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Haakon V was the last strong king of old Norway, and a restless, modernising one — he leaned on written law and appointed officials rather than the great lords, and curbed an aristocracy that had grown overmighty in his youth. His most consequential act was to shift the kingdom's centre of gravity: he made Oslo, a small town on the Swedish frontier, his capital, turning the realm's face east toward the rivals and the trade that would shape its next centuries.
The fortress was the point of it. Determined that his eastern flank would never again lie open to a raider, he raised Akershus on the headland above Oslo's harbour — the stronghold whose own story the rock tells in full. His line he tried to secure by marriage: his daughter Ingeborg wed the Swedish duke Erik Magnusson, and their son Magnus would inherit the Norwegian and the Swedish crowns at once.
But the male line ended with Haakon. He died in 1319, the last man of the ancient royal house — and centuries on, the rock he had raised took him back: his bones lie today in the Royal Mausoleum cut into Akershus, the founder folded into his own foundation.