Who ruled Wrocław?

Wrocław lies on the Oder River in south-western Poland, the historic capital of Silesia. The Oder splits here into many channels around islands, which made the site easy to defend and a natural crossing point on the trade routes between Bohemia, Poland and the Baltic. Over a thousand years the city belonged in turn to Bohemia, Poland, the Habsburgs, Prussia and Germany, and was known for most of that time by its German name, Breslau. In 1945 it changed country and almost its entire population.

A stronghold of the Slavic Silesian tribes stood on Ostrów Tumski, the Cathedral Island, by the 10th century. The city's name is usually traced to the Bohemian duke Vratislaus I, and Bohemia held the area until the Polish ruler Mieszko I took it around 990. In 1000 a bishopric was founded here, one of the first in Poland. As the Polish kingdom split among branches of the Piast dynasty, Wrocław became the seat of the dukes of Silesia.

The Mongol invasion of 1241 left the town in ruins, and the Silesian army was destroyed at nearby Legnica. The dukes rebuilt it as a planned town with a large market square, settled largely by Germans and governed by Magdeburg law from the 1260s. Breslau joined the Hanseatic League and grew rich on trade in cloth and other goods. When the last Piast duke of Wrocław died in 1335, the city passed to the Crown of Bohemia and so into the orbit of the Holy Roman Empire. With Bohemia it came under the Habsburgs in 1526. Most of its citizens adopted Lutheranism during the Reformation, and the city survived the Thirty Years' War battered but not destroyed.

In January 1741 Frederick the Great occupied Breslau at the start of the War of the Austrian Succession, and Austria ceded most of Silesia to Prussia in 1742. In March 1813 the Prussian king issued his call to arms against Napoleon from Breslau. The 19th century brought railways, factories and rapid growth; after 1871 Breslau was one of the largest cities of the German Empire, with a lively university and a prominent Jewish community. By the late 1930s it had over 600,000 inhabitants.

Under Nazi Germany the Jewish community was destroyed. In 1944 Hitler declared the city a fortress. Besieged by the Red Army from February, Festung Breslau held out until 6 May, four days after Berlin fell, and much of it was reduced to rubble. Civilians had been forced to evacuate in the depth of winter, and many died on the way.

At the Potsdam Conference the Allies placed the German lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, including almost all of Silesia, under Polish administration. Nearly all remaining Germans were expelled by 1948 and replaced by Poles, many from central Poland and others displaced from the former eastern territories annexed by the Soviet Union, especially Lwów, now Lviv. The new arrivals brought institutions with them, including the Ossolineum library, and rebuilt the market square and churches.

The city was badly damaged by the Oder flood of 1997 and was a European Capital of Culture in 2016. Today Wrocław has about 670,000 inhabitants and is one of Poland's main university, technology and business centres.