Who ruled Toledo?

Toledo stands on a rocky height in central Spain, wrapped on three sides by a bend of the Tagus River. A town of the Carpetani before the Romans came, it became the capital of the Visigothic kingdom, a restless frontier city of Muslim al-Andalus, and after 1085 one of the great cities of Castile, where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side for centuries. Today it is the seat of the regional parliament and government of Castilla–La Mancha.

When the Roman general Marcus Fulvius Nobilior defeated a coalition of Celtic tribes near the city in 193 BCE, Toletum belonged to the Carpetani. The historian Livy described it as small but protected by its site. Under Rome it rose from a tributary town to a municipium and gained walls, baths, a water supply and a circus that was one of the largest in Hispania, holding up to 15,000 spectators. Its importance grew in late antiquity, and church councils met there in 400 and 527.

By 546, and possibly earlier, the rulers of the Visigothic Kingdom had made Toledo their capital. At the council of 589 King Reccared announced that he had abandoned Arianism for Catholicism, and in the seventh century further Councils of Toledo tried to settle theological disputes and passed harsh laws against Jews. By the century's end the bishop of Toledo led all the bishops of Hispania, and the city was the unrivalled symbolic seat of the monarchy.

Exploiting divisions among the Visigothic nobles, Tariq ibn Ziyad captured Toledo in 711 or 712 for the Umayyad Caliphate, and the governor Musa executed many of the Gothic nobility. The newcomers around the city, which they called Tulaytulah, were mostly Berbers, and for some decades Toledo stayed a literary and church centre. Under the emirs of Córdoba it rose in revolt again and again between 761 and 857, was virtually independent for about twenty years, and was brought back to obedience in 873 and, after a long siege, by Abd al-Rahman III in 932.

When the caliphate of Córdoba broke apart in the early eleventh century, Toledo became the centre of an independent taifa kingdom under the Dhu l-Nunid dynasty, with some 28,000 inhabitants, around 4,000 of them Jews. Drained by the tribute it paid to León and shaken by a revolt in 1079, it fell on 25 May 1085 to Alfonso VI of León, a landmark of the Reconquista.

Under the Crown of Castile, Mozarab Christians, Muslims and Jews at first each kept their own laws, and Christian settlers from northern Iberia and Franks joined them. In a translation centre, Arabic and Hebrew books were rendered into Castilian and then Latin, bringing long-lost learning back to Christian Europe, and Alfonso X made Toledo a centre of scholarship in the thirteenth century. The Gothic cathedral was built between 1226 and 1493. Coexistence had sharp limits: Jews suffered riots in 1212 and forced conversions and killings in later centuries, and a revolt in 1449 combined tax grievances with hostility to Jews and converts. Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and Mudéjar Muslims in 1502, though the synagogues of Santa María la Blanca and El Tránsito still stand.

After crushing the Comuneros revolt, Charles V held his court in Toledo many times from 1525, and the population rose from about 31,900 in 1528 to 56,300 in 1561. Political power then passed to Madrid, where the royal court settled. Silk weaving kept the economy afloat for a while, but in the 1630s the city slid into real decline.

The Peninsular War hit Toledo hard, and over the nineteenth century it turned from a city of convents into an administrative town; the railway arrived in 1858, bringing the first tourists. At about 23,000, its population around 1900 was well below its sixteenth-century peak. When the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936, the military commander José Moscardó and about 1,000 rebels shut themselves in the Alcázar and withstood a Republican siege until Francisco Franco's army relieved them in late September; the episode became a central symbol of Francoist myth. UNESCO listed the city as a World Heritage Site in 1987, and since the 1980s Toledo has been the capital in practice of Castilla–La Mancha in Spain.