Who ruled Moscow?

Moscow grew up on a low hill above the Moskva River, in the forested heart of European Russia, where river routes connected the Volga basin with the Oka and the Dnieper. It began as a minor outpost of a minor principality and rose, by patience, opportunism and its rulers' usefulness to the Mongol khans, to become the capital of the largest country on earth. Its history is the history of the Russian state itself, punctuated by repeated destruction by fire and invasion and repeated rebuilding around the Kremlin, the fortress at its core.

The settlement is first mentioned in 1147, when Prince Yuri Dolgoruky of Suzdal invited an ally to a feast there, and a timber fort was built in 1156. It lay at the edge of the old Kievan Rus world, and in the winter of 1237 to 1238 Mongol armies burned it. Under the overlordship of the Golden Horde, Moscow became the seat of its own princes from the late thirteenth century. They grew strong by collecting tribute for the khans and by attracting the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who settled in Moscow in 1325. In 1380 Prince Dmitry Donskoy defeated a Tatar army at Kulikovo, though the city was sacked again two years later.

The Grand Principality of Moscow gradually absorbed its rivals, including Novgorod. Ivan III threw off Tatar overlordship in 1480 and brought Italian architects to rebuild the Kremlin, giving it the brick walls, towers and cathedrals that still stand. His grandson Ivan the Terrible was crowned tsar there in 1547, and St Basil's Cathedral was built on Red Square to mark his conquest of Kazan. In 1571 a Crimean Tatar army set fire to the city, and during the Time of Troubles a Polish-Lithuanian garrison held the Kremlin from 1610 until a popular militia led by Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky expelled it in 1612. The following year the Romanov dynasty was chosen in Moscow.

Peter the Great disliked the old capital and moved the court to his new city of St Petersburg in 1712. Moscow remained the ancient seat where tsars were crowned and the centre of trade and the nobility's winter life. In September 1812 Napoleon occupied it after the battle of Borodino, and a fire, very probably started on Russian orders, destroyed most of the largely wooden city. The French withdrew after five weeks. The rebuilt city grew rapidly in the nineteenth century as railways from across the empire converged on it and textile mills and factories spread.

After the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik government under Vladimir Lenin moved the capital back to Moscow in March 1918, and from 1922 it was the capital of the Soviet Union. Stalin's planners demolished churches and old quarters, built broad avenues, the first Metro line (1935) and the seven skyscrapers known as the Seven Sisters. In late 1941 the German advance was stopped on the city's approaches, and the Soviet counter-offensive in December drove it back.

Moscow hosted the 1980 Olympics, and in August 1991 crowds there helped defeat the hardline coup that hastened the end of the Soviet Union. It has since been the capital of the Russian Federation. The 1990s brought violent conflict between president and parliament in 1993 and a boom in wealth that remade the skyline. With about 13 million people in the city itself, Moscow is among the largest cities in Europe and is the political, financial and transport centre of Russia.