Tallinn through the ages

Archaeological traces of a small hunter-fisher community in what is now the city centre are about 5,000 years old, the comb ceramic pottery dating to around 3000 BCE and corded ware to around 2500 BCE. A fortress was built on the hill of Toompea around 1050. Earlier researchers supposed that a stronghold, a harbour, a market and Russian and Scandinavian trading yards stood here before the conquest, but excavation has produced no firm finds for it and the written sources mention nothing beyond the stronghold. What made the site matter was its position as a port on the trade route between Novgorod and western Europe, and that made it a target when the Teutonic Order and the Kingdom of Denmark expanded during the Northern Crusades, a campaign in which Roman Catholic Christianity was imposed on the local population by force. The people of northern Estonia were among the last in Europe to be Christianised.

Valdemar II of Denmark's forces took the place in 1219 — the year of the battle of Lyndanisse — fortified Toompea and raised a first wooden Dominican church. The Estonian name Tallinn has widely been taken as a derivation of Taani-linna, 'Danish castle', conceivably from the castle the invaders built on the site of the Estonian stronghold; from the thirteenth century the town was more widely known as Reval, a name drawn from the surrounding Estonian county of Revälä and preferred by the local Germans. The founding of the town proper can be dated to 1230, when the Order of the Brothers of the Sword, then briefly holding the place, brought in 200 German merchants from Gotland, settled them at the foot of Toompea and secured them burgher status and the rights that went with it. Lübeck town law was adopted on 15 May 1248; what law applied before is not known. In 1265 Margrete Sambor, mother of King Erik V and vicereine of Estonia, ordered the building of the earliest known defence work, the Margaret wall.

In 1285 Reval became the northernmost member of the Hanseatic League, the German-dominated mercantile and military alliance of northern Europe. Much of the transit trade between western Europe and Novgorod gathered into the hands of its merchants; the town was granted Hanseatic staple right in 1346, and after the Danes destroyed Visby in 1361 its weight in the trade and politics of the eastern Baltic grew further. The stretch from the early fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth was the town's flourishing period, when it led the League's eastern trade. By the mid-sixteenth century perhaps 7,000 to 8,000 people lived inside the walls, with more in the suburbs; the fortifications ran to 66 defence towers, and the lower town was fully enclosed by 1355.

Rule changed hands repeatedly above the merchants' heads. After the St George's Night Uprising of 1343 was put down by the Livonian Order, the important Danish castles of the duchy passed to the Order — Tallinn and Rakvere in 1343, Narva in 1345 — and in 1346 Valdemar IV sold his Estonian possessions to the Teutonic Order's master Goswin von Herike for about 19,000 Cologne marks, roughly four tonnes of silver; the following year they were pledged on to the Livonian Order. Under Lübeck law the town below was effectively self-governing regardless. Toompea was another matter: it kept land and knightly law, held the seat of the Roman Catholic bishopric, and remained a separate town of largely aristocratic residents until 1877. In 1319 the Danish king granted a school privilege giving the cathedral chapter the sole right to keep a school and forbidding others; the cathedral school is first mentioned the same year.

On 14 September 1524 a crowd of several hundred Germans and Estonians broke into the Dominican church of St Catherine, St Olaf's and the Church of the Holy Spirit and destroyed the images, statues, altars and relics held to be symbols of the old faith. Early in 1525 the town decided in favour of the Lutheran confession, though it was formally adopted only in the 1530s, after Lübeck itself had abandoned Catholicism. The weathervane figure of an old warrior, Old Thomas, was set on the town hall spire in 1530.

Trade fell away in the second half of the sixteenth century, partly with the general decline of Hanseatic commerce and the shifting of trading relations, and partly through a quarrel with Lübeck. From about 1516 Tallinn, and to a degree Tartu, tried to stop Lübeck merchants trading directly in the hinterland of the Livonian towns. Lübeck's ships answered by sailing past Tallinn altogether, straight to Narva and Vyborg, and relations between the towns worsened.

War between Old Livonia and the Tsardom of Muscovy began in 1558, and the last master of the Livonian Order could not hold northern Estonia against Ivan the Terrible's forces. On 4 June 1561 the knighthoods of Harju, Viru and Järva swore allegiance to the king of Sweden, and on 6 June the lower town and its burghers gave their oath to Erik XIV and accepted Swedish authority; the former Order castle on Toompea surrendered after a siege. Northern Estonia was made the province of Estonia, with Tallinn as its centre and the seat of its governor. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth also claimed the town as territory incorporated by the Treaty of Vilnius of 1561 and offered Sweden financial compensation for it, which Sweden refused; the dispute was one of the main reasons no Polish–Swedish alliance against Russia was formed in the 1570s.

