Viborg

Kings kept a close watch on that assembly. In the early 14th century Erik Menved raised a fortress on a knoll by the lakes, built not to shelter the town but to keep the assembly under his hand, and his brother Christopher II pulled it down on taking the throne in 1320. Two centuries later the Danish Reformation began here with Hans Tausen's preaching in Viborg from 1525 to 1529, and afterwards nearly all of the town's five monasteries and twelve parish churches were torn down. On 25 June 1726 fire consumed the eastern town with the cathedral and town hall, and a town of four or five thousand in the Middle Ages counted fewer than two thousand by mid-century. Viborg began to grow again only in the 1830s, when the Estates Assembly of North Jutland took its seat here.