Aalborg

Herring kept Aalborg rich in the centuries that followed. In 1516 Christian II granted its merchants a monopoly on salting Limfjord herring, and the trade carried the town's ships across the North Sea to England as well as to Norway and western Sweden. The Count's Feud brought disaster: Skipper Clement made Aalborg the base of his peasant rising, and in December 1534 the king's troops stormed the town, plundered and burned it, and some 2,000 people are thought to have died. Aalborg recovered quickly. It became a Lutheran bishop's seat in 1554, and for the next hundred years its ships sailing to Norway and as far as Portugal made it the richest town in the kingdom after Copenhagen.