Prešporok

Prešporok, called Pozsony by the Hungarians and Pressburg by the Germans, stands on the Danube at the foot of the Little Carpathians, below a castle that guarded the river road between Vienna and Hungary. A mixed town of German, Hungarian and Slovak burghers, it received a coat of arms with silver towers and a portcullis from Emperor Sigismund in 1436, and King Matthias confirmed its old privileges by a Golden Bull in 1464. Its Gothic parish church of St Martin and its town hall, built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were the heart of the walled town.

After the Ottomans destroyed Hungary at Mohács in 1526, Pressburg became the capital in 1536, the seat of the archbishop of Esztergom in 1543, and from 1563 the coronation city, where eleven kings and eight queens were crowned in St Martin's until 1830. The Diet met here from 1542. The seventeenth century brought uprisings, floods and plague; the epidemic of 1678–81 killed about 11,000 of some 30,000 people. In the eighteenth century, under Maria Theresa, who was crowned queen here in 1741, the population tripled and palaces and monasteries filled the town. She had the walls pulled down in 1775, but after Joseph II moved the offices to Buda and the crown jewels to Vienna in 1783 the city lost its capital role. In 1805 diplomats of Napoleon and Francis II signed the Peace of Pressburg in the Primate's Palace.