Who ruled Edinburgh?

Edinburgh faces the Firth of Forth from the south, in south-east Scotland, built around the plug of an extinct volcano, Castle Rock, and the long ridge that slopes down from it. A fortress on that rock drew a town along the ridge, and the town became the capital of the Kingdom of Scotland. Its history turns on that role: the seat of a small kingdom, then a capital without a king after the unions with England, and finally the home of a restored Scottish parliament.

People lived on and around Castle Rock in the Bronze and Iron Ages. By about 600 CE the stronghold of Din Eidyn belonged to the Gododdin, a Brittonic-speaking people. Forces of Northumbria besieged it in 638, and the area became part of the Anglian kingdom for about three centuries. Scottish kings took control in the 10th century. David I made Edinburgh a royal burgh in the 1120s and founded Holyrood Abbey at the foot of the ridge in 1128.

During the wars of independence the English held the castle for long periods, until Thomas Randolph, nephew of Robert the Bruce, recaptured it in 1314. By the 15th century Edinburgh had become the usual seat of the Scottish court and parliament. The Old Town grew up along the Royal Mile between castle and palace, packed with tall tenements because space inside the town walls was scarce. After the Scottish defeat at Flodden in 1513, the townspeople built a new wall in fear of an English attack. In the Protestant Reformation John Knox preached at St Giles' and made Edinburgh the centre of the new Church of Scotland.

In 1603 James VI inherited the English throne and moved his court to London, and the Act of Union of 1707 ended the Scottish parliament, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. Edinburgh kept Scotland's law courts, church assembly and universities, and these gave it a second golden age. In the 1745 Jacobite rising Charles Edward Stuart's army occupied the town, though not the castle. From 1767 the New Town, planned by James Craig, spread across the fields to the north in elegant Georgian terraces. In the same decades thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith made the city a leading centre of the Age of Enlightenment, and it earned the nickname "Athens of the North".

The 19th century brought railways, printing, brewing and banking, alongside severe overcrowding in the Old Town, which was partly cleared and rebuilt. Edinburgh escaped heavy bombing in the Second World War. In 1947 the first Edinburgh International Festival was held, and its fringe events grew into one of the largest arts festivals in the world.

After a referendum in 1997, a devolved Scottish Parliament met in Edinburgh in 1999 for the first time since 1707, moving into its building at Holyrood in 2004. In the 2014 independence referendum Scotland voted to remain in the United Kingdom. Edinburgh today has about half a million people and is Scotland's capital and second-largest city, with an economy built on government, finance, universities and tourism.