The Long Fall — the sudden loss of Norwegian nobility and the end of the kings

In the late summer of 1349, a ship from England made fast at the wharves of Bergen Bergen × Norway's western trading capital, founded around 1070 on the inner Byfjorden. For four centuries the largest city in the country and the wharf through which the entire western export economy ran — dried cod from the Lofoten fisheries, stockpiled and traded by the Hanseatic merchants at Bryggen from 1360 to 1754. Norway's commercial and intellectual heart through the Hanseatic period; eclipsed by Oslo only in the twentieth century. The painted wooden Bryggen wharf is on the UNESCO World Heritage list and substantially what it was in the late seventeenth century. In this article The plague's likely arrival point in 1349 — a ship from England made fast at the wharves of Bergen, and the longshoremen who unloaded its cargo were sick within days. The town's small literate class effectively disappeared in the months after. On the trip The Ungdommene (the Youngsters) arrive in Bergen on Tuesday 28 July 2026 via the Norway-in-a-Nutshell train-and-ferry route from Oslo. They walk Bryggen, climb Mount Fløyen on the funicular, and spend two nights in the city before flying back to Oslo and driving on to rejoin the Gråhårsklubben (the Oldsters) in Lillehammer. The Gråhårsklubben do not visit Bergen this trip — their split-week path runs north to Trondheim and the heritage country of Stjørdal, Hegra, and Kylloplass. Bergen Also discussed in The Germans Who "Ruled" Bergen — the Hanseatic merchants on Bryggen WharfBefore There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the worldThe King Who Became a Saint — how Christ came to the NorthA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutionsThe Golden Age — an empire of the North … reaching farther than you thinkThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, and the first monarch to personally lead a crusadeThe Reformation, 1537 — the year Denmark eradicated Norway's Catholicism and installed a Lutheran state churchWorld War II — the occupation, the resistance, and the Norwegian role in the Holocaust , and within days the longshoremen who had unloaded its cargo were sick. The priests of Christ Church Christ Church, Bergen × Cathedral of medieval Bergen, the seat of the bishop and the coronation church of the Norwegian kings, located on the Holmen headland above the Vågen harbour at what is today the Bergenhus fortress. Begun in the twelfth century by Olav Kyrre and completed under the early Sverre dynasty; Hákon IV was crowned there by the papal legate William of Sabina in 1247. Reportedly the first church in Bergen at which the plague-bearing ship's contagion took hold in the late summer of 1349, killing the priests of the headland. The cathedral was later moved to its present site away from the fortress; the medieval Christ Church itself was demolished after the Reformation, and only foundation traces remain today within the Bergenhus complex. Also discussed in The Reformation, 1537 — the year Denmark eradicated Norway's Catholicism and installed a Lutheran state church on the headland above the harbour died next. In the Lögmanns-annáll Lögmanns-annáll × The Lawman's Annal — late-medieval Icelandic annal collection compiled by the priest and law-speaker Einarr Hafliðason (1307–1393) at Breiðabólstaður in northern Iceland, covering events from Creation to 1392. Among the principal late-medieval Icelandic annals and the standard source for the dating of the Black Death's arrival in Norway, which the annal records as having reached the realm through Bergen in 1349 in a single terse entry. The surviving text is preserved in *Islandske Annaler indtil 1578*, edited by Gustav Storm (Christiania, 1888). of the Icelandic chronicler Einarr Hafliðason Einarr Hafliðason × Icelandic priest and chronicler (1307–1393), parish priest at Breiðabólstaður in Húnaþing and law-speaker of the northern quarter of Iceland. Compiler of the Lögmanns-annáll — the Lawman's Annal — one of the principal late-medieval Icelandic annal collections, which records the arrival of the Black Death in Norway through Bergen in 1349 in a single terse entry. The annal is the standard source for the dating of the plague's entry into the Norwegian realm. , the year 1349 is marked as the year the great mortality reached Norway through Bergen. The annal’s terse entry does not trace its path; the route — north to Nidaros Nidaros Cathedral × The principal cathedral of Norway and the burial place of Saint Olav, on the bank of the Nid River in Trondheim. Built and rebuilt in stages from the late eleventh through the early fourteenth centuries around the shrine site at the cathedral's east end. The octagonal east end, raised directly over Olav's grave, was the devotional core of the medieval building. Substantially damaged by fires and the 1531 lightning strike, then by neglect across the Lutheran centuries. The west front a visitor sees today is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reconstruction, completed only in 1983. The cathedral is the coronation and consecration church of Norwegian kings; Haakon VII was crowned there in 1906, Olav V consecrated in 1958, Harald V in 1991. On the trip Day 3 of the trip visits Nidaros Cathedral. The shrine is gone but the spot is marked on the cathedral floor in the octagonal east end. The west front is essentially what the medieval pilgrims first saw. The pilgrim road comes in past the south door — the same door medieval pilgrims walked through. Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim Also discussed in The King Who Became a Saint — how Christ came to the NorthA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutionsThe Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, and the first monarch to personally lead a crusadeThe Golden Age — an empire of the North … reaching farther than you thinkThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Reformation, 1537 — the year Denmark eradicated Norway's Catholicism and installed a Lutheran state churchLutheran Norway and Pietism — a farmer named Hans Nielsen Hauge and the personal faith the new state church could not silenceThe Quiet Revolution — how Norway won its independence without a war by autumn, south through Oslo Oslo × Capital of modern Norway, at the head of the Oslofjord on the country's southeastern coast. Founded according to the sagas by Harald Hardrada about 1049 and known through the medieval period as a secondary royal seat behind Bergen and Nidaros. Hákon V moved the royal residence permanently to Oslo about 1300 and built Akershus Fortress to guard the harbour. After a fire in 1624 the medieval town was abandoned and Christian IV rebuilt the city to the west under the new name Christiania (later Kristiania); the name Oslo was restored in 1925. The original medieval street pattern survives as the Gamlebyen district east of the modern centre. Oslo Also discussed in The 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Reformation, 1537 — the year Denmark eradicated Norway's Catholicism and installed a Lutheran state churchLutheran Norway and Pietism — a farmer named Hans Nielsen Hauge and the personal faith the new state church could not silenceThe Constitution That Saved a Nation — 1814 and a kingdom reborn800,000 Norwegians Leave — why a fifth of the country sailed awayThe Quiet Revolution — how Norway won its independence without a warWorld War II — the occupation, the resistance, and the Norwegian role in the Holocaust into the inland valleys before winter — is the reconstruction of modern scholars from charters, episcopal correspondence, and the dispersed annals of the years that followed.

