[edit]
Main article: History of Gdańsk
For a chronological guide, see Timeline of Gdańsk.
Prehistory[edit]
The oldest evidence found for the existence of a settlement on the lands of what is now Gdańsk comes from the Bronze Age (which is estimated to be from c. 2500–1700 BC) and the Iron Age (c. 1200–550 BC). Archaeological finds testify to the existence of the Lusatian culture and amber trade along the so-called Amber Road.
Duchy of Poland and Samborid rule[edit]
The settlement that is now known as Gdańsk began in the 9th century, being mostly an agriculture and fishing-dependent village. In the beginning of the 10th century, it began its transformation into an important centre for trade (especially between the Pomeranians) until its annexation in c. 975 by Mieszko I. The first written record thought to refer to Gdańsk is a work describing the life of Saint Adalbert. Written in 999, it describes how in 997, Saint Adalbert of Prague baptised the inhabitants of urbs Gyddannyzc, "situated on the edge of the vast state [Duchy of Poland] and touching the seashore." No further written sources exist for the 10th and 11th centuries. Based on the date in Adalbert's vita, the city celebrated its millennial anniversary in 1997.
Archaeological evidence for the origins of the town was retrieved mostly after World War II had laid 90 percent of the city centre in ruins, enabling excavations. The oldest seventeen settlement levels were dated to between 980 and 1308. Mieszko I of Poland erected a stronghold on the site in the 980s, thereby connecting the Polish state ruled by the Piast dynasty with the trade routes of the Baltic Sea. Traces of buildings and housing from the 10th century have been found in archaeological excavations of the city.
The site was ruled by the Samborides as part of the Duchy of Pomerelia, a fief of the Duchy of Poland since 1119. According to a 1148 papal bull, Gdańsk was part of the Polish diocese of Włocławek. Beginning approximately in 1180, the city’s increasing involvement in Baltic trade attracted numerous German settlers, the majority of whom came from Lübeck. Henceforth, the site consisted of a settlement at the modern Long Market, settlements of craftsmen along the Old Ditch, the old Piast stronghold and the newly established German merchant settlements around St Nicholas' Church.
Excavated cellars of a 13th-century Dominican monastery in Gdańsk
Since 1227, Świętopełk II ruled Pomerelia as an independent duchy and the town subsequently became part of the Duchy of Gdańsk. It was at this time that Gdańsk became an important trading town on the lower Vistula. Between 1242–1248 and 1252–1254, Świętopełk fought against the Teutonic Order, who were supported by Lübeck. These conflicts hindered the transformation of the German colony into an autonomous town at this time. Migration of merchants to the town resumed in 1257. At the latest in 1263, Pomerelian duke Świętopełk II granted city rights under Lübeck law to the emerging market settlement. It was an autonomy charter similar to that of Lübeck, which was also the primary origin of many settlers. In a document of 1271 the Pomerelian duke Mestwin II addressed the Lübeck merchants settled in the city as his loyal citizens from Germany.
As Mestwin II was the last male representative of his dynasty, his death in 1294 precipitated a contest for control of the city and its surrounding region, involving the Polish Piast dynasty, the Přemyslid rulers of Bohemia, the German Margraves of Brandenburg, and the Teutonic Order. In 1300, the town had an estimated population of 2,000. While overall the town was not an important trade centre at that time, it had relevance in regional trade.
Teutonic Order[edit]
Main article: Teutonic takeover of Danzig (Gdańsk)
In 1308, following a rebellion instigated against Bogusza [pl], the governor of Gdańsk who was appointed by the future king of Poland, Władysław I the Elbow-high, the town was taken by Brandenburg. Polish forces, under siege in the stronghold, sought aid from the Teutonic Knights, who freed them and proceeded to seize the town, which had previously acknowledged Brandenburg's authority. Subsequently, the Teutonic Order massacred not only the Brandenburg forces and the Pomeranian knights who supported them, but also the town's inhabitants. Błażej Śliwiński (2008) estimates that the overall number of killed was between 50 and 60 Pomeranian and Brandenburg knights, and 1,000 commoners from of the town's population and the adjacent settlements, which he estimates at the time numbered between 2,000 and 3,000 people. Śliwiński & Możejko (2017) give the estimated number of victims as approximately 1,000. According to Smoliński (2021), the death toll is estimated to lie between 60 and 150. The events were used by the Polish Crown to condemn the Teutonic Order in a subsequent papal lawsuit. After the takeover, the Teutonic Knights faced charges that they committed a massacre in a papal bull issued by Clement V.
