History of Beijing

People have lived in the Beijing area for thousands of years. Several towns were built on the site and later destroyed.

Beijing is first mentioned in history in the chronicles of the Zhou Dynasty’s conquest of the Shang Dynasty in the 11th century BC. A walled Chinese village called the ji was built in the southeast suburbs of contemporary Beijing.

For several centuries before the unification of China in 221 BC, Beijing was the capital of the State of Yan.

In the 1272 the Mongol leader Kublai Khan built the city of Dadu on the site.

He made Dadu the capital of China. Kublai Khan rebuilt the city, founding the modern city and made it capital of his domains.  After he completed the conquest of south China, Beijing became, for the first time in history, the capital of the whole of China.

The city was renamed Beijing in the early 1400s.  It was chosen as the capital of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) in 1421, which it remained during the Qing dynasty (1644 – 1911/12).

The city suffered heavy damage when it was occupied by European forces in 1860 and 1900. It was known as Peking in the United States and other Western countries until the early 1980s.
History of Beijing

City of Strasbourg under Roman Empire

Strasbourg had been founded as Argentinensis or Argentina and Argentotratum, a Roman camp that protected important trade routes along the Upper Rhine Valley.

There are signs of permanent habitation in the area of Strasbourg dating back to the Stone Age. The Celts, who had settled there prior to the Roman occupation, built dams and walls to counter the floods of the Rhine.

In the 12 BC, the Romans conquered the area and turned the settlement into one of fifty cities built by the Roman general Claudius Drusus, to guard  the empire’s easternmost frontier in Europe. Under the Roman Empire, Strasbourg – then called Argentorate – formed part of a zone of contact along the Rhine that attracted both Romans and a diverse mix of non-Romans.

Strasbourg’s post-Roman development as Startiburgum, ‘the fortress of the roads’ began to take form in Carolingian times, as the site of the well-known Oaths of Strasbourg in 842.

During the late Middle Ages, the burghers of Strasbourg asserted their independence from princes and bishops, even as the city remained part of the Holy Roman Empire. On November 18, 1262, Richard of Cornwall King of Germany confirmed the privileges of Strasbourg as a self-governing imperial city to the Holy Roman Empire.

In the 16th century Strasbourg was a prominent German speaking city in the Roman Empire and the see of a Roman bishop.

Strasbourg’s Protestant status was amended in 1681 when it was annexed by Louis XIV. The transition was bloodless, the culmination of a period of French expansion throughout Alsace.
City of Strasbourg under Roman Empire

Ancient city of Cumae in Italy

Cumae, perhaps the most ancient Greek settlement on mainland Italy is located just north of the Bay of Naples, 10 miles west of modern-day Italy.

Cumae was one of the earliest datable Greek colonies, established by Euboean Greeks who moved ashore from their nearby island holding of Pithecusae around 750 BC.

In 730/725 the trading station at Cumae achieved the status of a Greek colony and city, and became independent.

The city reached the height of its powers in the fifth century BC when the tyrant Aristodemus defeated the Etruscans, a people who had settled farther north on the Italic peninsula.

Cumae thrived, supplying the Etruscans with Corinthian painted pottery, Euboean bronze, and other wares.

In 524 BC, Cumae repulsed an attack launched by a coalition of Etruscans, Umbrian and Dauni. The invading army was motivated by greed, around by the city’s prosperity.
In 421 BC, the city fell to another Italian people, the Samnite, and later passed to the Romans.

Under the Roman Empire Cumae was noted for a manufacture of a particular kind of red earthenware. Its territory also produced excellent flax, which was especially adapted for the manufacturing of nets.
Ancient city of Cumae in Italy 

City of Syracuse, Sicily

Syracuse was one of the grandest and most violent cities of Greek history.

Syracuse played a major role in the downfall of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, when Syracusans totally destroyed an Athenian invasion force in 413 BC. At that time Syracuse was a democracy, and democracy made Syracuse stronger.

Located in the south part of Sicily’s east coast, Syracuse was founded in about 733 BC by ship-borne, Corinthian settlers who subdued the local natives Sicels. According to Plutarch (Greek historian), the archaic Greek colony of Syracuse was founded by the Bacchiad noble, Archias of Corinth.

Soon after the foundation, a city plan was set-up, which continues on to the mainland and connected the early settlement with the contemporary cemetery at Fusco.

It became the basis for the regular urban development of the city over the next century.

The descendants of the first settlers became a ruling class known as the Gamoroi, ‘landholders’, who lived in the city and whose farms occupied the best land of the plain.

The first tyrant was Gelon; the ruler of the nearby Greek city of Gela, who seized Syracuse under pretext of aiding the beleaguered Gamoroi.  The regime of the Gamoroi ended in 491 BC. They were expelled from the city by the demos and the Kyllirioi, the Gamoroi’s serf. A democratic regime was established in Syracuse in the course of these events.

Gelon was succeeded by his brother Hiero I, who protected the arts and sciences and died in 467 BC.

The Syracuse became the largest city and most wealthy city in Sicily, and according to Thucydides, possessed a greater population than Athens or any other Grecian city.

The city was besieged, BC 414 by the Athenians; and again, BC 215 by the Romans, under Marcellus and Appius.

Syracuse was the birth place of the great Archimedes (287 BC – c. 212 BC), and the poet Theocritus (3rd century BC).
City of Syracuse, Sicily