Who ruled Warsaw?

Warsaw stands on the Vistula River in east-central Poland, on a high bank above a wide river valley in the middle of the Masovian plain. It was not one of Poland's ancient centres: for its first three centuries it was a ducal town of modest size. Its central position between Kraków, Vilnius and the Baltic made it the capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and that role has exposed it to more destruction than almost any other European capital. The city that stands today was largely rebuilt after it was deliberately razed in 1944.

Small fortified settlements existed on the site of the modern city from the 9th or 10th century, such as Bródno on the east bank. Warsaw itself grew up around a castle of the dukes of Masovia in the late 13th century and is first recorded in 1313. It became the main seat of the Masovian dukes in 1413. When their line died out, the duchy was absorbed into the Kingdom of Poland in 1526.

After the Union of Lublin of 1569 created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the joint parliament, the Sejm, met in Warsaw, and royal elections were held nearby. King Sigismund III Vasa moved the court here from Kraków in 1596 and settled in the rebuilt Royal Castle in 1611. Warsaw became the real capital, though Kraków kept its title and its coronations for a time. Swedish and Brandenburg armies captured and plundered it during the Deluge of 1655 to 1656. In the 18th century magnates built palaces along the Royal Route, and in 1791 the Sejm meeting in the castle adopted the Constitution of 3 May, one of the first written constitutions in Europe.

The Commonwealth was destroyed in the partitions, and in 1795 Warsaw went to the Kingdom of Prussia as a provincial town. Napoleon made it the capital of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807, but the Congress of Vienna gave it to the Russian Empire in 1815 as capital of the Kingdom of Poland, with the tsar as king. Warsaw was the centre of the November Uprising of 1830 and the January Uprising of 1863, both crushed. Even so, it grew into a large industrial and railway city, with one of the biggest Jewish communities in the world.

German troops took Warsaw in 1915, and on 11 November 1918 it became the capital of a restored Poland. In August 1920 the Polish army defeated the Red Army at the gates of the city in the Battle of Warsaw, which preserved Polish independence.

Nazi Germany besieged and bombed Warsaw in September 1939. In 1940 the occupiers sealed more than 400,000 Jews in a ghetto; most were deported to Treblinka and murdered in the Holocaust, and many of those who remained rose in the Ghetto Uprising of April and May 1943. On 1 August 1944 the Polish Home Army launched the Warsaw Uprising, which held out for 63 days while Soviet forces halted on the far bank of the Vistula. Between about 150,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed. After the surrender the Germans systematically dynamited what was left, and by the time Soviet troops entered on 17 January 1945 about 85 percent of the city lay in ruins.

The communist authorities kept Warsaw as the capital and rebuilt the Old Town and Royal Route from paintings, drawings and photographs; the reconstruction was listed by UNESCO in 1980. Soviet-style landmarks such as the Palace of Culture and Science, completed in 1955, rose beside it. After the revolutions of 1989 Warsaw became a fast-growing business centre. The capital now has about 1.8 million people, more than in 1939.