The city of Lund, which has a long history as a center for learning, had been the ecclesiastical center and seat of the archbishop of Denmark. (A cathedral school for the training of clergy, established in 1085, is today Scandinavia's oldest school.)

A studium generale (a medieval university education) was founded in 1425, but had to close in 1536 in connection with the Danish reformation.

After the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658, the Scanian lands had come under the possession of the Swedish Crown, which quickly founds the Lund University in 1666 as the means of Swedification.

It is the today the second-oldest university on Swedish ground.