King of Norway (1161–1184), the first Norwegian king crowned and anointed by the Church, whose reign under his father Erling Skakke ended in defeat and death at the hands of Sverre.
Magnus V Erlingsson was king of Norway from 1161 to 1184, during the long civil-war era that followed the death of Sigurd the Crusader. His claim was unusual: he was raised to the throne as a child through his mother Kristin, a daughter of Sigurd the Crusader, while real power lay with his formidable father, the magnate Erling Skakke.
His reign is landmark for the coronation of about 1163–1164, when Magnus became the first Norwegian king to be crowned and anointed by the Church, sealing an alliance with Archbishop Eystein of Nidaros that gave the Church a decisive voice in kingship. But the settlement did not bring peace: the pretender Sverre and his Birkebeiner rose against him, killed Erling Skakke, and finally destroyed Magnus at the sea-battle of Fimreite in 1184.
Magnus was born in 1156 to Erling Skakke, one of the greatest magnates of the realm, and Kristin, a daughter of King Sigurd I the Crusader. In the tangled dynastic politics of the civil-war era, his father put him forward as king in 1161 on the strength of that maternal royal descent — a departure from the rule that only the sons of kings could claim the throne.
Because Magnus was a child, the government of the kingdom was in the hands of his father, and Erling Skakke ruthlessly eliminated rival claimants to secure his son's position.
Magnus is a king seen mostly in his father's shadow, and the sources present him as an appealing but overshadowed figure — brave and well-liked, but never the true master of his own reign while Erling Skakke lived. His personality is bound up with his dependence on that powerful father and on the Church that had crowned him.
What the saga tradition allows him is a certain gallantry: a king who came into his own only in adversity, fighting on for his crown after his father's death against the relentless rise of Sverre, and dying sword in hand at Fimreite rather than yielding. He appears as the sympathetic loser of his generation of the civil wars — legitimate, consecrated, and ultimately outmatched.
The masterstroke of the reign belonged to Erling Skakke: an alliance with the powerful Archbishop Eystein of Nidaros. In about 1163–1164 Magnus was crowned and anointed king by the Church — the first Norwegian coronation of its kind — and in return granted the Church privileges and issued a law of royal succession shaped to favour legitimate, Church-approved kingship. The deal bound crown and Church together as never before.
It could not end the civil wars. From 1177 a new pretender, Sverre, claiming to be a son of King Sigurd Munn, gathered the ragged Birkebeiner faction and waged a brilliant guerrilla war. In 1179 Sverre defeated and killed Erling Skakke at Kalvskinnet, near Nidaros, robbing Magnus of the father who had made him. Magnus fought on alone for five more years.
The end came at sea. On 15 June 1184, at Fimreite in the Sognefjord, Sverre's smaller but better-led fleet annihilated Magnus's forces. Magnus V was killed in the battle, and Sverre took the throne. Magnus was buried at Christ Church in Bergen.
Magnus V is remembered as the first Norwegian king crowned by the Church, a precedent of lasting importance for the sacral, Church-sanctioned monarchy that followed, and as the royal antagonist whose fall raised the extraordinary Sverre to power. His defeat at Fimreite marked the triumph of the Birkebeiner cause and opened the Sverrir dynasty that would rule Norway into its thirteenth-century golden age.