Copenhagen's name still means merchants' harbour
Denmark's capital, home to about 1.4 million people on the islands of Zealand and Amager, grew from a Viking-age fishing settlement near today's Gammel Strand. Its Old Norse name, Kaupmannahǫfn, meant merchants' harbour, and that meaning survives inside the Danish København.
By Old Danish times the name had become Køpmannæhafn, and a vowel shift around 1400 moved it toward its modern form; English took its version from Low German Kopenhagen. The Latin name Hafnia, from the word for haven, gave the chemical element hafnium its name. In the twelfth century Saxo Grammaticus called the town Portus Mercatorum, the first written mention.
Stone Age flint tools show early settlement, and some historians credit Sweyn Forkbeard with founding the town. A natural harbour and rich herring drew fishermen and traders from the eleventh century; rail works uncovered a merchant's mansion from around 1020 near Kongens Nytorv. Tradition dates the city to 1167, when Bishop Absalon built a small fortress on Slotsholmen, where Christiansborg Palace now stands, to fend off Wendish pirates. It received a charter in 1254, and the Hanseatic League sacked it in 1368.
It became Denmark's capital in the early fifteenth century and in the sixteenth served as the de facto seat of the Kalmar Union, which bound Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The eighteenth century brought plague, great fires, the grand Frederiksstaden district and the Royal Theatre, and the city became the hub of Denmark's slave trade. A British fleet bombarded it in 1807, before the Danish Golden Age gave it a Neoclassical face.
The Øresund Bridge now links it by road and rail to Malmö. The University of Copenhagen, founded in 1479, is Denmark's oldest; the metro opened in 2002; and Kastrup is the busiest airport in the Nordic countries, with about 2.7 million passengers a month.
Source: Copenhagen
