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Brian Boru

c. 941–1014

 

One of the most important figures in ancient Irish history, Brian Boru was always thought of in the popular imagination as having broken the power of the Viking invaders, or Danes, as they were once called in Ireland.  But the actual situation was more complicated.

      When he was born in north Munster about 941, the Vikings were well established in strongholds around the Irish coast, and the Irish annalists made much of their raids into the Irish interior.  Incidentally, at this time the Irish themselves had colonies in Scotland and Wales, and had made past excursions into Europe itself.  The Vikings are now seen more in the light of colonists and settlers rather than raiders, and their role in Irish culture a more positive one.

      The problem that faced Ireland was its own political structure.  Though the island of Ireland shared a common culture, it was divided into many small petty kingdoms.  To achieve unity among them was a hard task.  (The analogy is with the American colonies, which would have collapsed if they had not managed to unite in 1786.)

      In 976 Brian succeeded his brother as king of Dál Cais, in Thomond, an area now covered by County Clare in the southwest of Ireland.  At once he laid claim to the kingship of the province of Munster.  He became king of Munster in 978, and then began to grapple with the high king of Ireland, based at Tara.  Brian himself raided with his armies far into the northern half of the island.  Máel Sechnaill, the high king of Ireland, was eventually forced to concede power to Brian, and in 997 at a meeting at Clonfert they partitioned the country between them.

      However, in 999 the Leinstermen revolted and allied themselves with the Norse in Dublin.  Brian counterattacked, defeated them, and seized and plundered Dublin.  But this was not the end of the Norse; rather, it was the beginning of an alliance with them.  Brian married Gormlaith, the mother of King Sitric of Dublin, and married his own daughter to the king - a double marriage, cementing the alliance.

      Brian now felt secure enough to make claim to the northern part of the island.  Máel Sechnaill failed to obtain the support of the northern O'Neills, and yielded to Brian, who became high king of Ireland at the age of sixty-one.  In 1005, with a great army, he marched north to Armagh, the city of St Patrick in which the church in Ireland was centred, where he made a gift of gold and confirmed the city's bishop as the primate of Ireland.  Into a page of the Book of Armagh his secretary wrote an inscription in Latin referring to Brain as imperator scotorum, 'the Emperor of the Irish'.  The next year he made a circuit of the north, subduing the O'Neills by taking hostages.  This was how he got his traditional Irish name - Brian Boru means 'Brian of the Tributes'.

      In 1012 the O'Neills and the Leinstermen rebelled against his authority.  Brain, now an old man of seventy-two, laid siege to Dublin in 1013 but failed to take the city and returned home for Christmas to his own stronghold of Kincora on the shores of Lough Ree on the Shannon above Killaloe.

      Before spring, the Norse had summoned help from abroad and allies came from the Orkneys and Man.  The armies met on the field of Clontarf, a little to the north of Dublin, on Good Friday, 23rd April 1014.  The Norse and the Leinstermen were defeated, though Brian himself was slain by a fleeing Norse warrior while praying in his tent.  Brian's son and grandson also died in the battle.

      This battle, far from being an attempt to drive out the Norse, was part of an internal Irish struggle.  From recent investigations, the Vikings have now emerged in modern eyes as the bearers into Ireland of new cultural norms, such as coinage, towns, ships and international trade.  They are no longer seen as some earlier version of the English, ravishing the ideal Celtic nation of Ireland.

      The death of Brian marked the last chance Ireland had to create a centralized state under a principal king, as was emerging all over Europe.  Brian was called the Emperor of the Irish in imitation of the achievements of Charlemagne (who had died in 814), the protagonist of European unity and Christian culture.  Though he had been styled Emperor of the Irish, his empire was short-lived.  Again the Irish petty kings fell to local quarrels, and the Irish people failed to create the unitary state which alone would have preserved the integrity of the island from invasion and usurpation.

      As it was, despite the achievements of Brian Boru, the country and its ill-led people lay open for a more determined invasion by the Normans, which followed in due course.  Brian ultimately failed in what he had hoped for, but it was a noble failure of the kind that the Irish admire, and which her poets and annalists have lamented ever since.