The assembly at Viborg did more than register law. It hailed kings, and until the middle of the seventeenth century a Danish king was not fully a king until Jutland had said so out loud. The first recorded proclamation here was Harthacnut's, in 1027. The last came in 1655, when the crowd hailed a nine-year-old crown prince who would reign as Christian V. Three years after that, hereditary absolute monarchy arrived, and no king ever again needed the consent of a field full of Jutlanders. The landsting lingered on as a court and was formally abolished in 1805. That judicial afterlife is the part that survived: Vestre Landsret, the Western High Court for the whole Jutland peninsula, still sits in Viborg, and the city remains the capital of both its municipality and the Central Denmark Region.

The name is two Old Norse words pressed together — vé, a holy place, and borg, a fort — though an older form of it, Vvibiærgh, ends instead in -biærgh, hill. Both readings fit. The town sits on high ground between lakes, and high ground in a country with no mountains has always drawn people who wanted to be closer to something. Viking-age settlement on the site goes back to the late eighth century, but the town proper took shape later, when large Viking farms were carved up into narrow plots strung along a street. Around 1060 Jutland was divided into three dioceses and Viborg got a bishop. In 1313 King Erik Menved built a coercive castle here, a tvangsborg, specifically to keep the landsting in hand. It lasted barely seven years. In 1320 it was pulled down.

Hærvejen means army road, but armies rarely used it. The Germans called it the Ochsenweg and the name is more honest: this was a cattle route, running the length of the Jutland ridge along the watershed so that drovers could avoid fording deep rivers. Before industrialisation as many as 50,000 head of cattle a year walked south along it toward Flensburg and Hamburg, moving with hides, honey, amber and fur, while metal, glass and weapons came north the other way. Viborg is the road's northern end. Modern highways trace much of the old line now, and the rest has become walking and cycling routes — including the Hærvejsmarchen, a two-day international walking festival that draws around 8,000 people a year onto marked routes of up to 45 kilometres a day.

Before the Reformation, Viborg held five monasteries, roughly twelve parish churches, a scatter of chapels and the cathedral — an extraordinary concentration of stone and clergy for a town of a few thousand people. Then, in 1525, a monk of the Order of St John named Hans Tausen was sent here in disgrace after preaching heresy. Confinement did not work as intended. Tausen taught curious citizens from his cell, and the ideas took hold so quickly that within weeks he was free and preaching indoors to crowds. Søndre Sogn Church became the first church in Denmark permitted to hold Lutheran services. Within a year Tausen was personal chaplain to the king, and what started in a Viborg cell had spread across Jutland.

Fire took the city in 1501 and again in 1567, and then on 27 June 1726 it took nearly everything east of the centre — the cathedral, the Black Friars' church, the town hall. Medieval Viborg had held four to five thousand people; by the middle of the eighteenth century fewer than two thousand were left. Recovery came slowly and from institutions rather than trade. The Provincial Assembly arrived in the 1830s, along with Denmark's first credit union and the Hede Society, the body that set about turning Jutland's heathland into farmland. The railway opened in 1864 and a garrison the year after, staying until 2001. Today 44,021 people live in the urban area, Viborg Municipality is the second-largest in Denmark by area, and Apple's Foulum data centre — opened in September 2020 — hums away in the countryside a few kilometres out.