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William the Conqueror built his castle here around 1060, and the Château de Caen still stands at the center of the city, its walls enclosing a park and two museums. William also ordered the construction of the Abbaye aux Hommes, completed in 1063, where he was eventually buried -- though French Revolutionaries disturbed the tomb and only a fragment of his femur was recovered and restored to the abbey church. His wife Matilda founded the Abbaye aux Dames on the opposite side of town. Both abbeys survive. Charlotte Corday was born in this part of Normandy and was educated in Caen before traveling to Paris to assassinate Jean-Paul Marat in his medicinal bath in 1793.

In the summer of 1944, Caen was almost entirely destroyed.

The city was the objective of British forces pushing inland from the D-Day beaches, and the battle for it lasted from June through August, with Allied bombing and German resistance between them reducing most of the built environment to rubble. Around 35,000 civilians sheltered in the quarries beneath the city as their streets burned above them. The reconstruction took until 1962 and replaced the medieval street plan with wider roads and more functional architecture. What survived -- the two abbeys, the castle, the Church of Saint-Pierre -- survives in relief, like islands.