Roskilde

From the 14th century the kings came ever more rarely, and in May 1443 a fire burned the cathedral and the heart of the town in the very year Christopher of Bavaria made Copenhagen his residence. The Reformation finished what the Sound port had begun: the bishop's seat moved to Copenhagen, and the convents, some of the largest in the kingdom, were closed and pulled down. The fjord was too shallow for most ships, so that in 1634 timber for the cathedral had to be landed at Køge and carted overland, and plague and fire kept returning. It was here, on 26 February 1658, that Charles X Gustav forced Denmark to sign away Skåne in the Peace of Roskilde. By 1753 barely 1,550 people lived in the town, and it recovered only slowly, becoming the seat of the Estates Assembly of Zealand in 1835.