Manndauden

The Norwegian word for what came was manndauden Manndauden × The death of men — the standard medieval Norwegian term for the Black Death of 1349–1350 and its aftermath, using mann in the older general sense of human being. The contemporary Norwegian word for the catastrophe; svartedauden — *the black death* — is a later coinage that became common only in the early modern period. Modern Norwegian historiography uses both: manndauden for the contemporary Norwegian framing of the event, svartedauden for the pan-European phenomenon. Norwegian population loss in the two years following the plague's arrival at Bergen in autumn 1349 is estimated by modern scholarship at between one-half and three-fifths. — the death of men, in the older general sense of mann as human. The disease moved fast across the country in the spring and summer of 1349. By the autumn it was in Trøndelag Trøndelag × Region of central Norway around the Trondheim Fjord, north of Stadt and south of Hålogaland. Its agriculturally rich Trondheim plain is the second-largest area of arable land in the country and the base of the medieval earls of Lade. Trondheim — founded by Olav Tryggvason in 997 as Nidaros — became the seat of the Norwegian archbishopric in 1153 and remains the country's third-largest city and ecclesiastical capital. The family's Day 3-5 split routes the Gråhårsklubben (the Oldsters) into Trøndelag for the Slektsreisen heritage drive. On the trip Day 3-5 of the trip routes the Gråhårsklubben (the Oldsters) through Trøndelag for the Slektsreisen heritage drive — Trondheim and the Nidaros Cathedral on Day 3, then Stjørdal and Hegra, then north to Kylloplass. Trøndelag (Trondheim) Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the worldWorshiping Odin and Thor — the lived religion of pre-Christian NorwayThe King Who Became a Saint — how Christ came to the NorthLutheran Norway and Pietism — a farmer named Hans Nielsen Hauge and the personal faith the new state church could not silence and the high inland farms. By the next year it had reached the western fjords and the eastern lowlands and the cathedral towns and the farthest crofts that anyone still kept track of. There is no medieval account that gives the country a single mortality figure. There is no account that even tries.

Modern scholarship places the Norwegian population loss at somewhere between half and three-fifths within two years. The figure ran higher in the towns and royal centres, where the small literate class lived, and lower in the most isolated mountain settlements, where contagion arrived more slowly and the population was thinner to begin with. The class that ran the kingdom was small to begin with — a few hundred secular noble families and a Latin-trained clerical class of similar size — and the plague went through it. Norway, unlike England or France, had no second tier of educated men to replace the dead. There were no spare clerks, no spare lawmen, no spare priests with full Latin.