In July 1569, during the Northern Seven Years' War, a combined Danish and Lübeck fleet came into Tallinn Bay, bombarded the town from the roads for thirteen days, stripped the harbour bare and carried off more than thirty merchant ships. Fighting resumed in northern Estonia in 1570, bringing the first and second sieges of Tallinn, in which the suburbs and surrounding lands were plundered and the Pirita convent destroyed. Later Swedish–Polish wars were fought in southern Estonia and Latvia and did not reach the town. Under the Swedish crown the Baltic became in effect a Swedish inner sea and seaborne trade grew safely; Narva's Russian trade grew so fast that by the middle of the seventeenth century the Swedish authorities weighed making Narva, rather than Tallinn, the capital of the Baltic provinces.

The Great Northern War reached the town only on 15 August 1710, when Russian forces surrounded it and cut off both food supplies and drinking water from Lake Ülemiste. Over a siege of 45 days in which no fighting took place, plague and hunger killed most of the garrison and the townspeople — about nine in ten. On 29 September 1710 the town, the Estonian knighthood and the Swedish garrison surrendered to Peter I. Sweden formally ceded Tallinn and the surrounding lands to the Russian Empire at the Peace of Nystad in 1721. The local institutions of self-government, the Magistracy of Reval and the Estonian Knighthood, kept their cultural and economic autonomy within the Governorate of Estonia.

Tallinn and Paldiski mattered to the empire chiefly as naval ports on its western frontier. A viceroyalty replaced the governorate in 1783 and was wound up after Catherine II's death in 1796, when Paul I restored the Governorate of Estonia with Tallinn still its capital; in the last quarter of the eighteenth century the teaching of Russian was made compulsory in the schools of the Baltic governorate towns. Growth was held back by a building ordinance of 14 April 1825 restricting construction in the fortress and its suburbs, the ground around the fortress being divided into four distance zones, and the Defence Barracks were built on the bay between 1829 and 1840 by order of Nicholas I to protect the naval harbour. The restrictions were lifted only after 1 January 1858, when Tallinn was struck from the list of imperial fortresses.

Industry followed. Factories multiplied through the century — among them the Krull machine-building works in 1865, the Luther furniture factory in 1880, the Volta machine works and the Dvigatel wagon factory in 1899 — and the Baltic Railway, built in the 1870s, linked the ports of Tallinn and Paldiski through Narva and Gatchina to St Petersburg and the interior governorates. The port kept its importance. Russification measures grew stronger in the closing decades of the century, and the Magistracy of Reval was abolished in 1889. Off the coast in June 1908 Nicholas II and Alexandra met Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, a meeting read as royal confirmation of the previous year's Anglo-Russian Entente and the first visit by a reigning British monarch to Russia. On 24 February 1918 the Estonian Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in the city; German occupation followed until the end of the war that November, after which Tallinn became the capital of independent Estonia.

Estonia was occupied by the Soviet army and annexed to the USSR in the summer of 1940, then occupied by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944. During the German occupation the city was bombed repeatedly by the Soviet air force. In the most destructive raid, on the night of 9–10 March 1944, more than a thousand incendiary bombs were dropped, starting large-scale fires; 757 people were killed, 586 of them civilians, and 20,000 were left without shelter. The German forces withdrew in September 1944 and the city was occupied again by the Soviet Union.

The half-century that followed changed who lived there. Ethnic Estonians had made up over 80 per cent of the population before the Second World War; by 2022 they were just over 53 per cent. As an urban area of industrial and military significance, Tallinn took a large influx of migrants from Russia and other parts of the USSR, and whole new districts — Mustamäe, Väike-Õismäe, Pelguranna and above all Lasnamäe, the most populous district of the city since the 1980s — were built by the Soviet authorities with the intent of housing Russian-speaking incomers. Around a third of the city's residents are first- and second-generation immigrants from Russia and the former Soviet Union, a majority of the Soviet-era arrivals now Estonian citizens. The sailing events of the 1980 Summer Olympics were held at Pirita, and the television tower, the Olümpia hotel, the new main post office and the Regatta Centre were built for them.

Estonian independence was restored in 1991, and on 20 August that year Tallinn became once again the capital of a de facto independent country. The Old Town, Toompea included, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997; the city hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 2002 and was European Capital of Culture in 2011, sharing the title with Turku. It received the European Green Capital Award for 2023 and has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent by 2030, though critics argued the award rested on false promises, since the '15-minute city' concept the bid won on was left out of the programme that followed and much of the remaining twelve-million-euro spend went on temporary, one-off projects.

More than half of Estonia's GDP is generated in the city, whose economy runs on information technology, tourism and logistics alongside its older functions as seaport and capital. Skype and Bolt both began here, and the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and eu-LISA, the European Union's IT agency, are based in the city. The Port of Tallinn is among the largest in the Baltic region. The population stood at 456,518 on 1 January 2025.