The sea-battle of 15 June 1184 in which Sverre Sigurdsson destroyed the fleet of Magnus Erlingsson, the first Norwegian king crowned by the Church. Magnus drowned with most of his army, and the pretender who had spent seven years in the mountains became sole king.
On 15 June 1184 two Norwegian fleets met in the Sognefjord off Fimreite, a headland on the north shore near Sogndal. On one side was Magnus V Erlingsson, king since 1161 and, from about 1163, the first Norwegian ruler crowned and anointed by the Church. On the other was Sverre Sigurdsson, who claimed to be a son of Harald Gille, had taken over the Birkebeiner faction in 1177, and had spent seven years fighting a war of raids and winter marches with no fixed base.
Magnus had the larger fleet and lost. The decisive factor was not seamanship but what happened once the ships were locked together: as his outer vessels were cleared, the survivors retreated inboard, and the ships still in the fight took on more men than they could carry. Magnus drowned. Sverre, who had never held a kingdom securely, held one from that afternoon until his death in 1202.
Fimreite did not end the Norwegian civil wars. It ended the party that had fought them on the Church’s side: within a decade Sverre faced the Bagler, raised by the bishops he had alienated, and the wars ran on until 1240. What Fimreite ended was the arrangement Magnus’s father had built, in which a king held the crown by the archbishop’s gift.
Magnus was not the son of a king. His father was Erling Skakke, a magnate who had been on crusade to the Holy Land, and his claim ran through his mother Kristin, a daughter of Sigurd the Crusader. That was a claim through the female line, which Norwegian custom did not recognise, and Erling solved the problem by changing the rule rather than the claimant.
In 1161 the five-year-old Magnus was made king, and about 1163 he was crowned and anointed at Bergen by Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson. It was the first coronation of a Norwegian king, and it came with a price: a law of succession that gave the Church a decisive voice in choosing a king, and a letter in which Magnus held his kingdom of Saint Olaf and ruled as the saint’s vassal. Erling governed as earl while his son grew up.
In 1170 Erling settled the other threat to the arrangement by going to Denmark and coming to terms with Valdemar I, holding Viken of the Danish king in return for Danish recognition of Magnus’s crown. The settlement was comprehensive, and it was answered by a man it had no place for.
Sverre had been raised in the Faroe Islands as the son of a comb-maker and educated for the priesthood by his supposed uncle, Bishop Roe. He arrived in Norway in 1176 saying that his mother had told him on pilgrimage to Rome that his real father was King Harald Gille. Nothing corroborates the claim, and Sverris saga is the only source that argues it.
The Birkebeiner — the birch-legs, so called because they had wrapped their feet in bark — were the remnant of an earlier rising, beaten and leaderless. They took Sverre as king in 1177 at their second attempt to find a claimant. For the next seven years he fought a war without a capital: he crossed the mountains in winter, took Nidaros and lost it, and avoided a general engagement whenever the odds were bad.
The turn came in 1179 at Kalvskinnet outside Nidaros, where Erling Skakke was killed. Magnus was twenty-three and now fought without the man who had made him. Over the next five years Sverre took the initiative, and by 1184 Magnus had been driven to seek the decisive battle he had spent those years avoiding.
Sverris saga gives Magnus about twenty-six ships and Sverre about fourteen, and says Magnus’s vessels were the larger. Both numbers come from the winning side and should be read as the saga’s claim rather than a count, but the shape they describe — a smaller force that accepted battle against a bigger one — is the whole point of the account and is unlikely to have been invented in that direction.
Magnus had been at Bergen and came north into the Sognefjord looking for Sverre, who was at Sogndal. Sverre chose to fight in the narrow water rather than run for open sea. A Norse sea-battle was fought by lashing the ships of each side together into a floating platform and storming across the gunwales, so the fjord’s width mattered less than the number of men who could be brought to the fighting edge at one time.
That is the condition under which a smaller fleet can win. Only the ships in contact could fight, so Magnus’s numerical advantage could not be brought to bear all at once, while the extra depth behind his front rank became a liability the moment the front rank gave way.
The Birkebeiner attacked along the line and cleared the outermost ships one at a time. As each was taken, its surviving crew fell back onto the next vessel still holding out. Sverris saga describes the consequence plainly: the ships in the middle of Magnus’s line took aboard the men of the ships already lost, settled lower and lower in the water, and finally went down with everyone on them.
This is why the casualty figures for Fimreite are so lopsided and why almost all of them are drownings rather than wounds. Men in mail who went into the fjord did not come out of it. The saga says the water was thick with the dead, and whatever allowance is made for a victor’s rhetoric, the mechanism it describes is a real hazard of the lashed-ship formation rather than a literary flourish.
Magnus V Erlingsson died in the battle, aged twenty-eight. His body was recovered and taken to Bergen, where it was buried in Christ Church; a local cult grew up around him afterwards, encouraged by churchmen who had backed his father’s settlement and had no reason to accept Sverre. Orm the King’s Brother, one of the leading men of Magnus’s party, was among the dead.
Sverre was now sole king, and he spent the rest of his reign arguing that he had always been the lawful one. The Speech Against the Bishops, written in his circle about 1200, attacked clerical claims to control the crown directly, and it is one of the sharpest statements of royal authority produced anywhere in twelfth-century Europe.
The Church did not accept the verdict of the fjord. Archbishop Eirik Ivarsson went into exile at Lund, Sverre was excommunicated, and in 1196 Bishop Nikolas Arnesson raised the Bagler faction in Viken with clerical backing. Sverre died at Bergen on 9 March 1202 with that war unfinished, and it was his son Håkon III Sverresson who made peace with the Church by restoring the bishops.
The dynasty held. Sverre’s grandson Haakon IV Haakonsson was recognised in 1217 and ruled until 1263, and the settlement of 1240 finally closed the civil wars. The Norwegian monarchy that sent a fleet to the Hebrides in 1263 and gave the realm a single national law-code in 1274 was built on the house Fimreite put in power.