In this magisterial synthesis Sverre Bagge presents the fruits of decades of investigation into Norwegian nationhood. He marshals an impressive array of source materials to address such fundamental questions as why a fairly cohesive political structure formed along the entire western Scandinavian coast – rather than, say, a structure encompassing the fertile Oslofjord region and Jutland – and what kind of polity it was. He warns against assuming that its formation was inevitable: ‘there was no potential kingdom of Norway waiting to be united, nor any conqueror who had decided to carry out the unification’ (p. 33). By way of explanation, Bagge traces political history up to and including ‘the age of greatness’ that followed the end of the civil wars in 1240. He then devotes chapters to the material basis of power, including military organisation; religious cults before and after the kings’ adoption of Christianity; the theory and practice of justice, and notions of law; royal and ecclesiastical administration; and the interplay between kings and their closest counsellors, churchmen, nobles and commoners. The lattermost chapter, spanning some eighty-four pages, draws together the book's earlier themes in order to analyse Norwegian political culture, making due allowance for its changing texture over time. Bagge takes full account of current controversies about the meaning of such terms as state, law, literacy and community. Given the dearth of extant documentation, evaluation of the role of writing in Norwegian rulership is inevitably speculative and so, a fortiori, is assessment as to whether the king's written word counted for much among his subjects. That the scale of operations was modest even in the early fourteenth century is suggested by the size of the core group of clerks at work in Håkon v's chancery, between five and seven men. And royal revenues seem to have been limited, in comparison with those of the rulers of Denmark and Sweden. None the less, an ultra-reductionist approach may be misleading, and Bagge argues strongly that kingly decision-making and adjudication did have a major impact on most levels of society in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Norway was, he points out, one of the first countries in Europe to have a single law code respected throughout the realm, and seemingly in the period from 1240 to 1319 the king enjoyed a monopoly of legitimate violence. One reason for this was the dearth of noble families capable of matching royal power and this, in turn, reflects Norway's limited material resources, which could not sustain well-armed and well-organised regional aristocracies, ensconced in castles. The king himself relied heavily on the leidang, or general levy, primarily involving service in or contributions to naval warfare. Sea communications mattered more for governance and order in Norway than in virtually any other medieval polity. So the king's ability to muster fleets gave him a key advantage over his nobles, who could not mobilise the leidang in their own right. Bagge postulates a kind of social contract, whereby peasants offered military – mainly naval – service in return for the king's protection from external aggressors and endorsement of a fair degree of internal peace; the king did not need to raise sizeable revenues or deploy many full-time officials for this mutually beneficial arrangement to function. Bagge pre-empts charges of taking too rose-tinted a view of public-spirited law enforcement by showing its consistency with such evidence as survives for governance at grassroots in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. Quite how this virtuous circle came about after a century or so of struggles for ascendancy between leading families is not entirely clear, and Bagge stresses that it was far from inevitable. The concept of rulership as an indivisible office – rather than a ‘family firm’ in which brothers and other relatives had legitimate stakes – died hard. King Håkon Håkonsson could still seriously contemplate dividing the realm between his two sons before decreeing in 1260 that only one individual should succeed to the throne, the king's eldest son or the nearest heir if the king was sonless. Bagge focuses on the figure of King Sverre (1177–1202) as being of particular significance: his military prowess, statecraft and lengthy reign demonstrated the benefits of monarchical rule and set an appealing precedent for subsequent generations; and he exploited his victories over established noble families to forge a new elite whose interests converged with effective kingship. His grandson, Håkon Håkonsson, was equally canny and long-lived, compensating for his bastardy with a sophisticated court culture and patronage of texts depicting the king as the Lord's Anointed. Thus chance and the personal qualities of kings receive their due from Bagge, but he also underlines the importance of the material resources of the Church, especially the bishops. He offers close and convincing analysis of the evidence for the landed wealth of the five bishoprics. The competence of their administration is well-attested, and by the late Middle Ages the archbishop of Trondheim was ‘the greatest landowner in the country next to the king’ (p. 118). Already in the thirteenth century prelates were capable of maintaining armed men in substantial numbers, in contrast to what most noble households could afford. At the same time the development of parish structures under fairly tight episcopal supervision provided ample opportunities for fostering notions of the king's God-given role. Continual liaison between the prelates conducting routine visitations and the king was consistent with the fairly ‘light-touch’ governance at local level that the workings of the leidang entailed. Bagge acknowledges that this equilibrium presupposed a compliant, essentially, impecunious nobility. That said, he has made a powerful case in favour of a rather more positive evaluation of the Norwegian monarchy in ‘the age of greatness’ than has been fashionable in recent years. Most of the topics dealt with in this book have been the subject of controversies all the more furious for want of contemporary source materials. The author brings to bear on them his familiarity with legal and ecclesiastical history, mirrors for princes, sagas and the lie of the land. The upshot is a work that provides authoritative guidance to the theory and practice of Norway's political order, highlighting its distinctive features, and providing a finely calibrated affirmative to the question: ‘was there a medieval Norwegian state?.’