Edinburgh

Scotland

Edinburgh has been recognised as Scotland's capital since at least the fifteenth century and is today the seat of the devolved Scottish Parliament. The city was central to the Scottish Reformation of the sixteenth century: John Knox served as minister of St Giles' and led the movement from Edinburgh, dying there in 1572. Its university grew from a town college founded under a royal charter of James VI in 1582. In the second half of the eighteenth century Edinburgh was a leading centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, home to thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, and its intellectual reputation and neoclassical architecture earned it the nickname 'Athens of the North' in the early nineteenth century.