Gdańsk Crane, the largest medieval port crane, was completed in 1444.
The Teutonic Knights incorporated the town into their monastic state and instructed the remaining burghers to depart. In 1308, they founded Osiek Hakelwerk near the town, initially as a Lechitic fishing settlement. The Order did not rebuild the town until the mid-1320s, when some of its former inhabitants—primarily Lübeckers, who also brought back the pre-1308 town seal—returned, alongside settlers from other German regions. The town saw a rapid rise in population and became almost completely German; it would become primarily known by its German name, Danzig. In 1340, the Teutonic Order constructed a large fortress, the Gdańsk Castle, which became the seat of the knights' Komtur. After a series of Polish–Teutonic Wars, King Casimir of Poland recognized the Teutonic Order’s possession of Danzig and Pomerelia in the Treaty of Kalisz (1343), and the Order acknowledged that it would hold Danzig and Pomerelia as a grant from the Polish Crown. By accepting this grant, the Teutonic Order thus recognised the previous rights of Polish monarchs to the seized territories, something which they had previously denied, also this allowed for future claims by the Crown for the territories to be returned. The city thrived as a result of increased exports of grain (especially wheat), timber, potash, tar, and other goods of forestry from Prussia and Poland via the Vistula River trading routes. The Order's religious networks helped to develop Danzig's literary culture.
In 1346, Teutonic Order changed the Town Law of the city, which then consisted only of the Rechtstadt, to Kulm law. In 1358, Danzig joined the Hanseatic League, and became an active member in 1361. It maintained relations with the trade centres Bruges, Novgorod, Lisbon, and Seville. Around 1377, the Old Town was equipped with city rights as well. In 1380, the New Town was founded as the third, independent settlement. Urban growth was mainly driven by migration from German-speaking lands. A new war broke out in 1409, culminating in the Battle of Grunwald (1410), and the city came under the control of the Kingdom of Poland. A year later, with the First Peace of Thorn, it returned to the Teutonic Order. In 1440, the city participated in the foundation of the Prussian Confederation, an organisation opposed to the rule of the Teutonic Order. Following a fire in 1442, the Crane Gate, one of the city's present-day landmarks, was constructed in 1444 under the sanction of the Order. In a complaint of 1453, the Prussian Confederation mentioned repeated cases in which the Teutonic Order imprisoned or murdered local patricians and mayors without a court verdict.
Kingdom of Poland[edit]
Original charter of 1455 by King Casimir IV granting Danzig the right to independently levy and abolish taxes
In 1454, the Prussian Confederation renounced its obedience to the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order and appealed to King Casimir IV of Poland for the territory’s reintegration into the Kingdom of Poland. This led to the Thirteen Years' War between Poland and the State of the Teutonic Order (1454–1466). The local mayor pledged allegiance to the king during the incorporation in March 1454 in Kraków, and the city again solemnly pledged allegiance to the king in June 1454 in Elbing (Elbląg), recognizing the prior Teutonic annexation and rule as unlawful. The incorporation considerably strengthened Danzig’s position, as the king granted the city extensive privileges on 16 June 1454. In 1455, the king conferred additional rights on the city, including the right to enact its own laws and to impose taxes.
On 15 May 1457, King Casimir IV granted the town the Great Privilege [pl], after he had been invited by the town's council and had already stayed in town for five weeks. With the Great Privilege, the town was granted full autonomy and protection by the king of Poland. The privilege removed tariffs and taxes on trade within Poland, Lithuania, and Ruthenia (present day Belarus and Ukraine), and conferred on the town independent jurisdiction, legislation and administration of its territory, as well as the right to mint its own coin, the Danzig thaler. Furthermore, the privilege united the Old Town and Main Town and legalised the demolition of New Town, which had sided with the Teutonic Order. By 1457, New Town was demolished completely and no buildings remained.
Danzig in the 16th century, published by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg
Gaining free and privileged access to Polish markets, the seaport prospered while simultaneously trading with the other Hanseatic cities. After the Second Peace of Thorn (1466) between Poland and the Teutonic Order, the warfare ended permanently. The Order recognised Danzig’s incorporation into the Kingdom of Poland and the city became part of the autonomous province of Royal Prussia (which in 1569 became part of the larger Greater Poland Province). The city was visited by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1504 and 1526, and Narratio Prima, the first printed abstract of his heliocentric theory, was published there in 1540. During the Protestant Reformation, most German-speaking inhabitants adopted Lutheranism. Following the Reformation, High German soon prevailed in Danzig, where Low German had long served as the administrative language owing to the city’s Hanseatic ties. In 1566, High German also replaced Low German as the language of the courts. After the Union of Lublin between Poland and Lithuania in 1569, the city continued to enjoy a large degree of internal autonomy (cf. Danzig law). Being the largest and one of the most influential cities of Poland, it enjoyed voting rights during the royal election period in Poland.
