Norway's chief medieval town: founded, by tradition, by Olaf III of Norway around 1070, the thirteenth-century royal capital where Haakon IV Haakonsson built his great stone hall, and the stockfish port where the Hanseatic League kept its kontor at Bryggen.
Bergen lies at the head of Vågen, a narrow harbour on Norway's west coast sheltered by the Nordnes peninsula and ringed by mountains. Its Old Norse name, Bjørgvin, means the meadow among the hills. From the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth it was the kingdom's political centre, where kings held court on the headland of Holmen and were crowned, married and buried in Christ Church; for far longer it was Norway's greatest port.
Its wealth came from dried cod. Fishermen from the northern coast sailed south each summer with stockfish, which Bergen's merchants, and later the Germans of the Hanseatic kontor at Bryggen, shipped to Lübeck, England and Flanders, bringing back grain that the Norwegian coast could not grow. Estimates of its population around 1300 range from about 2,500 to 10,000, and every one of them makes it the largest town in the kingdom.
According to Snorri Sturluson's saga of the king, Olaf III of Norway, Olaf Kyrre, made Bjørgvin a market town around 1070, in the long peace that followed his father Harald Hardrada's death at Stamford Bridge. Excavations under Bryggen suggest the story is too neat. The archaeologist Gitte Hansen has argued that a trading place already existed in the 1020s or 1030s, perhaps under Olaf II Haraldsson or Cnut the Great, but that it did not prosper until the king's grant. The oldest harbour structures found under Bryggen date from about 1100, when the shoreline lay 100 to 150 metres inland of the present quay.
Olaf is also credited with beginning Christ Church on Holmen. In 1170 the bishopric of the west coast moved from the island monastery of Selja to Bergen, and the relics of Saint Sunniva, by legend an Irish princess who died in a cave on Selja, were placed on Christ Church's high altar. When fire threatened the town in 1170–1171 and again in 1198, the shrine was carried out to face the flames, and the halting of the fire was hailed as her miracle.
Olaf's grandson Øystein I of Norway moved the royal residence from the farm of Alrekstad down to Holmen, the headland guarding the harbour mouth, and built a hall there that Snorri called the most splendid timber building in Norway, with a wooden Apostles' Church beside it. Around 1110 he founded the Benedictine abbey of Munkeliv, dedicated to Saint Michael, on the heights of Nordnes across the harbour.
The civil wars made Bergen a prize. On 7 January 1135 Harald Gille took the town from his co-king Magnus Sigurdsson, whose escape by sea was blocked because the harbour had been closed with an iron chain; Harald had Magnus blinded and mutilated, and was himself killed in his sleep the following year, in Bergen according to the sagas, by the pretender Sigurd Slembe. In 1163 or 1164 the boy king Magnus V Erlingsson was crowned in Bergen by Archbishop Øystein Erlendsson, the first coronation in Scandinavia, a ceremony meant to give the church's sanction to a king whose claim came only through his mother.
Sverre Sigurdsson, leader of the Birkebeiner, arrived in 1180 and wintered in a hostile town. In 1181 a peasant army under Jon Kutiza landed at Nordnes and Holmen and was routed at dawn, and in the mid-1180s Sverre built the fort of Sverresborg on the hill above Holmen. In a speech his saga sets in Bergen he welcomed the English merchants who brought wheat and cloth and cursed the Germans whose wine filled the town with drunken fighting. He was crowned in Christ Church on 29 June 1194, died in Bergen in 1202 and was buried there; his son Håkon III Sverresson died in the town on 1 January 1204 amid rumours of poison. The rival Bagler party burned much of Bergen in 1198.
Under Haakon IV Haakonsson, whose right to the throne a great meeting at Bergen upheld in 1223, the town became the first place in Norway with a settled central administration. Haakon enclosed Holmen with a stone wall in the 1240s. The papal legate William of Sabina consecrated a new stone Apostles' Church on 2 July 1247 and crowned Haakon and his queen on 29 July. A year later, on the night of 4 July 1248, a fire destroyed eleven churches while an English Benedictine chronicler from St Albans, in Norway on church business and bearing a message from Louis IX of France, watched it.
