Who ruled Sarajevo?

Sarajevo stretches along the narrow valley of the Miljacka River in the mountains of central Bosnia, ringed by peaks that later hosted Olympic ski runs and, in the 1990s, the guns of a besieging army. It is a young city by Balkan standards, created by Ottoman governors in the fifteenth century, but within two hundred years it had become one of the great towns of south-eastern Europe. Its history is defined by the coexistence of Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic Christians and Jews in a small space, and by two moments that drew the world's attention: the assassination of 1914 and the siege of 1992 to 1996.

The valley was settled long before the city existed. The Neolithic Butmir culture, known for its decorated pottery, flourished in what is now the suburb of Ilidža, and Illyrian tribes later built hill forts in the area. Under the Roman Empire a spa settlement grew up at Ilidža's warm springs. In the Middle Ages the district was called Vrhbosna and lay within the Bosnian banate and later kingdom, which was often a vassal of Hungary. There was no major town, only villages, a small market and a fortress.

The Ottomans took the area in the late 1450s and early 1460s, and 1461 is usually given as the city's founding date. The governor Isa-Beg Ishaković built a mosque, a covered market, a bath, a bridge and a governor's palace, or saray, which gave the town its name. In the sixteenth century Gazi Husrev-beg, governor of Bosnia, endowed much of what is now the old town, including his great mosque, a religious school, a library and a covered bazaar. Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain settled here in the same century, and Orthodox and Catholic communities kept their own churches and quarters. By the mid-1600s Sarajevo was one of the largest Ottoman cities in the Balkans.

Hard times followed. In 1697, after the Ottoman defeat at Vienna, Prince Eugene of Savoy led a raid that set much of the city on fire. Plague struck repeatedly in the eighteenth century, and floods and fires added to the damage. The capital of Ottoman Bosnia moved for long periods to Travnik, though Sarajevo stayed the region's commercial heart.

In 1878 the Congress of Berlin handed Bosnia to Austria-Hungary to occupy, and Habsburg troops took Sarajevo after a short, hard fight. Vienna annexed the province outright in 1908. The new rulers built a tramway, a European-style city hall and Catholic and Orthodox cathedrals beside the old bazaar. On 28 June 1914 the young Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on a Sarajevo street, setting off the crisis that led to the First World War.

After 1918 Sarajevo became part of the new Yugoslav state. During the Second World War it was occupied by Germany and placed in the fascist Independent State of Croatia; most of its Jewish community was murdered in the Holocaust. Under Tito's socialist Yugoslavia it grew quickly as capital of the Bosnian republic, and in 1984 it hosted the Winter Olympic Games.

When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, Bosnian Serb forces surrounded the city. The siege lasted from April 1992 until February 1996, the longest of a capital city in modern warfare. Snipers and daily shelling killed about 11,000 to 12,000 people, and in August 1992 the national library in the old city hall was burned with most of its collection. The Dayton Agreement of 1995 ended the war and left Sarajevo as capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rebuilt but still marked by the war, it is today a city of roughly a quarter of a million people, with about half a million in the wider area, and the country's political and cultural centre.