KrakA?w's position at the junction of several important east-west trade routes, including the long haul to Kiev and the Black Sea, facilitated commercial development. By the end of the tenth century, it was a major market centre and had been incorporated into the emerging Polish state , whose early Piast rulers made Wawel Hill the seat of a new bishopric and eventually, in 1038, the capital of the country. Subsequent development, however, was rudely halted in the mid-thirteenth century, when the Tatars left the city in ruins. But the urban layout established by Prince Boleslaw the Shy in the wake of the Tatar invasions, a geometric pattern emanating from the market square, remains to this day.

KrakA?w's importance was greatly enhanced during the reign of King Kazimierz . In addition to founding a university here in 1364 - the oldest in central Europe after Prague - Kazimierz rebuilt extensive areas of the city and, by giving Jews right of abode in Poland, paved the way for the development of a thriving Jewish community . The advent of the Renaissance heralded KrakA?w's emergence as an important European centre of learning, its most famous student (at least, according to local claims) being the young Nicolaus Copernicus . Part and parcel of this was a reputation for religious tolerance at odds with the sectarian fanaticism then stalking sixteenth-century Europe. It was from KrakA?w, for example, that King Sigismund August assured his subjects that he was not king of their consciences - bold words in an age of despotism and bloody wars of religion.

King Sigismund III Waza's decision to move the capital to Warsaw in 1596, following the Union of Poland and Lithuania, was a major blow. The fact that royal coronations (and burials) continued to take place on Wawel for some time after was little compensation for a major loss of status. KrakA?w began to decline, a process accelerated by the pillaging of the city during the Swedish invasion of 1655-57.

Following the Partitions , and a brief period as capital of a tiny, notionally autonomous republic, the Free City of KrakA?w (1815-46), the city was incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. The least repressive of the occupying powers, the emperor granted Galicia autonomy within the empire in 1868, the prelude to a major revival. The relatively liberal political climate allowed KrakA?w to become the focus of all kinds of underground political groupings. JA?zef Pilsudski began recruiting his legendary Polish legions here prior to World War I, and from 1912 to 1914 KrakA?w was Lenin 's base for directing the international communist movement and the production of Pravda . Artists and writers attracted by the new liberalism gathered here too. Painter Jan Matejko produced many of his stirring paeans to Polishness during his residency as art professor at the Jagiellonian University, and the city was centre of the Mloda Polska (Young Poland) movement - an Art-Nouveau-inspired flowering of the arts led by Stanislaw Wyspianski and Jacek Malczewski.

The brief interlude of independence following World War I ended for KrakA?w in September 1939 when the Nazis entered the city. KrakA?w was soon designated capital of the so-called General Government, which covered all those Polish territories not directly annexed to the Reich. Hans Frank, the notorious Nazi governor, moved into the royal castle on Wawel Hill, from where he exercised a reign of unbridled terror, presaged by the arrest and deportation to concentration camps of many professors from the Jagiellonian University in November 1939. The elimination of the KrakA?w ghetto , most of whose inhabitants were sent to nearby Auschwitz (Oswiecim), was virtually complete by 1943.

The main event of the immediate postwar years was the construction of the vast Nowa Huta steelworks a few miles to the east of the city, a daunting symbol of the communist government's determination to replace KrakA?w's Catholic, intellectually oriented past with a bright new industrial future. The plan did not succeed: the peasant population pulled in to construct and then work in the steel mills never became the loyal, antireligious proletariat the communist party hoped for. KrakA?w's reputation as a centre of conservative Catholicism was enhanced by the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, who until then had been archbishop of KrakA?w.

An unforeseen consequence of the postwar industrial development is a serious pollution problem. Over the years dangerously high toxic levels have wreaked havoc with the health of the local population, as well as causing incalculable damage to the ancient city centre. After years of prevarication, cleaning up the city is now a major local political issue: in 1989 KrakA?w actually elected a Green mayor for a period, and environmental problems have remained a central political concern ever since.

Since 1989 and the transition to democratic rule, the city centre has been rapidly transformed by an influx of private capital - local and foreign - with Western-style shops, cafA©s and restaurants springing up in abundance, lending parts of the Stare Miasto a cosmopolitan, decidedly affluent feel that confirms the city's return to the place proud KrakA?w residents have always maintained it belonged, in the heartland of central Europe. The historic ensemble of the square and its immediate surroundings have also undergone a thorough clean-up, allowing both locals and tourists to appreciate buildings such as the Mariacki Church and the Sukiennice in all their pristine beauty