Haakon's great stone hall on Holmen, built in a Gothic style so close to English work that it may have been designed by masons connected with Henry III of England, is first recorded at the wedding of his son Magnus to Ingeborg of Denmark on 11 September 1261, three days before their coronation. It is the largest secular medieval building in Norway. The court at Bergen also brought French romance into Norse, beginning with a translation of the Tristan story finished for Haakon in 1226. Haakon died at Kirkwall in Orkney in December 1263 after his Scottish expedition, and his body was brought home to Christ Church.
His son Magnus VI Lawmender gave the town its law. The town law of 1276, drawn up beside his national code, divided Bergen into four quarters, required the houses along Bryggen to be kept to a common height and made foreigners lodging in the town share its watch and levies. Magnus built the stone keep on Holmen in the 1270s, the core of the later Rosenkrantz Tower, and in 1275 began a third Apostles' Church, modelled on the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, to house a thorn from the Crown of Thorns given him by Philip III of France. He died in Bergen on 9 May 1280.
His son Eric II of Norway was crowned in Christ Church in 1280 and his Scottish queen Margaret in 1281, and both were buried there, as was their daughter Margaret, Maid of Norway, heir to the Scottish throne, who died in Orkney in 1290. After Eric's death in Bergen in 1299 his brother Haakon V Magnusson governed more and more from Oslo, and in 1314 the royal chancery and seal moved from the Apostles' Church to St Mary's in Oslo.
Medieval Bergen was a long strip on the east side of Vågen. At its north end Holmen held the royal hall, Christ Church, the Apostles' Church, the bishop's residence and a Dominican friary, walled from the 1240s, with Sverresborg on the height above. From Holmen the merchant yards of Bryggen ran south along the shore to Vågsbunnen at the head of the harbour, backed by Øvregaten, the upper street, which in the twelfth century was probably the town's only street. By about 1300 continuous building reached the church of Saint Olaf in Vågsbunnen, taken over by the Franciscans in Haakon IV's reign and today Bergen Cathedral.
Each yard was a narrow plot running up from its own wharf to the street, with rows of timber buildings on either side of a passage, a pattern also found in Trondheim, Tønsberg and Kirkwall. Filling in the harbour pushed the wharves steadily outward. Twelve churches and three monasteries were built in the town before 1200; the Romanesque St Mary's Church, begun in the 1130s or 1140s in soapstone, probably by masons from Scania, is the only one of them still standing. Timber made fire the town's constant enemy: eleven churches burned in 1248, fourteen in 1413, and Bryggen itself in 1476.
About 670 runic inscriptions on wood and bone, found after the Bryggen fire of 1955, show how townspeople wrote to one another: owners' tags reading 'Eysteinn owns me', love notes, trade orders, a verse quoting Virgil, and a secret wax-tablet letter from the civil wars urging a man to change sides and to send word in runes to a nun in the convent at Bergen.
German merchants, above all from Lübeck, were in Bergen in numbers by the thirteenth century. Haakon IV made a peace and trade agreement with Lübeck in 1250, and around 1259 some Germans began to stay through the winter as tenants of Norwegian yard-owners instead of trading only between the spring and autumn feasts of the Holy Cross, 3 May and 14 September. Magnus VI granted them exemptions at Tønsberg in 1278. The crown also protected Bergen's own position: in 1294 Germans were forbidden to sail north of Bergen to trade, and in 1310 the ban was extended to all foreigners, so that the northern fish had to pass through the town.
Around 1350 to 1360 the Germans organised a kontor, one of the Hanseatic League's four great foreign trading posts with those at London, Bruges and Novgorod. It was a closed community of unmarried men sent out from the Hanseatic towns, with its own aldermen, court and training: boys began as house servants, moved on to handling the northern boats and could become journeymen after an examination in trade, goods and arithmetic. Members were forbidden to marry or mix with the townspeople, rules widely broken. The Germans gradually bought the buildings of Bryggen while the land stayed with the church and other owners, and from 1408 they took over St Mary's as their own church. Of perhaps 7,000 inhabitants in the fifteenth century, about a thousand were German.