Chapter 4

127

youthful sons, Eystein, Sigurd, and Olaf. The last-named died in 1115, still a boy, and the government of the country was left in the hands of the peace-loving Eystein, who stayed dutifully in Norway, and the much more adventurous Sigurd the Crusader who was away on his renowned journeys in the Mediterranean, in Palestine, in the Byzantine Empire, and in central Europe, from 1108 until 1111; once more Norway enjoyed tranquillity such as she had known under Olaf Kyrre. But Eystein died in 1122 and Sigurd in 1130.
       The country was then plunged into civil war. Just before Sigurd died an Irishman who called himself Harald Gille and who claimed to be a son of Magnus Barefoot had arrived at Sigurd's court; he had proved his story by the test of ordeal and had been accepted by Sigurd as a brother, though he was made to swear that he would not claim kingly rank either during Sigurd's life or during the reign of the heir to the throne, Magnus Sigurdsson. But a party of the Norwegian nobles prevailed upon him to break his word when Sigurd died, and from that time onwards for the space of 110 years the throne of Norway was in dispute. Harald, a swarthy and kilted foreigner who could speak little or no Norse, captured Magnus and blinded him; then another pretender to the throne, Sigurd Slembe, who also said he was a son of Magnus Barefoot, arrived in Norway and murdered Harald. Sigurd took the blind Magnus out of prison to make him king, but the sons of Harald Gille continued the war and killed Magnus in battle (1139). Twenty years of chaos followed while the sons and grandsons of Harald fought among themselves and as a result the prestige and the power alike of the kings became negligible; but at the end of this time the nobles and the clergy had become strong enough to invest one of their number, Erling Skakke, who was married to Sigurd the Crusader's daughter, with almost supreme authority, and in the early '60s the Archbishop of Nidaros crowned Magnus Erlingsson as king, the great Erling for a while ruling Norway as regent and for a while giving the country peace.
       There was, of course, some opposition. A grandson of Harald Gille raised a last and feeble rebellion in 1177 which was without difficulty suppressed, and it was precisely at this moment when the power of the Skakkes seemed to be most securely established that they were suddenly and unexpectedly overthrown by one of the most remarkable men who ever sat on the throne of Norway. For the miserable rebel party, the Birchlegs, so called because they had been reduced to using




128

birch-bark in place of shoe-leather, after their defeat invited Sverre Sigurdsson to be their leader. Sverre, who bore a vulgar Faroese name, claimed to be a bastard son of King Sigurd Mouth, a son of Harald Gille; but his mother, a Norwegian lady, had married a Faroese comb-maker and he himself had been trained for the priesthood in the Faroe Islands. He made an efficient army out of a nucleus of 70 Birchlegs and after suffering many hardships and rebuffs he routed the host of the Skakkes, slaying Erling in 1179 and Magnus in 1184. All parties in the state, nobles, churchmen, and peasants, were against him; pretenders to the throne he had usurped threatened rebellion; yet Sverre triumphed over all opposition and remained king of Norway until his death in 1202. In an atmosphere of universal suspicion and often of open hostility, excommunicated by the Church, he established himself as an autocratic ruler of unexampled power in Norway and died having created a centralized monarchy that had wellnigh completely undermined the old local authority of the nobles and landed proprietors who, taking advantage of the weakness of the throne during the previous century, had once more attained to a formidable power in the land. In so doing he was but reverting to the policy of St. Olaf, but Sverre's creation of a new nobility of court and government officials and his wholesale confiscation of land were acts not merely directed against the ancient aristocracy but against the bönder, or yeomen, themselves whose tenure of their estates henceforth depended upon the king's pleasure and whose share in the control of the country, as exercised at their things, was speedily reduced to empty formalities, so that thereby the dawning sense of nationality among them was summarily extinguished.
       Sverre, a harsh and dauntless dictator, handed on to his son Haakon a crushed and listless Norway, and two years later, in 1204, on Haakon's death the crown passed to Inge Bardsson, Sverre's nephew. These princes, though patching up the quarrel between the king's party and the Church, relinquished little of the authority held by the founder of the dynasty, nor did the political conditions of the people improve under Inge's successor, the great King Haakon Haakonsson (1217-1263). Haakon was Sverre's grandson and was only a boy when he came to the throne; but when he had attained manhood he was forced to concede a third of his realm to Skule, a brother of King Inge. Skule was killed in 1240, a year later, and with his death there ended that long period of civil war and bitter internal strife that with only rare inter-




