Monaco, a principality of about two square kilometres on the Mediterranean coast between Nice and the Italian border, has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic, when hunters sheltered in the cave beneath today's Exotic Garden and in the Balzi Rossi caves near Menton. Ligurian tribes held the coast when Greek seafarers named its harbour Monoikos after Heracles, and under Rome it was Portus Herculis Monoeci, overlooked by the Trophy of Augustus raised at La Turbie in 7–6 BCE.

After Rome the coast passed to Ostrogoths, Byzantines and Lombards and was ravaged by the Saracens of Fraxinetum. Emperor Henry VI granted the Rock to Genoa in 1191, and in 1215 the Genoese began the fortress that became the Prince's Palace. On 8 January 1297 François Grimaldi, an exiled Guelph disguised as a Franciscan friar, seized it; his family lost and regained Monaco several times, bought Menton and Roquebrune, and from 1419 held the Rock more or less continuously.

Under Spanish protection from 1524, Honoré II took the title of prince in 1612 and turned to France with the Treaty of Péronne in 1641. His successors became dukes of Valentinois and courtiers of Versailles, and in 1731 the throne passed through Louise-Hippolyte to the Goyon de Matignon. Revolutionary France annexed Monaco in 1793; restored in 1814 under Sardinian protection, it lost Menton and Roquebrune in 1848 and sold them to France in 1861.

Reduced to its present size but independent, Monaco found a new fortune in the casino of Charles III and François Blanc's Société des Bains de Mer, which created Monte Carlo and allowed direct taxes to be abolished in 1869. Albert I made it a centre of oceanography and gave it a constitution in 1911. Under Rainier III, who married Grace Kelly, it reclaimed land from the sea, joined the United Nations and became a modern financial and tourist centre, and Albert II has added environmental diplomacy and the Mareterra district. Explore the ten ages below through selected events from the timeline.