Who ruled Marseille?

Marseille grew around a deep, sheltered inlet on the Mediterranean coast of Provence, a short distance east of the mouth of the Rhône. The river opened a route north into the heart of Gaul, and the harbour, today's Old Port, gave ships a safe anchorage, so the site has been a port for some 2,600 years. Founded by Greeks, it is the oldest city in France. Its history is that of a proud, independent-minded trading city, repeatedly struck by plague and war, which became France's gateway to the Mediterranean and its colonies.

Around 600 BCE Greek settlers from Phocaea, a city on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, founded Massalia beside the inlet, and more colonists followed after the Persians took Phocaea around 545 BCE. Massalia became one of the leading cities of the western Greek world (see Ancient Greece). It traded wine, oil and pottery with the Celtic peoples of the interior, founded its own colonies along the coasts of what are now France and Spain, and minted coins that circulated widely in Gaul. In the fourth century BCE the Massaliot navigator Pytheas sailed into the Atlantic, around Britain and possibly as far as the North Sea, and wrote the first Greek account of those waters.

Massalia was a long-standing ally of Rome, but in the civil war of 49 BCE it sided against Julius Caesar, who besieged and took it. It kept some autonomy but lost most of its territory and trade to Roman rivals such as Narbonne and Arles. In late antiquity it became an important Christian centre, where the monk John Cassian founded the abbey of Saint-Victor in the early fifth century, and it passed through the hands of Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Franks.

In the Middle Ages Marseille revived as a port for crusaders and for trade with the eastern Mediterranean, under the counts of Provence. The Black Death entered France through its harbour in late 1347. In 1481 Provence passed by inheritance to the French crown, and Marseille with it, but the city guarded its privileges jealously. After it resisted royal authority, Louis XIV entered in 1660 and built Fort Saint-Nicolas with its guns turned towards the town as much as the sea. The Great Plague of 1720, brought by a merchant ship from the Levant, killed about half of the city's population.

During the French Revolution volunteers from Marseille marched to Paris in 1792 singing a new war song, which became known as La Marseillaise and is now the national anthem. The nineteenth century brought new docks, the conquest of Algeria from 1830 and the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, which together made Marseille the chief port for France's empire in Africa and Asia and drew immigrants from Italy, Armenia and elsewhere.

In the Second World War German troops occupied the city in November 1942. In early 1943 the occupiers and Vichy police rounded up thousands of residents of the old quarter north of the Old Port, deported many, including Jews, and then dynamited the district. The city was liberated in August 1944. After Algerian independence in 1962 tens of thousands of returning settlers and, later, migrants from North Africa settled there, giving it its present mixed population. With about 870,000 inhabitants, Marseille is the second-largest city in France and its main commercial port.