Who ruled Copenhagen?

Copenhagen lies on the east coast of Zealand and the neighbouring island of Amager, facing the Øresund, the narrow strait that links the Baltic Sea with the North Sea. A sheltered channel between the islands made a good harbour, and the Danish name, København, means "merchants' harbour". Control of the Sound and the tolls charged on passing ships made the city rich, and it has been the seat of Danish kings since the 15th century. Its history is that of a fortress capital that survived sieges, plague and fire before growing beyond its walls into a modern northern metropolis.

A fishing and trading settlement existed here by the 11th century, at the end of the Viking Age, living largely off the great shoals of herring in the Sound. In the 1160s King Valdemar I granted the village to Absalon, Bishop of Roskilde and his close adviser, who built a castle on the islet where the parliament building now stands. The town received a charter in 1254. Its growth drew attacks from rival German trading towns: Lübeck sacked it in 1249, and forces of the Hanseatic League did so again in 1368.

In the early 15th century, during the Kalmar Union of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Eric of Pomerania took the castle from the bishops, and Copenhagen became the usual royal residence and capital of Denmark. The University of Copenhagen was founded in 1479. During a civil war in the 1530s the city held out for a year against the future Christian III, and after its surrender in 1536 he made Denmark Lutheran, part of the Protestant Reformation.

Christian IV, who reigned from 1588 to 1648, gave the capital of Denmark-Norway much of its character. He added new districts such as Christianshavn, strengthened the fortifications and built Rosenborg Castle, the Round Tower and the Stock Exchange. After Denmark lost its provinces east of the Sound to Sweden in 1658, Copenhagen found itself close to the frontier, and the Swedish king Charles X besieged it. A night assault in February 1659 was beaten off by soldiers and citizens. In 1660 the king used his popularity after the siege to make himself an absolute monarch.

Disaster followed disaster in the 18th century. Plague in 1711 killed about a third of the population, and great fires in 1728 and 1795 destroyed most of the medieval town. During the Napoleonic Wars a British fleet defeated the Danish navy off the city in 1801, and in 1807 a British army bombarded Copenhagen for several days and carried off the Danish fleet. Defeat cost Denmark Norway in 1814. The decades that followed were nevertheless a cultural golden age, when the writer Hans Christian Andersen and the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard worked in the city.

Denmark became a constitutional monarchy in 1849, and from the 1850s the old ramparts were opened and later demolished, allowing new working-class districts to spread outwards as industry grew. In the Second World War German troops occupied the city from April 1940 until May 1945. In October 1943, when the Germans moved to arrest Denmark's Jews, most of them were hidden and ferried across the Sound to safety in Sweden.

After the war the "Finger Plan" of 1947 guided suburban growth along rail lines, and since 2000 a bridge and tunnel across the Øresund have linked Copenhagen with Malmö in Sweden. The city has about 650,000 people and its metropolitan area well over two million, and it is the political, economic and cultural centre of Denmark.