The church under-staffed

A letter from the bishop of Bergen to Pope Gregory XI Pope Gregory XI × Pierre Roger de Beaufort (c. 1329–1378), pope from 1370 until his death — the last Avignon pope and the pontiff who returned the papal see to Rome in 1377 after seven decades of French exile. His pontificate corresponded to the second generation after the Black Death, and the surviving correspondence between his curia and the depleted Norwegian dioceses gives the clearest contemporary measure of how thoroughly the plague had hollowed out the medieval Norwegian church. The 1370s letter from the bishop of Bergen reporting fewer than fifty priests where three hundred had served before the mortality is among the documents preserved from his pontificate. in the early 1370s gives the shape of what the post-plague church looked like a full generation on. Where three hundred priests had served his diocese before the mortality, fewer than fifty remained — twenty years after the catastrophe, with no recovery in sight. The figure was not unique to Bergen. It was roughly what the Norwegian church reported across the country in the post-plague generations, with surviving priests scattered across parishes that had themselves lost more than half their congregations.

The seat of the archbishop at Nidaros stood empty for years at a stretch in the second half of the century. The Latin of the surviving correspondence became noticeably worse. The cathedral schools at Nidaros and Bergen that had trained the medieval Norwegian clerical class, and the network of monasteries that had supported them, both shrank to a fraction of their pre-plague scale. The institutional church survived. It came out of the fourteenth century dependent on the import of clergy from Denmark Denmark × The southernmost of the three Scandinavian kingdoms, consisting of the Jutland peninsula and the islands between Jutland and the Swedish coast. Unified under Harald Bluetooth in the late tenth century and Christianised in his reign, Denmark was the dominant Scandinavian power through most of the medieval and early modern centuries. From the 1397 Kalmar Union onward Denmark ran the joint Scandinavian monarchy from Copenhagen; after Sweden left the union in 1523, Denmark and Norway remained joined as the Dano- Norwegian state until 1814, with Norway governed as a Danish province through that period. Also discussed in The 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Quiet Revolution — how Norway won its independence without a warWorld War II — the occupation, the resistance, and the Norwegian role in the Holocaust and the German lands — a dependence that would shape every subsequent stage of Norwegian Christianity until the Reformation of 1537 The Reformation × The Lutheran religious settlement imposed on Norway in 1537 by royal decree from Copenhagen. Christian III of Denmark abolished the Catholic ecclesiastical structure, dissolved the monasteries, ordered the saints' relics destroyed, and replaced the Latin liturgy with Danish-language Lutheran services. Unlike the Reformation elsewhere in northern Europe, Norway's arrived from outside — no Norwegian Luther, no Norwegian reformers, no domestic religious movement behind it. The country changed denomination because the king in Copenhagen ordered it. Also discussed in The Reformation, 1537 — the year Denmark eradicated Norway's Catholicism and installed a Lutheran state churchThe King Who Became a Saint — how Christ came to the NorthA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutionsThe Germans Who "Ruled" Bergen — the Hanseatic merchants on Bryggen WharfThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantLutheran Norway and Pietism — a farmer named Hans Nielsen Hauge and the personal faith the new state church could not silence .

Ødegårder

Out in the country the same losses appeared as the ødegårder Ødegårder × Deserted farms — the standard Norwegian historiographical term for the abandoned farmsteads documented in the long series of cathedral and royal registers compiled in the centuries after the Black Death. Comparison of pre-plague surveys against later compilations shows that between a third and three-fifths of pre-plague Norwegian farmsteads disappeared from the rolls. Some were repopulated within a generation. Many were not. Birch and pine returned to fields that had been worked for a thousand years. The ghost-farm pattern in the registers — especially in upland Setesdal, Telemark, and the upper Gudbrandsdalen — is one of the most visible long-term traces of the demographic catastrophe. Also discussed in 800,000 Norwegians Leave — why a fifth of the country sailed away — the deserted farms. The pattern is documented in the cathedral and royal registers compiled across the long post-plague century: pre-plague surveys compared against later compilations show that somewhere between a third and three-fifths of pre-plague farmsteads disappeared from the rolls. Some were repopulated within a generation. Some never were. Birch and pine returned to fields that had been worked for a thousand years. Maps drawn by modern Norwegian historians from the surviving registers show ghost farms in Setesdal and Telemark Telemark × Historic region and county in the inland-southern part of Norway, between the southeastern coast and the central Hardangervidda plateau. Home to Heddal Stave Church — the largest of the twenty-eight surviving Norwegian stave churches, standing nearly thirty metres tall — and to the heavy-water production facility at Vemork whose sabotage by Norwegian commandos in February 1943 disrupted the German atomic-weapons programme. The name Telemark also gives the world the modern ski-turn technique developed there in the nineteenth century. Telemark Also discussed in A Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutionsWorld War II — the occupation, the resistance, and the Norwegian role in the Holocaust and the upper Gudbrandsdalen Gudbrandsdalen × Long inland valley running about 230 kilometres northwest through the central Norwegian highland from Lake Mjøsa toward the Dovre mountain pass, the central traffic artery between Oslo and Trondheim across both medieval and modern eras. The Gudbrandsdalsleden pilgrim road to Nidaros runs along the valley; Lom Stave Church and several other surviving stave churches stand on its slopes; Lillehammer sits at its southern entrance. The dialect spoken in the valley is one of the most distinctive in modern Norwegian. Gudbrandsdalen Also discussed in A Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutionsThe Reformation, 1537 — the year Denmark eradicated Norway's Catholicism and installed a Lutheran state church that disappear in the late-medieval rolls and never reappear under any name.

