Two hills
Kaptol was founded with the bishopric in 1094 by King Ladislaus of Hungary. Gradec, the hill next to it, was made a free royal city by the Golden Bull of Béla IV in 1242 after the Mongol invasion.
One belonged to the church, one to the king, and they spent centuries in conflict over mills, land and tolls — with weapons as well as lawyers. The bridge between them was called the Bloody Bridge.
They were only united into a single city called Zagreb in 1850.
Habsburg centuries
Zagreb became the seat of the Croatian ban in 1621 and the effective capital of what was left of Croatia after the Ottoman advance.
It was small — around 10,000 people in 1800. What it had was politics: the Illyrian movement of the 1830s and 40s under Ljudevit Gaj standardised the literary language and built a national cultural project under Hungarian administrative pressure.
Bishop Strossmayer founded the Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1866; the modern University dates from 1874.
The earthquake that built the city
On 9 November 1880 an earthquake of about magnitude 6.3 struck.
Zagreb did not simply repair itself. It rebuilt as a capital: Hermann Bollé gave the cathedral its spires, tiled St Mark’s and designed Mirogoj; Milan Lenuci laid out the Green Horseshoe; the theatre opened in 1895.
Nearly everything a visitor photographs in Zagreb is from the thirty years after that morning.
Four states without moving
Austria-Hungary until 1918. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, proclaimed in Zagreb in October 1918. The Independent State of Croatia of 1941–45, the Ustaša regime, which made this the capital of an Axis satellite responsible for the Jasenovac camp system. Then socialist Yugoslavia.
Under Yugoslavia, Zagreb was a republic capital, built Novi Zagreb across the Sava, endured the 1964 flood, saw the Croatian Spring of 1971 suppressed, and hosted the 1987 Universiade.
Independence
1990 brought the first multi-party elections; 1991, independence and war.
The Banski dvori was bombed from the air on 7 October 1991 with the President inside. In May 1995, cluster rockets fired into the city centre killed seven civilians and wounded around two hundred.
Croatia joined NATO in 2009, the EU in 2013, and the euro and Schengen on 1 January 2023.
And then the ground moved again
22 March 2020, magnitude 5.5, in the first week of lockdown: one death, 26,000 buildings damaged, the cathedral’s south spire broken off.
29 December 2020, magnitude 6.4 at Petrinja: seven dead, that town destroyed, Zagreb shaken again.
The repairs are why so much of the centre is under scaffolding. The full version is The Two Hills and the Two Earthquakes, and the dated version is the timeline.