Who ruled Zagreb?

Zagreb lies in northern Croatia between the southern slopes of Medvednica mountain and the Sava River, on the old routes linking the Pannonian plain with the Adriatic and the Alps. The city grew from two rival hilltop settlements, a bishop's town and a royal free town, which stood side by side for nearly eight centuries before merging in 1850. For most of its history it lay within the Kingdom of Hungary and the Habsburg lands, and it became the capital of an independent state only in 1991.

The Romans had a town called Andautonia a few kilometres south-east of the modern centre, near the Sava, but it did not survive the end of Roman rule. Slavs settled the area from the 7th century, and the region later formed part of the medieval Croatian kingdom. Zagreb itself enters the written record in 1094, when King Ladislaus I of Hungary founded a bishopric here. The settlement that grew up around the cathedral became known as Kaptol, after the cathedral chapter that governed it.

After the Croatian crown passed to the kings of Hungary in 1102, Zagreb developed as part of the Hungarian realm; the map's Holy Roman colouring for these centuries is mistaken. The Mongol invasion reached the area in 1242, when King Béla IV took refuge in Croatia. In gratitude and for defence, he issued a Golden Bull that same year making Gradec, on the neighbouring hill, a royal free town. Gradec surrounded itself with walls, and for centuries its citizens quarrelled, sometimes violently, with the bishop's people across the stream that divided the two hills.

After the Hungarian defeat at Mohács in 1526, the Croatian nobility elected Ferdinand of Habsburg as king in 1527. The Ottoman Empire overran much of Croatia over the next century, and Zagreb became a frontier city, but it was never captured; the Ottoman defeat at Sisak in 1593 marked the limit of their advance here. The Jesuits founded a college in 1607, and a royal decree of 1669 granted it university status, the origin of today's University of Zagreb. The Croatian parliament, the Sabor, increasingly met in Zagreb, and after a fire destroyed Varaždin in 1776 the Croatian government settled here permanently.

In the 1830s Zagreb became the centre of the Illyrian movement led by Ljudevit Gaj, which promoted a common South Slav identity and standardised the Croatian literary language. In 1850 Kaptol, Gradec and the surrounding settlements were united as one city. After the earthquake of 1880, Zagreb was rebuilt with the grid of the Lower Town and its "green horseshoe" of parks and public buildings, the seat of autonomous Croatia within Austria-Hungary.

In 1918 Croatia joined the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia, and Zagreb became its second city and a centre of opposition to rule from Belgrade. During the Second World War it was the capital of the Axis-aligned Independent State of Croatia under the Ustaše, whose regime persecuted and murdered Serbs, Jews and Roma. Tito's Partisans entered the city in May 1945, and Zagreb became the capital of the Socialist Republic of Croatia within Yugoslavia.

Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991, and the city came under attack during the war that followed, from an air strike on the government palace in October 1991 to rocket attacks in May 1995. Croatia joined the European Union in 2013. A strong earthquake damaged the historic centre in March 2020. Zagreb now has about 770,000 inhabitants and is the political, economic and cultural centre of Croatia.