Scandinavia lends itself to a discussion of the causes, expressions and course of urbanization. The earliest known tendencies towards urbanisation in Scandinavia manifest themselves in the economic and political centres of the Merovingian Period and the early Viking Age. Scandinavian urbanisation entered a new phase from the latter part of the tenth century. From now on there is evidence of several places with a more complex centrality. Places of particular importance in this context are Lund in medieval Denmark, Sigtuna in Sweden, and Trondheim, Oslo and Bergen in Norway. Most of the new high medieval towns were established in the central parts of the Danish kingdom, including Skåne, and in the Mälaren area of Sweden with its extension towards the south and towards Finland. The development of Scandinavian towns was closely related to the evolution of more centralised political systems. The early medieval Norwegian towns were promoted by the kings which was important for the political unification process.

The beginnings of the European town in the form known to us from the late Middle Ages lie in the tenth century. The trading of Islamic merchants was shaped by a detailed legislative framework based on writing. In the regions outside the old Roman Empire incorporated into the Frankish empire during the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, people find very varying beginnings for quasi-urban settlements and for mercantile centres. Markets for wholesale and long-distance trade, merchants' inns, and also markets for the agrarian produce of the hinterland lay on the periphery. In the transalpine regions of the former Frankish empire, in what were becoming France and Ottonian Germany, the development of towns took a quite different path. Although the development of towns and markets in France, Lotharingia and Germany was strongly influenced by regional political forces, the Ottonian rulers played a decisive part.