Monaco

A rock above the sea held for seven centuries by one family, the longest-reigning dynasty in Europe.

Monaco's history is the story of how a single fortified rock on the Ligurian coast became a sovereign principality and stayed one against far greater powers. The harbour was known to the Greeks as Monoikos, sacred to Hercules, and to the Romans as Portus Herculis Monoeci. The modern state began as a Genoese fortress founded in 1215, but its defining moment came on 8 January 1297, when François Grimaldi, called Malizia, seized the Rock disguised as a Franciscan monk, beginning a Grimaldi rule that has never ended. For centuries the lords and then princes of Monaco preserved a precarious independence between Genoa, France, Spain and Savoy, sheltering under Spanish protection and then, by the Treaty of Péronne in 1641, under French. In 1861 Monaco ceded Menton and Roquebrune to France, losing the great bulk of its territory, but won recognition of its sovereignty and, in the founding of Monte-Carlo and its casino, the means to rebuild its fortunes. Treaties of 1918 and 2002 bound Monaco's sovereignty closely to France while guaranteeing its survival, and the principality, modernised under Rainier III and his wife Princess Grace, joined the United Nations in 1993 and today uses the euro.