Who ruled Strasbourg?

Strasbourg lies on the River Ill just west of the Rhine, in the plain of Alsace between the Vosges and the Black Forest. Its name means "town of the roads", and it grew where routes along the Rhine valley met crossings into Germany. That border position has defined its history: it passed between French and German rule five times between 1681 and 1944, and since 1949 it has turned that past into a role as one of the capitals of European institutions.

The Romans founded a military camp here, Argentoratum, around 12 BCE, on the island formed by branches of the Ill that is still the heart of the city, the Grande Île. In 357 CE the future emperor Julian defeated a large Alemannic army nearby. After Roman rule collapsed the town passed to the Alemanni and then to the Franks, who knew it as Strateburgum. In 842 two grandsons of Charlemagne, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, swore an alliance here, the Oaths of Strasbourg, whose text is among the earliest written records of both French and German.

From the tenth century Strasbourg belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. Its citizens fought a long struggle with their bishop and defeated his forces at Hausbergen in 1262, after which the city governed itself as a free imperial city. Trade on the Rhine made it rich. The cathedral's single spire was finished in 1439, and from 1647 to 1874 it was the tallest building in the world. In February 1349, as the Black Death approached, the city's Jews were accused of poisoning wells and hundreds were burned to death. Johannes Gutenberg lived in Strasbourg in the late 1430s and early 1440s, and the city became an early centre of printing. It accepted the Reformation in the 1520s, and John Calvin led a congregation of French refugees here from 1538 to 1541.

Strasbourg kept out of the Thirty Years' War, but in 1681 Louis XIV occupied it, and the Treaty of Ryswick confirmed French rule in 1697. The city kept its Lutheran churches and German speech, though the cathedral was returned to Catholic use. In April 1792, at a dinner given by the mayor, Rouget de Lisle composed a marching song for the Rhine army that became the Marseillaise.

In the Franco-Prussian War Strasbourg was besieged and heavily bombarded in 1870; the museum and the municipal library were destroyed. The Treaty of Frankfurt in 1871 gave Alsace to the new German Empire, and Strasbourg became capital of the Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine, gaining a university, an imperial palace and a planned new quarter. France recovered it after the First World War in 1918. After the fall of France in 1940 Nazi Germany annexed Alsace in practice, and many young Alsatians were forcibly conscripted into the German army. French troops under General Leclerc liberated the city on 23 November 1944.

The site's maps show Strasbourg in Germany after 1945 because of their coarse borders; it has been French without interruption since 1944. In 1949 it was chosen as the seat of the Council of Europe, and it later became the official seat of the European Parliament and the home of the European Court of Human Rights. Today the city has nearly 300,000 inhabitants and about half a million in its metropolitan area, and it is the main city of Alsace and of north-eastern France.