The Norwegian population would not recover its pre-plague level for nearly three centuries. The country that emerged from the long demographic depression in the seventeenth century was a different country: less populated, more concentrated along the coast, dependent on Danish administration and German commerce, and with most of the upland marginal farms that the medieval economy had relied on permanently lost to the forest.

The same collapse hit the secular nobility through a different door. Noble income was land income — the rents and dues paid by tenant farmers on noble estates. When the farms went empty, the rents went unpaid, and the small Norwegian aristocracy that had been thin to begin with was left poorer than its Danish and Swedish Sweden × The largest of the three Scandinavian kingdoms, occupying the eastern two-thirds of the Scandinavian peninsula. Unified in stages through the early medieval period and Christianised from the eleventh century onward. United with Norway and Denmark in the 1397 Kalmar Union under Margaret I and her great-nephew Erik of Pomerania; broke away under Gustav Vasa in 1523, ending the union. Modern Sweden's borders were largely set by the 1658 Treaty of Roskilde, which transferred the formerly Danish provinces of Skåne, Halland, Blekinge, and Bohuslän to the Swedish crown. Also discussed in The 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Quiet Revolution — how Norway won its independence without a warWorld War II — the occupation, the resistance, and the Norwegian role in the Holocaust counterparts at exactly the moment those neighbouring nobilities were expanding. The Riksråd Riksrådet × The Council of the Realm — the medieval and early modern Norwegian royal council of magnates and bishops, the body through which the senior secular aristocracy and the Norwegian church together advised and constrained the king and negotiated the succession when a line failed. In the high-medieval kingdom the Council was the institutional counterweight to the crown; in the post-plague century it was the body that should have negotiated Norway's next king on Norway's terms after the dynastic collapse of 1387. The Black Death reduced both the Council's numbers and the noble incomes that had sustained its independence — leaving it unable to assert Norwegian autonomy when the crown passed by inheritance to Margaret I and her Danish line. — the royal council of magnates and bishops, the body that should have negotiated Norway’s next king on Norway’s terms — came out of the plague reduced in numbers and reduced in wealth, with no surplus of younger sons coming up behind them, and no institutional reserves to draw on the next time the kingdom faced a crisis.

Out in the Atlantic, the consequences ran further still. The Norse Greenland Greenland × The world's largest island, lying between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans west of Iceland. Colonised by Norse settlers led by Erik the Red beginning in 985 — the name "Greenland" was Erik's marketing, chosen to attract colonists to a marginally agricultural land. The Norse Eastern and Western Settlements on the southwestern coast sustained perhaps two to five thousand people at peak across four centuries before steadily diminishing in the cooling climate of the Little Ice Age and disappearing by around 1450. Today a self- governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Also discussed in The Viking Age — longships, legends, and the first "Norway"The King Who Became a Saint — how Christ came to the NorthA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutionsThe Golden Age — an empire of the North … reaching farther than you thinkThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormant colony, which had answered to the Norwegian crown since 1261, lost its last documented contact with home in 1410. The ships from Bergen that had once made the crossing every few summers stopped sailing. The colony lasted in some form for a further generation or more before the archaeological record falls silent, the last Norse Greenlanders unaccounted for somewhere in the later fifteenth century, almost certainly dead.