Apotheosis of Gdańsk by Isaak van den Blocke. The Vistula-borne trade of goods in Poland was the main source of prosperity during the city's Golden Age.
In the 1560s and 1570s, a large Mennonite community started growing in the city, gaining significant popularity. In the 1575 election to the Polish throne, Danzig supported Maximilian II in his struggle against Stephen Báthory. It was the latter who eventually became monarch, but the city, encouraged by the secret support of Denmark and Emperor Maximilian, shut its gates against Stephen. After the Siege of Danzig, lasting six months, the city's army of 5,000 mercenaries was utterly defeated in a field battle on 16 December 1577. However, since Stephen's armies were unable to take the city by force, a compromise was reached: Stephen Báthory confirmed the city's special status and its Danzig law privileges granted by earlier Polish kings. The city recognised him as ruler of Poland and paid the large sum of 200,000 guldens in gold as an apology.
During the Polish–Swedish War of 1626–1629, in 1627, the naval Battle of Oliwa was fought near the city, and it is one of the greatest victories in the history of the Polish Navy. During the Swedish invasion of Poland of 1655–1660, commonly known as the Deluge, the city was unsuccessfully besieged by Sweden. In 1660, the war was ended with the Treaty of Oliwa, signed in the present-day district of Oliwa. In 1677, a Polish-Swedish alliance was signed in the city. Around 1640, Johannes Hevelius established his astronomical observatory in the Old Town. King John III Sobieski regularly visited Hevelius.
Beside a majority of German-speakers, whose elites sometimes distinguished their German dialect as Pomerelian, the city was home to a Polish minority. In 1632, the Gdańsk Bible was first published, which was a Polish language translation of holy scriptures that became the Bible of all Evangelical Poles. Polish influence increased slightly with Danzig’s integration into Poland, but the city retained a pronounced German linguistic and cultural character, a circumstance attributable above all to the ongoing influx of predominantly Protestant settlers, primarily of Dutch, Scottish and German origin, who assimilated into the local German culture. The Scots took refuge or migrated to and received citizenship in the city, with first Scots arriving in 1380, and a French Huguenot commune was founded in 1686. Due to the special status of the city and significance within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the city inhabitants largely became bi-cultural sharing both German and Polish culture and were strongly attached to the traditions of the Commonwealth.
An allegorical portrayal of wealth from 1604. The foreground features affluent citizens and the background presents the hyperbolized city with its landmarks, notably the Torture Tower and the Main City Hall.
The city suffered a last great plague and a slow economic decline due to the wars of the 18th century. After peace was restored in 1721, Danzig experienced steady economic recovery. As a stronghold of Stanisław Leszczyński's supporters during the War of the Polish Succession, it was taken by the Russians after the Siege of Danzig in 1734. In the 1740s and 1750s Danzig was restored and the Danzig port was again the most significant grain exporting port in the Baltic region. The Danzig Research Society, which became defunct in 1936, was founded in 1743.
In 1772, the First Partition of Poland took place and Prussia annexed almost all of the former Royal Prussia, which became the Province of West Prussia. However, Danzig remained a part of Poland as an exclave separated from the rest of the country. The Prussian king cut off the city with a military controlled barrier, also blocking shipping links to foreign ports, on the pretence that a cattle plague may otherwise break out. Danzig declined in its economic significance and lost commercial shares to Elbing, which had come under Prussian control in 1772. However, by the end of the 18th century, Danzig was still one of the most economically integrated cities in Poland. It was well-connected and traded actively with German cities, while other Polish cities became less well-integrated towards the end of the century, mostly due to greater risks for long-distance trade, given the number of violent conflicts along the trade routes.
Kingdom of Prussia, Napoleonic Free City and Germany[edit]
Danzig was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1793 in the Second Partition of Poland. The population largely opposed the Prussian annexation and wanted the city to remain part of the Kingdom of Poland. The mayor of the city stepped down from his office due to the annexation. The notable city councilor Johann Uphagen also resigned as a sign of protest against the annexation.
Independent currency (groschen coins) minted in the Free City of Danzig after Napoleon's entry in the aftermath of the Franco-Polish 1807 siege.
