Uppsala

The cathedral was consecrated in 1435, still unfinished, and in 1477 a papal bull gave Uppsala the first university in the Nordic lands. The Reformation nearly emptied it, for Gustav Vasa's crown saw the old archbishop's town as a nest of Catholic disloyalty; yet the reformed church kept the cathedral as the place of coronations, and Gustav Vasa himself was buried there. Uppsala's standing returned in 1593, when the synod summoned there by Duke Charles bound Sweden to Lutheran orthodoxy and the university received new privileges to train the clergy and officials of a growing state. When fire swept the town in 1702, the university library survived in the Gustavianum, with the aged Olaus Rudbeck, so the story goes, directing the firefighters from its roof, and by the 1740s Anders Celsius and Carl Linnaeus were teaching there.