A line of kings that runs out

Magnus VII Eriksson Magnus Eriksson × Magnus IV (in Sweden) or Magnus VII (in Norway), born 1316, reigned in Sweden 1319–1364 and in Norway 1319–1355. Grandson of King Hákon V Magnusson of Norway; acceded to the Norwegian throne in May 1319 at age three when his grandfather died without a male heir, and was elected King of Sweden two months later. The dual kingship inaugurated the long series of Scandinavian personal unions that would hold the Norwegian crown almost continuously until 1905. Ruled both kingdoms through regency until 1331; deposed in Sweden in 1364 and in Norway (in favour of his son Hákon VI) earlier. Died in a boating accident on Bømlo island in Norway in 1374. Also discussed in The Golden Age — an empire of the North … reaching farther than you think was thirty-three when the plague reached Norway. He had been king of Norway since the age of three, his mother Ingeborg Ingeborg of Norway × Norwegian princess (1301–1361), daughter of King Hákon V of Norway and mother of King Magnus VII Eriksson (Magnus IV of Sweden). Married the Swedish prince Eric Magnusson in 1312; their son Magnus, born in 1316, inherited the Norwegian crown on Hákon V's death in 1319 at three years old and was elected king of Sweden the same year. Ingeborg held the regency in the first years of her son's Norwegian reign before the Norwegian Council took over the practical running of the realm. A powerful political figure in her own right through the 1320s and 1330s, with extensive Danish and German diplomatic connections. holding the regency in the first years before the Norwegian Council took the practical running of the country and continued it through his minority. He had gained Sweden by election the same year. He had grown into the joint office across the decades before the catastrophe — which were not as quiet as the chronicles imply: the Scania acquisition strained his treasury, his Swedish baronage was restive, and in 1343 he had already settled a tentative division of the realms among his sons. He spent the years of the plague watching his administrative class come apart. The clerks who had carried his correspondence died, and so did the lawmen who had drafted his charters, and so did the regional administrators.

In 1355, under pressure from a depleted Norwegian Council and with the Swedish nobility increasingly hostile, Magnus formally ceded the practical rule of Norway to his son Haakon VI Haakon VI Magnusson × King of Norway (1340–1380), only surviving son of Magnus VII Eriksson and the last king of the Sverre dynasty in the male line. Acclaimed king of Norway at fifteen in 1355 when his father Magnus formally ceded the Norwegian crown under pressure from the depleted post-plague Council. Briefly co-ruled Sweden in 1362–1364 before being driven out by Albert of Mecklenburg. Married the ten-year-old Margaret of Denmark in 1363 — the marriage that would, through their son Olav IV, join the Norwegian and Danish crowns and open the way to the Kalmar Union. Died in 1380 at forty, leaving the ten-year-old Olav as king of both Norway and Denmark. Also discussed in The 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Quiet Revolution — how Norway won its independence without a war . Haakon was about fifteen and he ruled the country for the next twenty-five years from a court that was diminished and a treasury that was small. The pilgrim economy that had supported Nidaros never recovered its old volume. The timber and stockfish trades ran increasingly on Hanseatic terms — the German merchants of the Bryggen Bryggen × The Hanseatic wharf at Bergen — a long row of narrow gable-fronted wooden warehouses and trading houses lining the eastern shore of the Vågen harbour. From around 1360 the German Hansa established its Bergen kontor here, and for nearly four hundred years (until 1754) the buildings housed German merchants who controlled the export of Norwegian stockfish to Catholic Europe. The structures burned and were rebuilt repeatedly to the same medieval footprint; the surviving wooden buildings (most after the 1702 fire) preserve the medieval urban plan. UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979 and Bergen's most-visited landmark. On the trip Day 4 in Bergen lands the Ungdommene (the Youngsters) directly on the Bryggen waterfront — the wharf the Hanseatic trade in Norwegian stockfish built and rebuilt for four centuries. Also discussed in The Golden Age — an empire of the North … reaching farther than you thinkThe Germans Who "Ruled" Bergen — the Hanseatic merchants on Bryggen WharfThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormant wharf, who had been operating with crown-granted privileges since the late thirteenth century, used the post-plague decades to consolidate their grip on western commerce and would hold it for the next four hundred years.

