Lund

By the early 14th century trade had begun to move to Malmö on the Sound, but Lund remained the church's seat of learning: a Franciscan school of higher studies opened beside the cathedral in 1425 and awarded degrees from 1438. The Reformation of 1536 broke the archbishop's power, church property was taken over by the crown, and the school did not survive.

After the Treaty of Roskilde made Skåne Swedish in 1658, the new rulers founded Lund University beside the cathedral in 1666 to make the province Swedish in language and loyalty. Ten years later the Scanian War reached the town's gates: on 4 December 1676 Charles XI beat a larger Danish army under Christian V on the fields north of Lund, and the university stayed closed until 1682. From 1716 to 1718 Charles XII lived in a house in the town, and for those two years little Lund was in effect the capital of Sweden.