The Norse town of Orkney, seat of St Magnus Cathedral, where Haakon IV of Norway died in December 1263 after the campaign that ended Norwegian power in the Hebrides.
Kirkwall stands at the head of a sheltered bay on the Orkney Mainland, and its name is Old Norse: Kirkjuvágr, church bay. The town grew as the administrative centre of the Norwegian earldom of Orkney, which also held Shetland and, for long periods, Caithness on the Scottish mainland.
It first appears in the Orkneyinga saga under the year 1046 as the residence of Earl Rögnvald Brusason, who was killed there by his uncle Thorfinn the Mighty. For four centuries after that it was a Norse town under a Norwegian crown, and Scots law and Scots speech arrived only at the very end of the Middle Ages.
Earl Magnus Erlendsson, who ruled jointly and uneasily with his cousin Haakon Paulsson, was killed on the island of Egilsay about 1116 or 1117 in a quarrel dressed as a peace conference. He was quickly venerated as a martyr, and miracles were reported at his grave.
His nephew Earl Rögnvald Kali Kolsson founded a cathedral in his honour at Kirkwall in 1137, built in banded red and yellow sandstone by masons who had worked at Durham. The relics of both Magnus and Rögnvald are in its piers, discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the building gave the town its name and its rank.
In July 1263 Haakon IV of Norway sailed west with a leidang fleet of at least a hundred and twenty ships to defend Norwegian lordship over the Hebrides against the pressure of Alexander III of Scotland. The fleet reached Shetland and Orkney in August and moved down through the Isles to the Firth of Clyde.
The confused fighting at the Battle of Largs on 2 October 1263 settled nothing militarily, but autumn gales and the loss of ships did. Haakon withdrew to Orkney to winter and resume the campaign in the spring, took up residence in the Bishop's Palace at Kirkwall, fell ill there and died in the early hours of 16 December 1263. He was buried in St Magnus Cathedral for the winter and taken home in the spring to Bergen.
Haakon's son Magnus VI Lawmender inherited a position that could not be held and settled it by treaty. At Perth in 1266 Norway ceded the Hebrides and the Isle of Man to Scotland for a lump sum and an annual payment, keeping Orkney and Shetland.
The northern islands stayed Norwegian for another two centuries. They passed to Scotland in 1468 and 1469, pledged by Christian I of Denmark and Norway against the unpaid dowry of his daughter Margaret on her marriage to James III. The pledge was never redeemed, and the islands were annexed to the Scottish crown in 1472.
Two ruined palaces stand beside the cathedral. The Bishop's Palace, where Haakon died, is the older: a twelfth-century hall range, much rebuilt in the sixteenth century, with a round tower added by Bishop Robert Reid.
Beside it is the Earl's Palace, built about 1607 for Patrick Stewart, Earl of Orkney, and often called the finest Renaissance domestic building in Scotland. The pairing is a fair summary of the town's history: a Norse and medieval ecclesiastical centre overlaid by the Scottish earldom that replaced the Norwegian one.