In 1363 Haakon married Margaret of Denmark Margaret I of Denmark × Queen-regnant of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (1353–1412), daughter of King Valdemar IV Atterdag of Denmark and wife of King Haakon VI of Norway, mother of King Olav IV. After her son's death at sixteen in 1387 she was acknowledged as ruler in her own right by all three Scandinavian kingdoms in turn — the first woman in Danish history acclaimed sovereign — and was titled by the Swedes fullmäktig fru och rätt husbonde, plenipotentiary lady and rightful master, the constitutional language having no formula for a queen who governed three kingdoms in her own name. In 1397 she gathered the three realms at Kalmar to crown her great-nephew Erik of Pomerania as joint king, founding the Kalmar Union. Died at Flensburg in 1412. Also discussed in The 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Quiet Revolution — how Norway won its independence without a war , the youngest daughter of King Valdemar IV Atterdag Valdemar IV Atterdag × King of Denmark (c. 1320–1375), reigned 1340–1375. His by-name Atterdag — "day again" or "another day" — referred to his patient rebuilding of the Danish crown from a state of near-collapse when he came to the throne. He systematically bought back or seized the territories his predecessors had pawned to German creditors, including the rich province of Scania (Skåne), and by the 1360s had reconstituted Denmark as a serious Baltic power. Arranged the 1363 marriage of his ten-year-old daughter Margaret to Haakon VI of Norway as a diplomatic move to plant his line in the Norwegian succession. Died in October 1375 without a surviving male heir; his grandson Olav inherited the Danish throne the following May. . Valdemar had arranged the marriage to settle a dispute over the Swedish succession and to plant his line in Norway against the day his grandchildren might inherit both crowns. Margaret was ten years old at the wedding; Haakon was twenty-three. Their son Olav Olav IV Håkonsson × King of Denmark and Norway (1370–1387), only son of King Haakon VI of Norway and Margaret of Denmark. Born during the marriage alliance his maternal grandfather Valdemar IV had arranged to link the two crowns. Elected king of Denmark in May 1376 at five years old after Valdemar's death without a male heir, with his mother Margaret as regent. Became king of Norway in his own right on his father Haakon's death in 1380, joining the two crowns on a single ten-year-old. Died at Falsterbo on the southern coast of Skåne in August 1387 at sixteen — cause recorded only as illness — leaving no son and no will. With his death ended the line of Norwegian kings that the sagas had traced back to Harald Fairhair. Also discussed in The 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Quiet Revolution — how Norway won its independence without a war was born in 1370. When Margaret’s father Valdemar died in October 1375 without a male heir, his grandson Olav was elected king of Denmark the following May at the age of five, with his mother as regent. When his father Haakon died in 1380, Olav also became king of Norway in his own right. For seven years the two crowns sat on a single boy, and it appeared the Norwegian and Danish lines were about to converge in a single child who would rule both kingdoms and produce children who would inherit both.

Then, in August 1387, Olav fell ill at Falsterbo Falsterbo × Small town on the southwestern tip of the Skåne peninsula, facing the entrance to the Øresund. In the late medieval period one of the most important seasonal trading sites in the Baltic — the August Skånemarknad (Scania Fair) drew Hanseatic merchants from across northern Europe to its herring market. Falsterbo Castle was a Danish royal residence through the fourteenth century. King Olav IV Håkonsson of Norway and Denmark died there in August 1387 at sixteen, ending the medieval Norwegian male royal line the sagas had traced from Harald Fairhair. Today a small resort town in southwestern Sweden. Also discussed in The 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Quiet Revolution — how Norway won its independence without a war on the southern coast of Skåne Skåne × Southernmost province of modern Sweden, the flat fertile peninsula between Kattegat and the Baltic facing Denmark across the Øresund strait. From the early medieval period until 1658 Skåne was Danish territory — one of the three core Danish provinces alongside Halland and Blekinge — and its principal town Lund was the seat of the archbishopric of all of Scandinavia from 1103. Valdemar IV Atterdag recovered Skåne for the Danish crown from German creditors in the 1360s, restoring it as the agricultural heart of the Danish realm. Ceded to Sweden in the Treaty of Roskilde (1658) and has been Swedish ever since. (today in southern Sweden, then Danish) and died within days. He was sixteen. The chronicles record the cause only as illness. He left no son and no will, and with him ended the line of Norwegian kings that the sagas had traced back across five centuries, from Harald Fairhair Harald Fairhair × Traditionally remembered as the first king of a unified Norway, reigning ca. 872 to ca. 933. Inherited the small kingdom of Vestfold at ten on the death of his father Halfdan the Black; over two decades subdued the petty kingdoms of the western coast, climaxing at the sea-battle of Hafrsfjord. The byname Hárfagri ("Fairhair") appears in his own court skalds' verse within his lifetime; the famous oath not to cut his hair until he had subjected every petty king is later saga construction. His actual authority stopped short of the Arctic north and the inland mountains, but he established the durable idea of a single Norwegian crown. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the worldThe Viking Age — longships, legends, and the first "Norway" to the boy at Falsterbo.

Margaret and the union

The regency in Norway fell to Olav’s mother. Margaret was thirty-four. She had married into the Norwegian royal line as a child, become a widow at twenty-seven when Haakon died, and lost her only son at thirty-four. She had also, by that summer of 1387, outlived her father Valdemar and most of the Danish privy councillors she had grown up obeying. Across the autumn the Danish provincial assemblies recognised her in turn as ruler in her own right; the Skåne ting at Lund Lund × Cathedral city in what is now southern Sweden, just inside the Skåne region (which was Danish territory until 1658). The seat of the Scandinavian archdiocese from 1104, when Pope Paschal II detached the Scandinavian church from the German metropolitan see at Hamburg-Bremen. From 1104 to 1152 the Norwegian bishops were suffragans of the Lund archbishopric. The 1152 mission of Nicholas Breakspear created the independent Norwegian province at Nidaros, separating the Norwegian church from Lund — though Lund remained the senior Scandinavian see and the metropolitan of the Danish and Swedish churches through the medieval period. Also discussed in A Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutionsThe Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, and the first monarch to personally lead a crusade acclaimed her within weeks of Olav’s death, and the other provinces followed. She was the first woman in Danish history acclaimed ruler in her own right.

