The importance of the strategic position at the junction of two great rivers, and with an outlook towards the great plain on the north, seems to have been recognized in early times, for the Celts are said to have first raised fortifications on this rocky summit in the third century before our era. By them it was named, and for a thousand years it remained, Singidunum--during which period it was successively in the possession of the Romans, the Huns, Sarmatians, Goths and Gepids, and then again in that of the Romans. In the eighth century the Franks, and in the ninth the Bulgarians, secured it, and held it until the eleventh, when they were evicted by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II. The Hungarians, under King Stephen, conquered it, to be followed by Greeks, Bulgarians and Hungarians again. In the fourteenth century it seems first to have fallen into the hands of the Servians, who later ceded it to Hungary. Then it was alternately occupied by Hungarians and Turks during the long period of their intermittent warfare, while later Austria and Turkey held it by turn for brief periods. Austria captured it in 1688 to lose it two years later, again in 1717 to hold it until 1739, and yet again in 1789 to lose it in 1792. Then it was Servians and Turks who alternately disputed the mastership, and it was only in 1866 that the Turks finally gave up the citadel. It was presumably the Austrian attack of 1789 which was commemorated in the wonderful alliterative verses, the opening lines of which have become so popular that they almost deserve inclusion among our nursery rhymes. The lines, which were written in 1828 by the Rev. B. Poulter, Prebendary of Winchester, are not widely familiar _in extenso_, and may therefore be appropriately quoted when we are regarding Belgrade as a much-besieged city:--