Odense

That learning carried over into the age of print: in 1482 the bishop brought a German printer to Odense to produce a breviary, counted among the first books printed in Scandinavia. The Reformation swept away the Catholic bishopric in 1536, but the town lost little by it. For more than a century Odense prospered as the market of northern Funen, where cattle sales paid for the half-timbered houses of its merchants and the island's nobles kept their winter residences, and the Funen provincial assembly met here until 1805. Heavy taxes after the Swedish wars of the late 1650s ended that prosperity and left the town stagnant for over a century, until a canal dug to Odense Fjord between 1796 and 1806 at last made the inland town a port.