Danzig’s integration into the Prussian kingdom soon fostered its economic revival. The city regained its significance as a Baltic port, though trade patterns shifted increasingly towards the British market. It also benefited from its integration into the Prussian customs territory, which had been expanded considerably since the Second Partition of Poland, and new postal links to Berlin, Königsberg, and Warsaw, which facilitated communication.
During the Napoleonic Wars in 1807, the city was besieged and captured by a coalition of French, Polish, Italian, Saxon, and Baden forces. It then became the Free City of Danzig, a client state of the French Empire, which it remained until 1814, when it was captured by combined Prussian-Russian forces. In 1815, after France's defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, the city was restored to Prussia and became the capital of Regierungsbezirk Danzig within the province of West Prussia.
Beginning in the 1820s, the Wisłoujście Fortress served as a prison, mainly for Polish political prisoners, including resistance members, protesters, insurgents of the November and January uprisings and refugees from the Russian Partition of Poland fleeing conscription into the Russian Army, and insurgents of the November Uprising were also imprisoned in Biskupia Górka (Bischofsberg). From May to June 1832 and in November 1833, more than 1,000 Polish insurgents departed partitioned Poland through the city's port, boarding ships bound for France, the United Kingdom and the United States (see Great Emigration). The population in 1843 was 62,000 inhabitants.
An early photograph of Langgasse, present-day Długa Street, 1855
The city's longest serving mayor was Robert von Blumenthal, who held office from 1841, through the revolutions of 1848, until 1863. In the second half of the 19th century, Danzig experienced railway construction, port expansion, and the growth of industries such as shipbuilding, timber processing, and food production. Nevertheless, its industrial development lagged behind that of other major Prussian cities. In 1871, Danzig became the first city in Continental Europe to establish a sewer system with wastewater treatment, resulting in a significant improvement in public health.
With the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony in 1871, the city became part of the German Empire and remained so until 1919, after Germany's defeat in World War I. Starting from the 1850s, long-established Danzig families often felt marginalized by the new town elite originating from mainland Germany. This situation caused the Polish to allege that the Danzig people were oppressed by German rule and for this reason allegedly failed to articulate their natural desire for strong ties with Poland.[clarification needed]
Free City of Danzig and World War II[edit]
Main article: Free City of Danzig
An aerial view of the historic city centre around 1920
When Poland regained its independence after World War I with access to the sea as promised by the Allies on the basis of Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points", the Poles hoped the city's harbour would also become part of Poland. However, in the end – since Germans formed a majority in the city, with Poles being a minority – the city was not placed under Polish sovereignty.
Instead, in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, it became the Free City of Danzig, an independent state under the auspices of the League of Nations with its external affairs largely under Polish control. Poland's rights also included free use of the harbour, a Polish post office, a Polish garrison in Westerplatte district, and a customs union with Poland. The Free City had its own constitution, national anthem, parliament, and government. It issued its own stamps and currency, the latter being called the Danzig gulden.
With the growth of Nazism among Germans, anti-Polish sentiment became far more common among local Germans; public Polish-language schools were heavily restricted, causing its Polish inhabitants to found their own private schools. In the 1930s, the local branch of the Nazi Party under Albert Forster, a Schutzstaffel member, capitalized on the sentiments of the city's German population to win the next elections to the city's legislature, triggering a wave of repression. The Danzig city government implemented various discriminatory policies against Poles, including expelling Polish students from the technical university, forcibly Germanizing dozens of Polish surnames, removing landmarks that reminded of Polish rule such as the Artus Court and Neptune's Fountain from the heritage list, prohibiting employment of Poles by German companies, and banning the use of Polish in public places.
Crowds greet Adolf Hitler as he rides in an open car in Danzig in September 1939.
Attacks and discrimination also came from the citizens of Danzig themselves, who often attacked Polish schools and the youth that attended them and were disallowed from entering various businesses owned by Germans. Polish railwaymen were also subjects of beatings. Many ethnic Poles were tracked by the Gestapo and, in Operation Tannenberg, arrested and moved to camps such as Stutthof or executed in the Piaśnica forest.
Nazi Germany officially demanded the return of Danzig to Germany along with a German-controlled highway through the area of the Polish Corridor, pursuing a far more aggressive policy in this matter than it had regarding the Sudetenland with Czechoslovakia in 1938. With Poland's refusal, German–Polish relations deteriorated, ultimately concluding with the beginning of the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Some of the earliest combat of World War II occurred in Danzig. At 04:45 a.m. on 1 September, the Battle of Westerplatte began with the SMS Schleswig-Holstein firing the war's first shots on a Polish military depot there, whilst a small group of men defended the Polish post office in the city for several hours. The defenders were later executed.
