Kingdom of Norway

The medieval Kingdom of Norway grew out of the Viking Age, when a single ruler first claimed authority over the scattered districts along Norway's Atlantic coast. Tradition dates its foundation to 872 under Harald Fairhair. At its height in the thirteenth century the Norwegian realm reached far beyond the mainland, taking in Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, Orkney, Shetland and for a time the Hebrides and the Isle of Man. It kept its own kings until 1397, when it entered the Kalmar Union with Denmark and Sweden.

Before the ninth century the coast from the Oslofjord region in the south to Hålogaland in the north was divided among small districts called fylki, whose leaders formed shifting alliances and feuds. Yet an older idea already linked them: Norðvegr, "the North Way", the sea route along this coast and the people who lived beside it. Harald Hálfdanarson, later known as Harald Fairhair, gathered a following of warriors and became, as far as historians can tell, the first to claim that these districts should form one kingdom. Royal power long remained loose, and for decades rival dynasties, including the earls of Lade, competed for control. The king's seat moved between Avaldsnes, Trondheim, Bergen and other centres.

From the seventh century Norwegians had settled the islands to the west, first Orkney and Shetland, later the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland. These settlers kept close ties with the homeland, and as the monarchy grew stronger it brought them under its authority, often governing through local earls. Leif Erikson, an Icelander of Norwegian descent, reached North America some five centuries before Columbus. In the early twelfth century King Sigurd I led a crusade to the Holy Land between 1107 and 1110, helping to capture Sidon.

Norway had no fixed rules of succession, and royal claimants often shared or disputed the throne. After Sigurd's death in 1130 a quarrel over the crown began more than a century of civil war. Late in the twelfth century the struggle hardened into a contest between two parties, the Birkebeiner and the Bagler, who were reconciled in 1217. The wars finally ended in 1240 with the defeat of Duke Skule Bårdsson, who had challenged King Haakon Haakonsson.

The decades from 1240 to 1319 were the realm's peak. The archbishopric of Nidaros, founded in 1152, gave Norway its own church province. Royal power was strongest at the end of Haakon Haakonsson's reign in 1263. By the Treaty of Perth in 1266 Norway gave the Hebrides and Man to the Kingdom of Scotland while keeping Orkney and Shetland. In 1274 the law code of King Magnus Lagabøte, "the Lawmender", made Norway one of the first European countries with a single body of law for the whole kingdom. In the far north, Norwegians and the Novgorod Republic competed to tax the Sámi, and a treaty in 1326 ended decades of border fighting there.

When the male royal line died out in 1319, the crown passed to Magnus VII, who was also elected king of Sweden. The Black Death of 1349 to 1351 is estimated to have reduced the population from about 350,000 to 125,000, ruining many noble and royal estates and weakening the monarchy. In 1380 the young Olav IV inherited Norway as well as Denmark. After his death in 1387, his mother Margaret secured the succession of her chosen heir, Eric of Pomerania, and in 1397 the three Scandinavian crowns were joined in the Kalmar Union.

Norway stayed bound to Denmark for centuries, later within Denmark–Norway, and Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland remained attached to the Norwegian crown until 1814. The medieval kingdom is remembered in modern Norway as the age of independent native kings.

Our 900 map shows the Kingdom of Norway in its earliest form along the western coast of Scandinavia, around a generation after its traditional founding.