The Swedish nobility had been at war with their king, Albert of Mecklenburg Albert of Mecklenburg × King of Sweden (1338?–1412), reigned 1364–1389. A German prince from the Mecklenburg ducal house in the southern Baltic, brought in as king by the Swedish nobility in 1364 after they drove out Haakon VI Magnusson. His reign saw progressive alienation of the Swedish magnates by the favours he showed his German kinsmen and retainers. In 1388 the Swedish nobility deserted him and acclaimed Margaret of Denmark as their lawful ruler instead. Defeated and captured by Margaret's forces at the Battle of Falköping on 24 February 1389; spent the next six years in Margaret's custody and formally renounced the Swedish crown in 1395. The vacuum left by his defeat opened the way to the Kalmar Union of 1397. , for years. In 1388, deserting Albert, they met Margaret at Dalaborg in Dalsland and acknowledged her as their lawful ruler as well. They gave her a title their constitutional language had not previously needed: fullmäktig fru och rätt husbonde — plenipotentiary lady and rightful master — since no formula existed for a woman who would govern three kingdoms in her own right. The next year her army defeated Albert at Falköping and captured him; he spent the next six years in Margaret’s custody, formally renouncing the Swedish crown only in 1395. In 1397 the three kingdoms gathered at Kalmar Kalmar × Coastal town in southeastern Sweden on the Baltic, facing the island of Öland across the Kalmar Sound. In the medieval period one of Sweden's principal fortified towns — the medieval Kalmar Castle, on a small islet just south of the town, was Sweden's strongest southern bulwark against Danish-held Blekinge. Chosen as the site for the 1397 meeting that crowned Erik of Pomerania joint king of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden — ground that belonged to none of the three crowns at issue — and gave the Kalmar Union its name. The medieval castle survives in substantially altered form, most of the present buildings the sixteenth- century work of Gustav Vasa and his sons. — Sweden’s principal southeastern fortress, on the border with Danish Blekinge, chosen as ground that belonged to none of the three crowns at issue — to crown her great-nephew Erik of Pomerania Erik of Pomerania × King of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (c. 1382–1459), reigned 1396–1439 in Denmark and Norway, 1396–1434 in Sweden. Born Bogislav, a Pomeranian prince, great-nephew of Margaret I of Denmark (the son of Margaret's niece Maria of Mecklenburg). Margaret adopted him as her dynastic heir after the death of her son Olav IV in 1387 and arranged his election as king of Norway in 1389, Denmark and Sweden in 1396. Crowned joint king of all three Scandinavian kingdoms at Kalmar in 1397 — the constitutional founding of the Kalmar Union. Margaret continued to rule in his name until her death in 1412. Erik was deposed by all three kingdoms in stages between 1434 and 1442 and died in exile in Pomerania. as their joint king. Erik would remain the named monarch while Margaret continued to rule in his name until her death.

The Kalmar Union Kalmar Union × Personal union of the three Scandinavian kingdoms — Denmark, Sweden, and Norway — under a single monarch, established at Kalmar (in modern southeastern Sweden) in 1397 by Margaret of Denmark. Lasted 126 years until Gustav Vasa's revolt of 1523 took Sweden out of the union. Denmark and Norway remained joined as the Dano-Norwegian union (1523–1814), with Norway treated as a Danish province governed from Copenhagen. The Kalmar Union shifted Scandinavian political power decisively to Copenhagen and gradually placed the senior Norwegian clergy under Danish appointment — one of the long political conditions for the imposed Lutheran Reformation in Norway in 1537. Also discussed in A Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutionsThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormant of 1397 was the form the dynastic settlement took. Margaret died at Flensburg Flensburg × Port town at the head of the Flensburg Fjord, on the Baltic coast of what is today the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein, just south of the modern Danish border. In the late medieval period a Danish royal town within the duchies of Schleswig — a Danish possession through most of the medieval and early modern centuries until 1864. Margaret I of Denmark died there in 1412 while on board ship in the harbour, allegedly of plague. in 1412. By then the Norwegian crown was effectively a department of the Danish state — though the form of that long absorption, and what it meant for Norway across the next four centuries, is the story another article tells.

