The rock
There is evidence of settlement on Castle Rock from the Bronze Age. By the seventh century a fortress called Din Eidyn stood here, held by the Gododdin, a Brittonic people, and taken by the Northumbrians in 638. The name survived the conquest.
David I made Edinburgh a royal burgh around 1130 and founded Holyrood Abbey in 1128. The town grew down the ridge from the castle.
Capital
Edinburgh became Scotland’s capital in the fifteenth century under James III. The Flodden Wall went up after the catastrophic defeat of 1513, and it fixed the town’s boundaries for two hundred and fifty years — which is why the Old Town grew upwards rather than outwards.
Reformation
John Knox preached at St Giles’ from 1559 and the Scottish Reformation was carried by parliament in 1560. Mary Queen of Scots returned from France in 1561 into a country that had changed religion in her absence; her secretary Rizzio was murdered at Holyrood in 1566, her husband Darnley blown up in 1567, and she was deposed within months.
Her son James VI inherited the English throne in 1603 and moved to London. Scotland kept its parliament and its church but lost its court.
Covenant and civil war
The National Covenant was signed at Greyfriars in 1638 in resistance to Charles I’s prayer book, triggering the Bishops’ Wars and contributing directly to the civil wars across all three kingdoms. Cromwell occupied the city in 1650.
Union
The Act of Union of 1707 dissolved the Scottish parliament. It was deeply unpopular in Edinburgh — there were riots — and it removed the city’s political function while leaving it the centre of Scotland’s law, church, universities and medicine.
What followed was the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Smith, Hutton, Black, Ferguson, and the first Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1768.
The New Town
James Craig’s plan was chosen in 1767, and the Nor Loch was drained. Over the following seventy years the wealthy moved across the valley, leaving the Old Town to become one of the worst slums in Europe — a division the Victorian improvement acts only partly addressed.
The city acquired its Athens of the North nickname in this period, and the half-built Parthenon on Calton Hill is what came of it.
Victorian city
Railways arrived in the 1840s and were run along the bottom of the drained loch. Medicine flourished — Simpson and chloroform, Lister and antisepsis, Bell and his diagnostic party trick — and so, notoriously, did the trade in bodies for dissection that produced Burke and Hare in 1828.
Leith remained a separate burgh until 1920.
Festival and parliament
In 1947, with Europe in ruins, the Edinburgh International Festival was founded as an act of cultural reconstruction. Eight uninvited companies performed on the edges of it and created the Fringe by accident.
In 1997 Scotland voted for devolution, and in 1999 a Scottish parliament sat for the first time since 1707 — initially on the Mound, and from 2004 in Enric Miralles’ building at Holyrood.