Brian Boru

Brian Boru was an Irish king who rose from a minor dynasty in what is now County Clare to become High King of Ireland from 1002 until his death in 1014. He broke the centuries-old hold of the Uí Néill dynasties on the high kingship, came closer than any earlier ruler to bringing the whole island under one overlord, and was killed at the Battle of Clontarf, near Dublin, in the hour of his army's victory. Later propaganda made him the saviour of Ireland from the Vikings, an image historians have since heavily revised.

Brian was born about 941, one of twelve sons of Cennétig mac Lorcáin, king of the Dál Cais, a dynasty of the lower Shannon whose power had grown quickly in the early tenth century. Ireland at the time was a patchwork of well over a hundred small kingdoms grouped under provincial kings, with a nominal high king usually drawn from the Uí Néill of the north and midlands. The province of Munster had long been ruled by the Eóganachta dynasty from Cashel. Brian's name in the annals of his own day is simply Brian mac Cennétig. The byname Bóruma, anglicised as Boru, was attached to him later; it probably comes from Béal Bóraime, a fort near Killaloe, though it was also read as "of the cattle tributes".

The Viking Age had transformed Irish politics. Norse settlers had founded trading towns at Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, Wexford and Cork, and their commerce, much of it in slaves, brought wealth that ambitious Irish kings sought to capture. Brian's father may have been killed by the Norse of Limerick, and the Shannon was a highway for raids in both directions. Later tradition says Brian was educated at the monastery of Inisfallen, but this is uncertain.

Brian's elder brother Mathgamain took Cashel around 964 and was recognised as king of Munster by 967, the first outside the Eóganachta to hold that title in centuries. Together the brothers defeated the Norse of Limerick at the Battle of Sulcoit in 967 or 968 and sacked the town. When Mathgamain was captured and murdered in 976 by rivals allied with the Limerick Norse, Brian, then in his mid-thirties, took over. He killed the Norse king Ivar of Limerick in 977 and in 978 defeated and killed the Eóganacht king Máel Muad at Belach Lechta, making himself master of Munster.

Rather than destroy the Norse towns, Brian brought them under his authority and used their wealth and ships. His fleets on the Shannon and along the coast became a distinctive part of his warfare, letting him strike deep into Connacht and Meath and later the north.

From 982 Brian pushed beyond Munster, which brought him into a long struggle with the high king Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill of the southern Uí Néill. Máel Sechnaill raided Dál Cais territory and cut down the sacred inauguration tree of Brian's dynasty; Brian answered with raids into Meath and Connacht. Neither could crush the other, and in 997, at a meeting on Lough Ree, they agreed to divide Ireland. Brian was recognised as overlord of the southern half, including Leinster and its Norse towns, and Máel Sechnaill kept the north.

The arrangement soon broke down. The Leinstermen under their new king Máel Mórda rebelled with Sigtrygg Silkbeard, the Norse-Gaelic king of Dublin, and at Glenmama in late 999 Brian routed them. He then sacked Dublin, but allowed Sigtrygg to return as a subordinate king and gave him one of his daughters in marriage. Brian also married Gormlaith, Máel Mórda's sister and Sigtrygg's mother, one of several marriages he used to bind rivals to him. In 1002, for reasons the annals do not record, Máel Sechnaill submitted, and Brian became high king.

Brian wanted to be high king in fact and not merely in name. In the following decade, already in his sixties, he led army after army north, making circuits of the island in 1005 and 1006, and combining land campaigns with naval attacks on the coasts of Ulster. The powerful king of the Cenél nEógain finally submitted around 1010, and in 1011 the last independent northern kingdom, Cenél Conaill in Donegal, gave hostages. For a brief moment every provincial ruler acknowledged him.

On his 1005 visit to Armagh, the chief church of Ireland, Brian made a large gift of gold and confirmed the church's primacy. A note added to the Book of Armagh, a manuscript of texts about Saint Patrick, records that it was written in the presence of Brian, "emperor of the Irish" (imperator Scotorum). The title is unique in Irish history and suggests he saw himself less as one king among many than as a ruler on the model of the emperors of continental Europe, the heirs of Charlemagne. His support for Armagh also tied the leading institution of Irish Christianity to his own rule. Some historians have argued that he was moving towards a more unified kingship like that of the Kingdom of England, though this goes beyond what the sources can show.

Brian's system depended on constant force. In 1012 Máel Mórda of Leinster rose again, with Sigtrygg of Dublin and, in the north, the Cenél nEógain king. Brian's blockade of Dublin in 1013 failed when his army ran short of supplies. Over the winter Sigtrygg recruited allies from the Norse world, notably Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, and a fleet from the Isle of Man under a leader the sagas call Bróðir. Brian's own support was narrower than before: Munster, south Connacht and possibly Meath, whose king Máel Sechnaill appears to have withdrawn before the battle after a quarrel.

The armies met at Clontarf, north of Dublin, on Good Friday, 23 April 1014. The fighting was long and bloody and ended with the Leinster and Norse forces broken; many drowned trying to reach their ships. But Brian's son and heir Murchad, his grandson Tairdelbach, Máel Mórda and Sigurd were all killed, and so was Brian. The famous story that the old king was cut down in his tent while praying by the fleeing Bróðir comes from the twelfth-century Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib and from Norse saga, not from contemporary annals, which record only that his body was carried with honour to Armagh and buried there. Máel Sechnaill resumed the high kingship and held it until 1022.

For centuries Clontarf was told as the battle in which the Irish under Brian freed their country from the Vikings. That version owes much to the Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib, written around a century later for Brian's great-grandson Muirchertach Ua Briain, which cast Brian as a national hero leading the Gaels against foreigners. Most historians now see Clontarf chiefly as an Irish war: a rebellion of Leinster and Dublin against Munster's overlordship, with Norsemen fighting on both sides, since Brian had men from the Norse towns of the south in his army. The Norse towns remained part of Irish life long after 1014.

What is not in doubt is Brian's political achievement. By ending the Uí Néill monopoly he turned the high kingship into a prize any strong provincial king could compete for, and in the following century his descendants, the Uí Briain or O'Briens, were among the leading contenders. His name has stayed central to the national story of Ireland: the medieval harp in Trinity College Dublin that serves as the model for the national emblem is popularly called the Brian Boru harp, though it was made long after his time.