Who ruled Syracuse?

Syracuse stands on the south-eastern coast of Sicily, its old core on the small island of Ortygia beside a great natural harbour. Founded by Greek colonists in the eighth century BCE, it became the most powerful city of the Greek west, a rival of both Carthage and Athens, and later served as the capital of Roman Sicily and, for a few years, as the seat of a Byzantine emperor.

People lived here long before the Greeks: finds at Stentinello, a coastal site just to the north, go back to around 6000 BCE. Following the date given by Thucydides, settlers from Corinth led by Archias landed on Ortygia in 733 BCE, drove out the native Sicels and founded Syrakousai. The colony soon dominated the land around it. Its government swung between tyrants, oligarchies and brief spells of popular rule, and forceful rulers such as Gelon, Hiero I, Dionysius I, Agathocles and Hiero II made it the leading power on the island.

For centuries Syracuse fought Carthage, which held western Sicily. During the Peloponnesian War Athens sent a vast expedition to conquer the city, which failed; the Syracusan general Hermocrates later took troops to Asia Minor to fight beside Sparta. The court drew writers and thinkers including Aeschylus, Pindar and Plato, and the city's most celebrated native, the mathematician Archimedes, directed its defence when Rome besieged it.

The Roman siege ended in 212 BCE when legions under Marcus Claudius Marcellus entered the city; a soldier killed Archimedes, and the wealth of centuries was carried off to Rome. Syracuse nonetheless remained the chief city of the island and became the capital of the Roman province of Sicily. Cicero, who knew it in the first century BCE, called it "the most beautiful and largest Greek city", and Augustus sent Roman citizens to settle there. Christianity came early through the busy port: the Acts of the Apostles record a three-day stay by Paul, Saint Lucy was martyred in the city in 304, and large catacombs were dug.

When the western empire collapsed, Syracuse passed to the Byzantine Empire. The emperor Constans II made it his capital in place of Constantinople from 663 until he was murdered there in 668. Arab attacks grew heavier in the ninth century; the city survived a siege in 827 but fell after a second one on 21 May 878, and was largely destroyed.

Little is recorded of Syracuse under Muslim rule. The Byzantine general George Maniakes retook it in 1040 with Norman and other mercenaries, among them Harald Hardrada, but quarrels broke up his army and Muslim rule returned. The Normans took the city for good in 1085 after a sea battle in the Great Harbour, though Palermo stayed the island's capital. Genoa and Pisa competed for Syracuse in the twelfth century until Frederick II placed it under direct royal control in 1234. From 1302 it formed part of the dower of the queens of Sicily, which gave it wide self-government for two centuries.

Under the Spanish crown, and especially Charles V, Syracuse was fortified as a bulwark against the Ottomans, and Spanish engineers cut the ancient isthmus so that Ortygia became an island once more. The Knights Hospitaller stayed in the city in 1529–30 before being granted Malta. Earthquakes in 1542 and 1693 wrecked much of the city, and its population fell while other Sicilian towns grew.

After the War of the Spanish Succession, Sicily passed from Savoy to Austria and then to the Bourbons of Naples, and British fleets and garrisons used Syracuse throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Within the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies the city revolted after a cholera epidemic in 1837, was punished with the loss of its provincial status, and joined the risings of 1848. On 28 July 1860 it went over to Garibaldi's forces and became part of united Italy.

Syracuse was bombed many times in the Second World War and was taken by Allied troops on the night of 9–10 July 1943; Italy's armistice with the Allies was secretly signed at nearby Cassibile on 3 September 1943. A large petrochemical complex rose north of the city from the late 1950s. In 2005 UNESCO made Syracuse and the rock-cut necropolis of Pantalica a joint World Heritage Site. The municipality had about 115,500 inhabitants in 2026.