129

ruption had distressed Norway since the death of Sigurd the Crusader.
       Norway, still in the unrelaxing grip of her over-centralized government, was now at peace, and Haakon's reign is memorable not for domestic affairs so much as for the king's vigorous foreign and colonial policy; in his day the viking people of Iceland and Greenland for the first time agreed to live under the direct rule of the Norwegian crown, Norwegian rights in Finland were established by treaty, and it seemed that the Norwegians as a nation, whether living in Norway or abroad, were to be welded into a single political unit under this true autocrat of Sverre's line; for Haakon's last enterprise, made with the intention of asserting his overlordship of the viking settlements in the Scottish Isles and Man, was a bold and formidable expedition against Scotland. Luck turned against him at the so-called 'battle' of Largs, and Haakon, having given unmistakable proof of Norway's power, went off to winter in the Orkneys where he suddenly fell sick and died.
       But Haakon's son, Magnus Lagaböter (1263-1280), the great jurist of Norway, realized the hopelessness of effectively controlling from Norway the Western Isles. One of his early acts (1206) as king was to cede the Hebrides and Man to Alexander of Scotland in return for a yearly payment of money, and it is with this surrender that the disruption of the far-flung viking commonwealth of Norwegian peoples begins. He was followed on the throne by his son Eric (1280-1299) and afterwards by his second son Haakon V (1299-1319); Haakon married his only legitimate heir, a daughter, to the son of King Magnus Ladulås of Sweden, and the son of this union in due course inherited the thrones both of Sweden and Norway. This was Magnus Ericsson (13191355), whose reign marks the first serious stage of the national decline, a period of poverty and mercantile failure that was speedily reflected in the fortunes of the unhappy colonies of Greenland and Iceland that were now dependent upon Norway for the imports without which life in these remote places was almost impossible. The union itself was of little advantage and only of short duration, for in 1355 Magnus ceded the throne of Norway to his young son Haakon VI (1355-I380), himself remaining king of Sweden; yet a greater and more disastrous coalition was at hand, for Haakon married Margaret, the daughter of King Valdemar Atterdag of Denmark, and this marriage led to a union of Norway and Denmark that lasted until 1814. For Valdemar




130

died without sons in 1375, whereupon Haakon and Margaret had their five-year-old son chosen as king of Denmark; then Haakon died in 1380, so that the young Olaf, with his mother for regent, became king of Norway as well as king of Denmark. In the meantime his grandfather had been deposed from the throne of Sweden and this Magnus's nephew and successor, Albert of Mecklenberg, had become so unpopular that the Swedes made it plain that they would prefer Margaret's rule. It seemed certain that rather than continue under the hated Mecklenbergs they would take little Olaf for king, when this young prince suddenly died. The occasion was one when the fate of all Scandinavia hung in the balance, but Margaret faced the crisis with magnificent wisdom. She had herself elected formally as regent of Norway and Denmark until such time as these two countries could agree upon a successor to Olaf, and then without hesitation she invaded Sweden. Albert and his Germans were beaten near Falköping in 1389 and the country was soon in her hands; then she chose her youthful great-nephew, Eric of Pomerania, as the king who was to rule the three realms, and in 1397 at the Swedish city of Kalmar Eric was solemnly invested with the crown of a united kingdom of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. And thus it came about that after the reign of Haakon V the neglected Norsemen of Greenland and Iceland could expect aid only from kings who were foreigners to them, unsympathetic and preoccupied monarchs who gave little heed to the failing fortunes of the wretched children of the vikings in the far-off colonies of the north.