Who ruled Cluj-Napoca?

Cluj-Napoca lies in the valley of the Someșul Mic river in north-western Transylvania, where old routes across the Carpathian basin met near a ford below the hill now called Cetățuie. A Roman town stood here in antiquity, and in the Middle Ages German settlers built a walled trading town that grew into the leading city of Transylvania. For centuries it was known by three names, Kolozsvár in Hungarian, Klausenburg in German and Cluj in Romanian, and its history is bound up with the shifting balance between those peoples.

A settlement called Napoca already existed before the Emperor Trajan conquered Dacia in 101 to 106 CE. A Roman milestone of 108 CE records a road from Potaissa to Napoca, and Hadrian gave the town the rank of municipium. Later in the 2nd century it became a colonia, and it served as a centre of the province of Dacia Porolissensis until Rome withdrew from Dacia around 274.

Little is known of the site during the following centuries. By the 10th century the Magyars had reached Transylvania, and the area became part of Hungary, with a royal castle that gave its name to the county of Kolozs. The town proper was founded in the 13th century, largely by Saxon settlers from the German lands. Mongol raids damaged the area in 1241, and in 1316 King Charles I granted the town the status of a city in reward for its loyalty. Matthias Corvinus, the most celebrated Hungarian king of the Renaissance, was born here in 1443, and his birth house still stands.

After the Hungarian defeat at Mohács in 1526, Transylvania became a separate principality under Ottoman overlordship. The map's Ottoman Empire label for the 17th century refers to this arrangement: the princes paid tribute to the sultan but ran their own state, and the town was never under direct Ottoman administration. The Reformation spread quickly through the town, and in the 1560s its pastor Ferenc Dávid led the founding of the Unitarian Church, one of the first denominations to reject the doctrine of the Trinity. In the 1690s Transylvania passed to the Habsburg Monarchy, and from 1790 the town was the seat of its government.

The town was a centre of Hungarian culture and politics in the 19th century, and in 1848 the Transylvanian Diet meeting there voted to unite with Hungary. After 1867 it lay within the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary, and a Hungarian-language university opened in 1872. Romanians, the majority in the surrounding countryside, resented the government's policy of promoting the Hungarian language, and the leaders of a Romanian petition to the emperor were tried in the city in 1894.

At the end of the First World War Transylvania joined Romania, and the university was refounded as a Romanian institution. In 1940 the Second Vienna Award returned northern Transylvania, including Cluj, to Hungary. After Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, the city's Jewish community, about 16,700 people in 1941, was confined in a ghetto and deported to Auschwitz in May and June, together with Jews from the surrounding region. Romanian and Soviet troops took the city that October, and the 1947 peace treaties confirmed it as Romanian.

Under communism, industrialisation and migration from rural areas made Romanians the majority by the 1960s, and in 1974 the regime added "Napoca" to the city's name to stress its Roman roots. Hungarian speakers are now about a seventh of the population. Since 1989 Cluj-Napoca has become one of Romania's most prosperous cities, with large universities and a strong technology sector, and about 290,000 people live within its limits.