Prehistory 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. 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 90percent of the city centre in ruins, enabling excavations. The oldest seventeen settlement levels were dated to between 980 and 1308. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. , 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. 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. 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. In 1380, the
New Town was founded as the third, independent settlement. 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 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 , 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. 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. Being the largest and one of the most influential cities of Poland, it enjoyed voting rights during the
royal election period in Poland. 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. 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. 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.
Prussia, Napoleonic Free City and Germany 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. An attempted student uprising against Prussia led by Gottfried Benjamin Bartholdi was crushed quickly by the authorities in 1797. 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, 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 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. , 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. 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.
Free City of Danzig and World War II 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. 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. forcibly Germanizing dozens of Polish surnames, and
Neptune's Fountain from the heritage list, prohibiting employment of Poles by German companies, and banning the use of Polish in public places. 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 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 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. 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 . 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. 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) (
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) in Gdańsk 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.
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. ==Geography==