Kingdom of Norway (872–1397)

A unified realm was initiated by warrior bands that had coalesced around Harald "Shockhead" Hálfdanarson—later known as King Harald Fairhair—in the 9th century. Before Harald, the coastal stretch from Vík (the Oslofjord area and the Skagerrak coast) in the south to Hálogaland (the northern Atlantic coast, roughly from Namdalen to present-day Troms, and beyond) consisted of shifting alliances and persistent hostility among groups whose political loyalties were tied to smaller fylki (districts). As far as historians can determine, none before him had ever asserted that these separate districts ought to form a single political unit—the entity later called the Kingdom of Norway. That claim built, however, on an already older conception of Norðvegr (the North Way) as a maritime transit route and a shared sociocultural landscape, inhabited by people known as "Northmen"—the common appellation for "Norwegians" in each of the North Germanic languages (to wit, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese)—alongside other peoples, notably the Sámi.

At the peak of Norwegian expansion before the civil war (1130–1240), Sigurd I led the Norwegian Crusade (1107–1110). The crusaders won battles in Lisbon and the Balearic Islands. In the Siege of Sidon they fought alongside Baldwin I and Ordelafo Faliero, and the siege resulted in an expansion of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Leif Erikson, an Icelander of Norwegian origin and official hirdman of King Olaf I of Norway, explored America 500 years before Columbus. Adam of Bremen wrote about the new lands in Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (1076) when meeting Sweyn I of Denmark, but no other sources indicate that this knowledge went farther into Europe than Bremen, Germany. The Kingdom of Norway was the second European country after England to enforce a unified code of law to be applied for the whole country, called Magnus Lagabøtes landslov (1274).

The secular power was at its strongest at the end of King Haakon Haakonsson's reign in 1263. An important element of the period was the ecclesiastical supremacy of the archdiocese of Nidaros from 1152. There are no reliable sources for when Jämtland was placed under the archbishop of Uppsala. Uppsala was established later, and was the third metropolitan diocese in Scandinavia after Lund and Nidaros. The church participated in a political process both before and during the Kalmar Union that aimed at Swedish side, to establish a position for Sweden in Jämtland. This area had been a borderland in relation to the Swedish kingdom, and probably in some sort of alliance with Trøndelag, just as with Hålogaland.

History

Expansion and unification

From the 600s Western Norwegian fish farmers began an exodus to the nearby islands in the North Sea, Orkney and Shetland, and then later to the Western Isles, like the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, and westward to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. Some of these islands were inhabited when the Norwegians arrived, but the local population was displaced or assimilated by the Norwegian immigrants.

Consistently, the islands' populations had a Norwegian ancestry, who kept in touch with the homeland over the North Sea. These Norwegians had their own chiefs or kings in the Norwegian tradition, subject to Norwegian royal power when it eventually developed a centralized state. Often, Norwegian kings had enough to contend with on the mainland, so the local power in the villages was often in the hands of local jarls who operated on behalf of the king.

Holdings in Sweden were in varying degrees Norwegian. By the 9th and 10th centuries, it is reasonable to assume that the population of Båhuslen, Jämtland and Herjedalen had no national affiliation to Norway, Svealand, or Götaland. It lay to the increasingly centralized monarchy to create this, which had to consolidate its right in the border areas above the neighboring kingdoms. Norway was then the first to integrate these areas into its kingdom.

Civil War Era

The civil war era began in 1130 and ended in 1240. In this period of Norwegian history, some two dozen rival kings and pretenders waged wars to claim the throne. The Civil War period can be divided into phases: the first phase was sporadic strife between the kings from 1130 to the second phase, where there were extensive battles between them from 1160 to 1184; and the final phase in which the Birkebeiners defeated the rest in 1240.

In the absence of formal laws governing claims to rule, men who had proper lineage and wanted to be king came forward and entered into peaceful, if still fraught, agreements to let one man be king, set up temporary lines of succession, take turns ruling, or share power simultaneously. In 1130, with the death of King Sigurd the Crusader, his possible half-brother, Harald Gillekrist, broke an agreement that he and Sigurd had made to pass the throne to Sigurd's only son, the bastard Magnus. Already on bad terms before Sigurd's death, the two men and the factions loyal to them went to war.

In the first decades of the civil wars, alliances shifted and centered on the person of a king or pretender. However, towards the end of the 12th century, two rival parties, the Birkebeiner and the Bagler emerged. In their competition for power, the legitimacy dimension retained its symbolic power, but it was bent to accommodate the parties' pragmatic selection of effective leaders to realize their political aspirations. When they reconciled in 1217, a more ordered and codified governmental system gradually freed Norway from wars to overthrow the lawful monarch. In 1239, Duke Skule Bårdsson became the third pretender to wage war against King Håkon Håkonsson. Duke Skule was defeated in 1240, bringing more than 100 years of civil wars to an end.

End of self-rule

After the extinction of the male lines of the perceived Fairhair dynasty in 1319, the throne of Norway passed through matrilineal descent to Magnus VII, who in the same year became elected as king of Sweden too. In 1343 Magnus had to abdicate as King of Norway in favour of his younger son, Haakon VI of Norway. The oldest son, Eric, was explicitly removed from the future line of succession of Norway. Traditionally Norwegian historians have interpreted this clear break with previous successions as stemming from dissatisfaction among the Norwegian nobility with Norway's junior position in the union. However it may also be the result of Magnus' dynastic policies. He had two sons and two kingdoms and might have wished they should inherit one each, rather than start battling over the inheritance. Magnus was at the same time attempting to secure Eric's future election as King of Sweden.

The Black Death of 1349–1351 was a contributing factor to the decline of the Norwegian monarchy as the noble families and population in general were gravely affected. But the most devastating factor for the nobility and the monarchy in Norway was the steep decline in income from their holdings. Many farms were deserted and rents and taxes suffered. This left the Norwegian monarchy weakened in terms of manpower, noble support, defence ability and economic power. The Black Death ended up depleting the population by 65%, from roughly 350,000 to 125,000.

After the death of Haakon VI of Norway in 1380, his son Olav IV of Norway succeeded to both the thrones of Norway and Denmark and also claimed the Kingdom of Sweden, holding its westernmost provinces already. Only after his death at the age of 17 his mother Margaret managed to oust their rival, king Albert, from Sweden, and thus united the three Scandinavian kingdoms in personal union under one crown, in the Kalmar Union. Olav's death extinguished yet one Norwegian male royal line; he was also the last Norwegian king to be born on Norwegian soil for the next 567 years.

After the death of Olav IV of Norway in 1387, the closest in line to the succession was the Swedish king Albert of Mecklenburg. However, his succession was politically unacceptable to the Norwegians and Danes. Next in line were the descendants of the Sudreim lineage, legitimate descendants of Haakon V of Norway's illegitimate, but recognized daughter Agnes Haakonardottir, Dame of Borgarsyssel.

However, the candidate from this lineage renounced his claim to the throne in favour of Eric of Pomerania, Queen Margaret's favoured candidate. The succession right of this lineage resurfaced in 1448 after the death of King Christopher, but the potential candidate, Sigurd Jonsson, again renounced his candidature (see Sudreim claim). Eric's succession was one in a line of successions which did not precisely follow the laws of inheritance, but excluded one or a few undesirable heirs, leading to Norway formally becoming an elective kingdom in 1450.