Who ruled Dublin?

Dublin sits where the River Liffey flows into Dublin Bay, on the east coast of Ireland facing Britain. Its English name comes from the Irish Dubh Linn, the "black pool" where the Poddle stream joined the Liffey, while its Irish name, Baile Átha Cliath, recalls a ford of woven hurdles across the river. A Viking port turned centre of English rule, Dublin spent most of its history as the place from which Ireland was governed by others, before becoming the capital of an independent state in the 20th century.

There were Irish settlements and church sites near the river mouth before the Vikings, but the town proper began in 841, when Norse raiders built a fortified ship camp there. Over the following two centuries Dublin became a Norse kingdom and one of the busiest slave and trading ports of the Viking Age, its silver and goods reaching across the Irish Sea. At Clontarf in 1014 the high king Brian Boru defeated an alliance of Leinster and Norse forces, though he died in the battle and Dublin's Norse rulers survived for another 150 years under Irish overlordship.

The turning point came with the Anglo-Norman invasion. Norman lords took Dublin in 1170, and Henry II, king of England, arrived the following year to assert royal authority. The city became the centre of English government in Ireland and the heart of the Pale, the area around it under firm English control. Dublin Castle was begun in the early 13th century, and Christ Church and St Patrick's cathedrals were rebuilt in stone. The Black Death struck hard in 1348. In 1592 Elizabeth I chartered Trinity College to train a Protestant elite.

The 18th century was Dublin's grandest era. With its own Irish parliament and a Protestant ascendancy rich from land rents, the city gained broad Georgian streets and squares, a new Parliament House, the Custom House and the Four Courts. By the late 1700s it was one of the largest cities in the British Empire. The Act of Union of 1800 abolished the Irish parliament from 1801, and Dublin declined into a provincial city with some of the worst slums in Europe.

It was also the stage for the struggle for independence. Workers fought employers in the Lockout of 1913, and on Easter Monday 1916 republicans seized the General Post Office and other buildings, proclaiming an Irish Republic before surrendering after six days of fighting. The executions that followed turned opinion against British rule. After the War of Independence and the treaty of 1921, Dublin became the capital of the Irish Free State in 1922; the civil war that followed began with the shelling of the Four Courts that June.

Ireland became a republic in 1949. Dublin grew slowly until the late 20th century, when membership of the European Community and investment by technology and finance companies transformed it. About 1.4 million people now live in County Dublin, more than a quarter of the country's population, and the city is the political and economic centre of the state.