Puberty

When his brother died without any male heir in 1299, Haakon V took the throne & made Oslo, his permanent residence and seat of his personal duchy, the capital city of the Norwegian Kingdom. An attack on Oslo a few years earlier by a Norwegian earl who was looking for some easy spoils of war, had made the city’s need for a better defense an urgent matter, so the new King put forward the construction of what was to become the Akershus Castle.

When King Haakon V died in 1319 he was buried in St. Mary’s Church which had been turned into a large brick Cathedral a few years earlier. After his death the city entered a rather bleak period, marked by the devastating outburst of Black Death in 1348 which wiped out more than three quarters of the population that had reached about 3000 people around 1300. It was also hit by a great fire in 1352 which among others destroyed the Cathedral of St. Hallvard.

The decimation of the city’s population prompted the traders of the powerful Hanseatic League, who had already been well established in Bergen at the time, to move in and add Oslo to their extensive network of trading stations. The merchants from the Hanseatic city of Rostock, North Germany would very quickly come to control the city’s trade for the next 200 years.