Who ruled Tallinn?

Tallinn stands on a bay of the Gulf of Finland on Estonia's northern coast, facing Helsinki some 80 kilometres across the water. A limestone hill near the shore, Toompea, offered a natural stronghold, and the harbour below sat on the sea route between Scandinavia, Germany and the Russian trading cities of Novgorod and Pskov. For most of its history the city was ruled by outsiders, Danes, German crusading knights, Swedes and Russians, and run by a German-speaking merchant elite, while the surrounding countryside was Estonian. Its well-preserved medieval walls and towers are the legacy of its years as a prosperous Hanseatic port.

Hunter-fisher communities lived on the site about 5,000 years ago. By around 1050 the Estonians had built a fort on Toompea, overlooking a harbour used by Baltic and Scandinavian traders. In 1219, during the Northern Crusades, King Valdemar II of Denmark landed with an army, defeated the Estonians and began building a stone castle on the hill. The town took the name Reval in German and Swedish, and Tallinn, probably meaning "Danish town", in Estonian.

German merchants and artisans settled below the hill, and in 1248 the town received the law code of Lübeck. It joined the Hanseatic League in 1285 and grew rich by handling trade in furs, wax, salt and grain between the Baltic and Russia. After a major Estonian rising against Danish rule in 1343, the Danish king sold northern Estonia in 1346 to the Teutonic Order, whose Livonian branch then ruled the region; the map's Danish and Teutonic periods correspond to these two phases. The lower town, governed by its own council, built the Town Hall, the guild halls and a circuit of walls with more than forty towers, while Toompea remained the seat of the castle, the bishop and the landed nobility. The city adopted the Lutheran Reformation in the 1520s.

During the Livonian War the city placed itself under Sweden in 1561 rather than fall to Muscovy, and it remained Swedish for 150 years. In 1710, during the Great Northern War, plague-stricken Reval surrendered to Peter the Great, and it became a provincial capital of the Russian Empire, much earlier than the map's 1783 snapshot suggests. The Baltic German nobility and burghers kept many of their old privileges. A railway to Saint Petersburg arrived in 1870, and industry drew Estonian peasants into the city, so that by the end of the nineteenth century Estonians were the majority.

Estonian independence was proclaimed in Tallinn on 24 February 1918, and after a war of independence the city became the capital of the Republic of Estonia. The Soviet Union occupied and annexed the country in 1940; German forces held it from 1941 to 1944, and a Soviet air raid in March 1944 destroyed large parts of the city. Soviet rule returned in September 1944, bringing deportations and large-scale migration of Russian-speaking workers. In 1980 Tallinn hosted the sailing events of the Moscow Olympics, and in the late 1980s mass song festivals in the city became a rallying point of the Singing Revolution. Estonia restored its independence on 20 August 1991 and joined the European Union and NATO in 2004. Tallinn today has about 450,000 inhabitants, a third of the country's population, and is known as a centre of digital and technology businesses.