It was on a small, canal-encircled island called Slotsholmen in 1167 that Bishop Absalom constructed a small fortress within a harbor side village to try and stifle regular raids by the German Wends on the east coast of Zealand, thereby laying the foundations for the future capital of Denmark. The fortress inflated the village's sense of self-worth, causing it to grow significantly and to adopt the name Købmandshavn or Merchant's Port. The moniker was eventually shortened to København. The fortifications were destroyed during an attack on the town by raiders from northern Germany in 1369 and work on a new defensive structure, Copenhagen Castle, began seven years later. The reigning monarch, King Erik of Pomerania, moved into his sturdy new castle quarters in 1416 and named the city as his capital.

Copenhagen grew swiftly in size and population, and by the beginning of the 18th century had around 60,000 people living within its confines. The next 100 years weren't kind to the burgeoning capital, however. By 1711 nearly one-third of the population had died from bubonic plague, and a pair of fires, in 1728 and 1795, turned large areas of the city, including most of its wooden buildings, to ash. To top it all off, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in 1800, Britain's Admiral Horatio Nelson decided he'd had enough of Denmark profiting from wartime foreign trade, and of rumors that the neutral Danes were considering putting their naval fleet at Napoleon's disposal, and ordered a savage bombardment of the city. Much of Copenhagen went up in flames and the British rubbed salt into the wound by confiscating the entire national fleet. After Denmark became a democracy in 1849, it went through a lengthy and fairly peaceful period of economic development, not counting a political hiccup in 1864 when a short-lived war was successfully waged on it by Prussia.

Denmark managed to retain neutral status during WWI, but that ploy didn't work during WWII. The Nazis marched on Copenhagen on 9 April, 1940, and ended up occupying it and the rest of the country for five years. Although it survived the war relatively unscathed, Copenhagen was in a poor state by war's end. Today, Copenhagen is flourishing as a center of culture and the arts, and has had its historic skyline marred by only a few high-rise developments.