Who ruled Seville?

Seville stands on the Guadalquivir in the plain of western Andalusia, at the highest point that seagoing ships could reach upriver. That made it an inland port with safe access to the Atlantic, and the river has driven its fortunes for nearly three thousand years. Two periods define the city: five centuries as a great centre of Muslim al-Andalus, and the sixteenth century, when it held the legal monopoly on Spain's trade with the Americas and became one of the richest cities in Europe.

The earliest town, known as Spal or Ispal, belonged to the Tartessian culture of the lower Guadalquivir, which traded with Phoenician merchants on the coast. After Rome defeated Carthage at nearby Ilipa in 206 BCE, the Romans founded Italica a few kilometres away, later the birthplace of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, and the river town itself grew into Hispalis, one of the main cities of the province of Baetica. Julius Caesar made it a colony in the 40s BCE. In the fifth century Vandals, Suebi and finally Visigoths took it, and under Visigothic rule its bishops Leander and Isidore made it a leading centre of Christian learning.

Muslim forces captured the city in 712, and as Ishbiliya it prospered under the emirs and caliphs of Córdoba, despite a destructive Viking raid in 844. When the caliphate broke apart in the early eleventh century, Seville became the capital of a powerful taifa kingdom ruled by the Abbadid family from 1023 to 1091, whose last king, the poet al-Mu'tamid, was deposed and exiled by the Almoravids. The Almohads took the city in the late 1140s and made it one of their capitals in Spain. They built the great mosque, whose minaret survives as the Giralda bell tower, and the riverside Torre del Oro followed in the 1220s.

In 1248, after a siege of about fifteen months, Ferdinand III of Castile captured Seville during the Reconquista, and most of the Muslim population left. The kings of Castile often lived in the Alcázar palace, which Peter I rebuilt in Mudéjar style in the 1360s. The mosque was used as a cathedral until work began on a vast Gothic replacement in 1401, finished in 1506.

After 1492 Seville's river port became the gateway to the New World. In 1503 the Crown set up the Casa de Contratación here to control all shipping, passengers and silver to and from the Americas, and Magellan's expedition sailed from the city in 1519. Wealth poured in, the population rose past 100,000, and painters such as Velázquez and Murillo were born and trained here. Decline followed in the seventeenth century: the river silted up, the larger ships could no longer reach the quays, and the plague of 1649 killed perhaps half the inhabitants. In 1717 the Casa de Contratación moved to Cádiz.

Seville recovered slowly in the nineteenth century with railways and industry. The Ibero-American Exposition of 1929 left the Plaza de España and María Luisa Park, and the city fell to Nationalist forces in the first days of the Civil War in July 1936. Since 1982 it has been the seat of Andalusia's regional government, and the Expo of 1992 brought high-speed rail and new bridges. Today Seville has about 700,000 inhabitants and some 1.5 million in its metropolitan area, making it the largest city in southern Spain.