The German battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein firing at the Polish Military Transit Depot in Westerplatte during the Battle of Westerplatte in September 1939
Within one year of a 1937 pogrom, more than half of the city's Jewish community had left, and organized emigration of Jews away from Danzig began after the Kristallnacht riots in 1938. In 1939, regular transports to Mandatory Palestine began. The numbers of the local Jewish community quickly thinned, with only 600 Jews remaining in Danzig by 1941. Many of the Jews who remained were transported to the small, single-building Danzig Ghetto.
During the war, Germany operated a prison in the city, an Einsatzgruppen-operated penal camp, a camp for Romani people, two subcamps of the Stalag XX-B prisoner-of-war camp for Allied POWs, and several subcamps of the Stutthof concentration camp within the present-day city limits. In 1945, as the Red Army neared the area, thousands of civilians fled the city during Operation Hannibal aboard ships such as Wilhelm Gustloff. It endured heavy Allied and Soviet air raids during the war. Danzig was captured by Polish and Soviet troops in March 1945. The city was heavily damaged as a result. Soviet soldiers committed large-scale rape and looting, especially of the industrial areas.
In line with the decisions made by the Allies under pressure of Stalin at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the city was annexed by Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which stayed in power until the fall of communism in Poland in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The remaining German residents of the city who had survived the war fled or were expelled to postwar Germany. The city was repopulated by ethnic Poles; up to 18% of them had been deported by the Soviets in two major waves from pre-war eastern Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union.
Post-World War II (1945–1989)[edit]
Solidarity (Solidarność) strikes at the Gdańsk Shipyard in 1980
Parts of the historic old city of Gdańsk, which had suffered large-scale destruction during the war, were rebuilt during the 1950s and 1960s. The reconstruction sought to dilute the "German character" of the city, and set it back to how it supposedly looked like before the annexation to Prussia in 1793. Nineteenth-century transformations were ignored as "ideologically malignant" by post-war administrations, or regarded as "Prussian barbarism" worthy of demolition, while Flemish/Dutch, Italian and French influences were emphasized in order to "neutralize" the German influence on the appearance of the city.
Boosted by heavy investment in the development of its port and shipyards fuelled by Soviet ambitions in the Baltic region, Gdańsk became the major shipping and industrial centre of the People's Republic of Poland. In December 1970, Gdańsk was the location of anti-regime demonstrations, which led to the downfall of Poland's communist leader Władysław Gomułka. During the demonstrations in Gdańsk and Gdynia, military and police forces opened fire on the demonstrators, causing several dozen deaths. Ten years later, in August 1980, Gdańsk Shipyard was the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union and political movement.
In September 1981, to deter Solidarity, Soviet Union launched Exercise Zapad-81, the largest military exercise in history, during which amphibious landings were conducted near Gdańsk. Around the same time, Solidarity's first national congress was hosted in the Hala Olivia, located in Gdańsk. Its opposition to the Communist regime led to the end of communist rule in 1989, and sparked a series of protests that overthrew the communist regimes of the former Eastern Bloc.
Contemporary history (1990–present)[edit]
The European Solidarity Centre houses exhibits documenting the history of the Solidarity trade union and the anti-communist resistance movement in Poland.
Solidarity's leader, Lech Wałęsa, became President of Poland in 1990. In 2014 the European Solidarity Centre, a museum and library devoted to the history of the movement, opened in Gdańsk. On 9 July 2001, the city experienced a flood, with 200 million zł being estimated in damage, 4 people being killed, and 304 being evacuated. As a result, the city has since built more than fifty reservoirs, the number of which is rising. Donald Tusk, a Gdańsk native, has been prime minister of Poland since 2023, and also filled the role from 2007 to 2014. He was additionally President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019.
In January 2019, the Mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, was assassinated by a man who had just been released from prison for violent crimes. After stabbing the mayor in the abdomen near the heart, the man claimed that the mayor's political party had been responsible for imprisoning him. Though Adamowicz underwent a multi-hour surgery, he died the next day.
In October 2019, the city of Gdańsk was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award in the Concord category as a recognition of the fact that "the past and present in Gdańsk are sensitive to solidarity, the defense of freedom and human rights, as well as to the preservation of peace". In a 2023 Report on the Quality of Life in European Cities compiled by the European Commission, Gdańsk was named as the fourth best city to live in Europe alongside Leipzig, Stockholm and Geneva.