What the plague did

The royal line ending was contingency: a boy died at sixteen, of an illness, at Falsterbo in 1387. Kings’ sons died young in plenty of medieval kingdoms that survived perfectly intact. Sweden elected Albert when its line faltered; the Empire elected its monarchs as a matter of constitutional course. What the plague had done was not, in itself, to kill the Norwegian dynasty. What it had done was hollow out the kingdom’s capacity to respond to a succession vacuum as an independent actor.

An intact Norway in 1387 would have had a functioning Council of magnates and bishops to negotiate its own next king on its own terms. It would have had the noble wealth and clerical literacy to assert that choice against the crown’s other claimants. The plague had taken both. The Council had lost its members and the surviving members had lost their incomes. There were no spare younger sons of magnate houses coming up to fill the empty seats, and no clerical class of full Latin to staff the chancery that would have drafted Norway’s letters of negotiation. The crown was effectively up for inheritance by whichever European royal house held the strongest claim by marriage and survival — and Margaret’s house held the strongest.

Across the rest of Europe the recovery took a different shape. England and France emerged from the catastrophe with their crowns intact and their literate classes rebuilt. The Italian city-states emerged with their merchant fortunes and humanist scholars in place. Even the German lands, hit as hard as anywhere, emerged with their network of Hanseatic cities consolidated and their princely houses extending across central Europe. The institutional reserves were lighter everywhere in 1351 than they had been in 1347, but everywhere except Norway there was a layer beneath the dead that could replace them.

Norway came out of the fourteenth century with no such layer. The institutional church was running on imported clergy. The trade was running on imported merchants. The aristocracy and the Council were running on diminished numbers and diminished incomes. The throne, when the line failed, was not empty — it passed by inheritance to Margaret’s house, was governed by her as regent, and was crowned upon her great-nephew Erik.

The kingdom does not come back.

Sources & further reading

Primary sources

• Einarr Hafliðason, Lögmanns-annáll (the Lawman’s Annal), c. 1393. The Icelandic chronicle whose annal entries for 1349 give the standard dating of the plague’s arrival in Norway. In Islandske Annaler indtil 1578, ed. Gustav Storm (Christiania, 1888).
• Diplomatarium Norvegicum, 23 vols. (Christiania/Oslo, 1847–2011). The standard collection of medieval Norwegian charters and correspondence, including the surviving post-plague episcopal letters. Digitised at https://www.dokpro.uio.no/dipl_norv/diplom_field_eng.html.

Modern scholarship

• Ole Jørgen Benedictow, The Black Death and Later Plague Epidemics in the Scandinavian Countries: Perspectives and Controversies (De Gruyter Open, 2016). The definitive recent scholarly synthesis on the plague in Scandinavia, including the argument for Bergen 1349 as the single point of entry.
• Ole Jørgen Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History (Boydell Press, 2004). The standard modern history of the plague across Europe, with substantial treatment of the Norwegian case.
• Halvard Bjørkvik, Folketap og sammenbrudd 1350–1520, in Aschehougs Norgeshistorie, vol. 4 (Aschehoug, 1996). The standard Norwegian-language treatment of the demographic collapse, the ødegård registers, and the institutional consequences.
• Sverre Bagge, Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation (Princeton University Press, 2014). The Scandinavian political context for the dynastic collapse and the union.
• Vivian Etting, Queen Margrete I (1353–1412) and the Founding of the Nordic Union (Brill, 2004). The standard modern English biography of Margaret.
• Knut Helle, ed., The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Volume 1: Prehistory to 1520 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The reference treatment of the period.

Reference

• Store norske leksikon (snl.no). See in particular svartedauden, manndauden, ødegård, Magnus 7 Eriksson, Margrete 1, Kalmarunionen, and Olav 4 Håkonsson.

Visit

• Bergen, harbour. The wharf-front where the plague entered Norway in late summer 1349. The medieval Christ Church on the headland above the harbour is gone — the cathedral seat moved later and the medieval church itself was demolished after the Reformation. The present-day Bryggen UNESCO district occupies the same wharf the plague-bearing ship would have docked at.
• Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim. The medieval archbishopric whose chair stood empty for years at a stretch in the post-plague generations.
• Akershus Fortress, Oslo. The medieval royal castle, built by Haakon V in the early fourteenth century shortly before the dynastic transition that closed the Golden Age. By the late fourteenth century the fortress had passed under Danish-appointed governance, where it would remain for the next four centuries.
• Bergenhus Fortress, Bergen. The medieval royal seat at Bergen, similarly under Danish-appointed governance from the late fourteenth century onward.
• Kalmar Castle, Kalmar in southeastern Sweden. The fortified site at which the Kalmar Union was constituted in 1397 and Erik of Pomerania crowned joint king of the three Scandinavian kingdoms. The medieval castle survives in substantially altered form, with the present buildings mostly the work of Gustav Vasa and his sons in the sixteenth century.