Who ruled Kraków?

Kraków lies on the upper Vistula in southern Poland, at a point where a limestone hill, Wawel, rises beside the river and an old trade route from Bohemia to Rus crossed the water. A fortress on that hill became the seat of Polish kings, and the town below grew into one of the great merchant and university cities of central Europe. Kraków was Poland's capital for more than five centuries, and because it escaped heavy destruction in the Second World War, its medieval centre survives to a degree unusual in the country.

Legend credits the founding to a prince called Krak, who killed a dragon living in a cave under Wawel. In reality the area was settled by the West Slavic Vistulans by the 8th or 9th century. A Jewish traveller from Spain, Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, described Kraków as a trading town around 965, when it was under Bohemian rule. By about 990 it had passed to the Piast rulers of Poland, and in 1000 it became the seat of a bishopric. Around 1038 Casimir the Restorer made it his capital after the old centres in Greater Poland were devastated. Mongol raiders burned the town in 1241, during the Mongol invasion of Europe, and in 1257 it was refounded under German town law with the great market square that still forms its centre.

Kraków reached its height in the 14th to 16th centuries. Casimir the Great founded a university here in 1364, the second in central Europe after Prague, and under the Jagiellonian dynasty it became a centre of learning; Nicolaus Copernicus studied there in the 1490s. Kings were crowned and buried in Wawel Cathedral, Italian architects rebuilt the castle in Renaissance style, and the neighbouring town of Kazimierz grew into one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. After the union with Lithuania created the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the centre of the state shifted north-east, and around 1596 Sigismund III Vasa moved the royal court to Warsaw. Coronations continued in Kraków until the 1730s.

In the third partition of Poland in 1795 Kraków was taken by the Habsburg Monarchy. Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw won it back in 1809, and from 1815 it was a tiny semi-independent Free City under the joint protection of Austria, Prussia and Russia. After a failed uprising in 1846 Austria annexed it. From the 1860s Austrian Galicia enjoyed wide self-government, and Kraków became the leading centre of Polish culture, scholarship and art, the place where the nation's memory was kept while Poland itself did not exist. It became part of the reborn Polish state in 1918.

German troops entered Kraków in September 1939, and it became the capital of the General Government, the occupation regime run by Hans Frank from Wawel Castle. In November 1939 the Germans arrested over 180 university professors and sent them to concentration camps. The city's Jews, about a quarter of the pre-war population, were confined in a ghetto in Podgórze and then deported and murdered in the Holocaust, many at Bełżec, at the Płaszów camp on the city's edge or at Auschwitz, some 60 kilometres to the west. The Red Army took the city in January 1945 with little damage to the old town.

The communist government built the vast steelworks town of Nowa Huta beside Kraków from 1949, partly to create a working-class counterweight to the old city. In 1978 the historic centre was among the first sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and the same year the city's archbishop, Karol Wojtyła, was elected Pope John Paul II. Kraków now has about 800,000 people and is Poland's second-largest city, a major university centre and one of the most visited places in the country.