Who ruled Gdańsk?

Gdańsk, known in German as Danzig, stands near the mouth of the Vistula on the Baltic coast of northern Poland. Whoever held it controlled the outlet of Poland's greatest river and the grain trade that flowed down it, so the city was fought over for a thousand years by Polish, German and Prussian powers. It was also a place where two world-changing events began: the first shots of the Second World War in 1939 and the strikes that gave birth to Solidarity in 1980.

The name first appears in an account of the missionary Adalbert of Prague, who baptised people in "urbs Gyddanyzc" in 997, when the area belonged to the early Polish state. In the 12th and 13th centuries a local dynasty of dukes ruled Pomerelia from the stronghold. In 1308 the Teutonic Knights seized the town, killing many of its inhabitants, and it remained under the State of the Teutonic Order for almost 150 years. German settlers arrived in large numbers, and Danzig became an important member of the Hanseatic League.

In 1454 the city joined the revolt of the Prussian estates against the Knights and placed itself under the Polish king. After the Thirteen Years' War, the Peace of Thorn in 1466 confirmed it as part of Royal Prussia within the Kingdom of Poland. Danzig kept broad self-government, its own laws and a mainly German-speaking burgher elite, while serving as Poland's window on the sea. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was the largest and richest city of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, shipping grain from the Polish interior to Amsterdam and beyond.

The partitions of Poland ended this era. Prussia annexed Danzig in 1793, and apart from a short period as a Napoleonic free city from 1807 to 1814, it stayed in the Kingdom of Prussia and from 1871 the German Empire. After the First World War the Treaty of Versailles made it the Free City of Danzig in 1920, under the protection of the League of Nations and in a customs union with Poland, which built the rival port of Gdynia nearby. The Nazi party won control of the city government in the 1930s.

On 1 September 1939 the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish depot at Westerplatte, at the harbour mouth, one of the first acts of World War II. Danzig was annexed to Germany. In March 1945 the Soviet army captured the city, much of which was destroyed in the fighting. Its German population fled or was expelled, and Poles, many of them displaced from the eastern lands Poland lost, settled in their place.

The historic centre was rebuilt in the following decades. The shipyards made Gdańsk an industrial city and a centre of worker unrest: strikes in December 1970 were put down with deadly force, and in August 1980 a strike at the Lenin Shipyard led by the electrician Lech Wałęsa won the right to form Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. Its movement helped bring about the revolutions of 1989. Today Gdańsk has about 480,000 people and forms, with Gdynia and Sopot, the Tri-City conurbation on the Baltic.