1030-1319 CE
The Norwegians of the high Middle Ages were the descendants of Viking sea kings who had once raided from Iceland to the Black Sea, slowly remade into a Christian kingdom of fishermen, fjord farmers, and long-distance sailors who still ruled some of the harshest coastline in Europe.
In 1030, on a muddy field at Stiklestad north of Trondheim, King Olaf Haraldsson was killed in battle by a coalition of Norwegian chieftains who wanted nothing to do with his rough methods of converting their country to Christianity. Within a year his enemies were quarrelling, his memory was being polished into legend, and miracles were being reported at his grave. By 1031 his bones had been moved into the church at Nidaros and he was being called a saint. The man who had failed to conquer his own kingdom in life had succeeded in death, and the Norwegians, who had spent the previous two centuries terrifying Christian Europe as Vikings, now had a saint of their own and a reason to think of themselves as a single Christian people. The kingdom that grew out of that strange reversal would last, in one form or another, until the union with Sweden in 1319 ended the old royal line.
Norway was the most demanding country in Latin Christendom. A long, narrow strip of land pressed between the mountains and the sea, cut by hundreds of fjords that pushed deep inland, with summers too short for serious grain farming over most of its territory and winters that locked the inland valleys in snow for half the year. The people lived where they could: on small farms tucked into the heads of fjords, on the better soil around the Trondheim and Oslo districts, on the coast where the fishing was reliable. Cattle and sheep mattered more than plowed fields. Stockfish, cod gutted and dried in the cold, dry winds of the Lofoten islands until it was hard as wood and would keep for years, became the kingdom's great export and the staple food of Lent across half of Europe. Bergen, on the western coast, grew through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries into the largest town in the kingdom and the great staple market for the stockfish trade. Trondheim, with the shrine of Saint Olaf at its heart, was the spiritual capital and the seat of the archbishopric after 1152. Oslo, on the eastern shore, was a smaller and more outward-looking town that traded with the Baltic and would slowly grow in importance toward the end of the period.
The Norwegians remained a sea people long after they stopped being Vikings. The leidang, the old coastal levy that obliged each district to provide ships, crews, and provisions for the king's fleet, survived throughout the period and gave Norwegian kings a real ability to project force along the Atlantic seaboard. On land they fought as infantry, with spear, axe, and round shield, and the heavy cavalry of continental Europe never took root in country where there was nowhere to charge. The kingdom's last great age of expansion came in the thirteenth century under Hakon IV, who reigned from 1217 to 1263 and brought Iceland and Greenland formally under the Norwegian crown, fought a long war for control of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man against the rising kingdom of Scotland, and died on Orkney on his way home from a campaign that ended in the indecisive battle of Largs. His son Magnus the Lawmender accepted the loss of the Hebrides in 1266 and turned his energy to the inside of the kingdom, issuing in 1274 a single national lawbook that replaced the older provincial laws of the Norwegian regions and gave him the nickname by which history would remember him. After Magnus the kingdom's reach contracted. By 1319, when the male line of the old royal house died out and the crown passed to a child king who also ruled Sweden, Norway was no longer expanding.
Christianity had been brought to Norway by force as much as by persuasion. Olaf Tryggvason in the 990s and Olaf Haraldsson in the 1020s had both used the sword to baptize reluctant chieftains, and both had been killed for their trouble. After Stiklestad the conversion proceeded more quietly and more thoroughly, and within two generations the country was building churches in its own distinctive style. The Norwegian stave churches, raised on a frame of upright wooden posts with steep tarred roofs and dragon heads at the gables, were unlike anything else in Latin Europe, and a few of them still stand. The shrine of Saint Olaf at Nidaros became the great northern pilgrimage site of medieval Christendom, drawing pilgrims from as far away as Iceland and Russia. Bishops and priests learned to write in Old Norse as well as Latin, and the same century that saw the building of the first cathedrals also saw the writing of the great Icelandic sagas, many of them by men whose grandfathers had been pagans. In Norway proper the literary tradition was thinner but real: the Konungs skuggsja, the King's Mirror, written around 1250 for the instruction of a royal prince, is a work of plain practical wisdom that has no real equivalent in the rest of medieval Europe.
The Norwegians lived at the edge of the known world and made the edge their territory. From the fjords of the western coast their ships had carried settlers to the Faroes, to Iceland, to Greenland, and briefly to the shores of North America, and the long sea routes of the North Atlantic remained Norwegian routes throughout this period. Closer to home they ruled the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland, the Hebrides until 1266, and the Isle of Man, and they dealt as equals with the kings of Scotland, England, and Denmark. The relationship that would shape their later history, however, was the one that grew up with the German merchants of the Hanseatic League. By the late thirteenth century the Hansa had built a permanent trading station at Bryggen in Bergen and was buying the entire Norwegian stockfish harvest in exchange for the grain that the country could not grow for itself. The arrangement made both sides rich and made Norway dependent. By 1319, when the old royal line ended and the crown went to a Swedish child, the kingdom was still recognizably itself, with its saint, its stave churches, its lawbook, and its long memory of the sea, but the great age of independent Norwegian power was already passing into the sagas.
Norwegians in this Age are built around the longship, the foreign shore, and the slow accumulation of know-how. Their signature ship, the Drakkar, is a fast and unusually aggressive vessel that hits hard against other ships and against fortifications, the closest thing in the game to the old Viking raiding craft. Experience cubes can stand in for the usual cost of recruiting in a Dockyard area, so a learned shipbuilding tradition replaces a treasury of silver. Winning a battle pays you back one resource for every engaged vessel of yours, the old logic of plunder by hull. And winning a battle inside a foreign religious community pays an extra 2 coins for each of your experience cubes, rewarding the long Norwegian habit of striking shrines that belonged to someone else.
5 | 
1 | 
1 or +4 vs 
1 
8 
| Dockyards
for each of your engaged
, gain 2 for each of your experience cubes
Yes. The Drakkar is a unique melee-attack vessel. It can attack any enemy target on any hex adjacent to it, including other vessels on adjacent sea or ocean hexes, and including land targets on adjacent coastal hexes.
Yes. "Foreign" here means controlled by another player, not of a different religion. A religious community of your own faith but under another player's control still counts as foreign for this ability.
Both. Your engaged army and the target of the battle must each be inside a foreign religious community. They do not have to be in the same one. As long as both your force and the target sit inside a religious community that you do not control, the reward triggers.
No. Ocean hexes are not part of any religious community, so a battle fought on the open ocean cannot satisfy the condition. The reward only applies when both your force and the target are inside foreign religious communities.