Who ruled Budapest?

Budapest spans the Danube at one of the best crossing points on its middle course, where the hills of Buda rise on the west bank and the flat plain of Pest stretches away to the east. Hot springs bubble up along a fault line beneath the hills, and the Romans, the Ottomans and the modern city have all built baths on them. For most of its history there were separate towns on either bank: Buda, Óbuda and Pest were merged into one city only in 1873, and the united capital then grew within a generation into one of the great cities of Europe.

Celts known as the Eravisci had a hilltop town on Gellért Hill in the first century BCE. The Romans built a legionary fortress and the town of Aquincum on the Buda side, in today's Óbuda, and in 106 CE it became the capital of the province of Pannonia Inferior. After Roman power faded, Huns and then Avars dominated the plain, and the Magyars arrived at the end of the 9th century.

Under the Hungarian kingdom, Pest grew as a market town with many German settlers. The Mongols destroyed it in 1241, and King Béla IV then built a walled town and castle on the defensible Castle Hill of Buda. Buda became the main royal seat in the 14th and 15th centuries, and under Matthias Corvinus, king from 1458 to 1490, its palace was a celebrated centre of Renaissance art and learning, with one of the largest libraries in Europe.

The Hungarian defeat at Mohács in 1526 opened the way for Suleiman the Magnificent, who took Buda in 1541. For 145 years it was the seat of an Ottoman province, which is why the map shows the Ottoman Empire here around 1600, although the occupation in fact began earlier and ended in 1686. The Ottomans built mosques and several bath houses that are still in use. In 1686 an international Christian army recaptured Buda after a long siege that left the town in ruins, and the region passed to the Habsburg Monarchy.

Pest boomed in the early 19th century as the commercial heart of Hungary. The Hungarian revolution of March 1848 began in its streets, led by poets and liberals with Lajos Kossuth as its political leader, and the Chain Bridge, the first permanent bridge between the two banks, opened in late 1849, a few months after the revolution had been crushed. After the Compromise of 1867 made Hungary an equal partner in Austria-Hungary, the three towns were united in 1873. The new capital built boulevards, a ring road, the neo-Gothic Parliament and, in 1896, the first underground railway on the European continent, timed for the celebrations of a thousand years since the Magyar arrival.

After the First World War Budapest became the capital of a much smaller independent Hungary. In 1944 Germany occupied the country, and hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Most of Budapest's own Jews escaped those deportations, but thousands were murdered by the fascist Arrow Cross militia or sent on death marches that autumn and winter. The Soviet siege of the city, one of the longest urban battles of the Second World War, ended in February 1945; during the fighting German troops blew up all of the city's Danube bridges.

On 23 October 1956 a student demonstration in Budapest grew into a national uprising against communist rule and the Soviet Union, which Soviet tanks crushed in November. Hungary's peaceful change of system came in 1989. Today Budapest has about 1.7 million inhabitants, close to a fifth of the country's population, and is its political, economic and cultural centre.