Nidaros

The archbishops grew powerful enough to strike their own coin from 1434, and it was the last of them who led Norway's resistance to the Danish Reformation. When it was forced through in 1537 he fled into exile, and the Danish authorities destroyed St Olaf's shrine. With the pilgrims gone, the cathedral, damaged by fire in 1531, was only partly repaired, and its nave stood a roofless ruin. After another great fire in 1681, the Luxembourg-born general Johan Caspar de Cicignon redrew the town with broad, straight streets around a central square, the finest Baroque plan in Norway, and the fortress he founded on the hill to the east helped save the city from Swedish conquest in 1718. When the constitution of 1814 named the cathedral Norway's coronation church, the crowning of Carl Johan there in 1818 showed how far it had fallen into decay.