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By the 7th or 8th century the Wislan tribe of the Slavs had settled in the swampy upper Wista (Vistula) valley. Until Prince Mieszko of the neighbouring Polan (literally “fielddwellers’) tribe conquered the region about 988, the fortified town of Krakow was closely linked with the territories of Bohemia and Moravia to the south. King Kazimierz (Casimir) I the Restorer moved the royal court of the infant Polish kingdom to Krakow ín 1038 and Krakow enjoyed a golden age of growth. By the time of Kazimierz III the Great (ruled 133370) the city had expanded far beyond the ancient earthworks, and stone walls now girded it. The city was bracketed by two satellite towns, Kleparz and Kazimierz (named after its founder). Most importantly, the king founded a university, whose fate was inextricably entwined with the city’s. Krakow basked in the warmth of royal patronage until 28 May 1609 when Zygmunt (Sigismund) [II and his court left Wawel, never to return. Warsaw became the capital, although kings and queens still made the journey to Krakow for their coronations and funerals in Wawel’s cathedral. Krakow was the cosmopolitan capital of a multi-ethnic kingdom. The streets were filled with Poles, Germans, Jews, Hungarians, Scots, Czechs, Walloons and Italians. When Krakow was annexed in 1795 to that vast portfolio of international real estate, the Habsburg Empire, Cracovians adapted with far more ease than other cities. Even toda. Krakow fondly remembers the last emperor, Franz Joseph — his portrait may still be seen in many bars and cafés. The Second World War marked the end of ethmic diversity, and the new communist government fought bitterly against Krakow’s bourgcois valucs and entrenched Roman Catholicism. Cracovians remained stubbornly proud of their history and legends, devoted to cultured and sometimes overblown intellectual pursuits, and ostentatious in their allegiance to the Church. The new suburb of Nowa Huta was meant to give Krakow a proletarian slant, but it brought only steelworkers’ strikes. The election of Krakow's archbishop as Pope John Paul IJ in 1978 was one of the harbingers of the ‘fall’ of communism at the close of the 1980s. By the early 1990s, cafés and restaurants were appearing on every street, churches and palaces were being renovated and visitors from abroad had begun to rediscover one of Europe’s most enchanting cities. The magic and mystery of Krakow dend in every brick of its Gothic ‚mansions, in the echoing halls of its ancient Jagiellonian University, in the empty spaces of its synagogues. It is in top the mist that rises from the fields in the morning and the peculiar quality of moonlight over its cobblestone mn streets. It is in the whispering murmur of the Vistula river the secret silence its limestone cliffs.