Who ruled Madrid?

Madrid stands on the high, dry plateau of central Spain, on a modest river, the Manzanares, and close to the geographic centre of the Iberian peninsula. Unlike most European capitals it was not an ancient city or a natural trading hub. It began as a small Muslim fortress and spent five centuries as an ordinary Castilian town until a king chose it as the seat of his court in 1561. Its history since then has been the history of Spanish government: royal building, revolt against Napoleon, a long siege in the Civil War and the transition to democracy.

Although people lived along the Manzanares in prehistoric and Roman times, the city's story begins in the second half of the ninth century, when the Umayyad emir of Córdoba, Muhammad I, built a fortress called Mayrit on a bluff above the river. It guarded the approaches to Toledo against the Christian kingdoms to the north. During the Reconquista King Alfonso VI of Castile took Madrid in the 1080s, around the time of his capture of Toledo in 1085, and it became a town of the Crown of Castile with a mixed Christian, Muslim and Jewish population. Kings sometimes stayed there and the Cortes occasionally met there, but it remained a minor place.

That changed in 1561, when Philip II moved his court permanently to Madrid, probably because of its central position and its good supply of water and hunting grounds. Apart from a brief move to Valladolid from 1601 to 1606, it has been the capital ever since. Under the Habsburgs the town filled with nobles, clergy, officials and servants of the Spanish Empire. The Plaza Mayor was completed in 1619, and writers such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Quevedo lived and worked in its streets.

After the old royal castle burned down in 1734, the Bourbon kings built the vast Royal Palace on its site. Charles III, who reigned from 1759 to 1788, gave the city paved and lit streets, sewers, the Puerta de Alcalá and the building that became the Prado Museum. On 2 May 1808 the people of Madrid rose against the French troops occupying the city, and the brutal reprisals, painted by Goya, helped launch the Peninsular War, part of the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon's brother Joseph ruled from Madrid as king until 1813.

The nineteenth century brought political turmoil, railways and a planned expansion beyond the old walls. When the army revolted in July 1936, Madrid stayed loyal to the Republic, and Francisco Franco's forces reached its edge in November. The defenders, helped by the International Brigades, held the city through a siege and bombing that lasted until the Nationalists entered on 28 March 1939, days before the end of the war.

Under Franco Madrid grew enormously as migrants from the countryside filled new suburbs. After his death in 1975 the city became the stage of Spain's transition to democracy, surviving an attempted military coup in the parliament in February 1981, and the cultural flowering known as the Movida. On 11 March 2004 bombs on commuter trains killed 191 people. Today Madrid has about 3.4 million inhabitants and almost 7 million in its region, and it is the capital of Spain and its largest city.