Ireland's First Viking Age (800-875)

[Music] whilst Norwegian Vikings had been island hopping across the North Sea to raid anglo-saxon Irish Scottish Pictish and Welsh monasteries since the end of the 8th century their Danish counterparts tended to focus upon the vast and rich remnants of Charlemagne's Frankia just to their southern flank in mainland Europe these raiders included such famous sea kings as Ragnar lothbrok and Hostin along with dynastic rulers in Denmark such as King horik by the late 830's however some of the most ambitious of these piratical raiders on the continent began to look northwards to Britain and Ireland to raid whilst the Anglo Saxon and Gaelic kingdoms of Britain and Ireland weren't as prosperous or as rich as Frankia they were nowhere near as used to the annual raids which now plagued the European mainland the Anglo Saxon kingdoms were probed for weaknesses and for now at least some of the Danish Raiders in Frankia seemed to have opted to go to Ireland instead the focal point of Gaelic Christianity and an island that had just recently embarked upon a Golden Age of culture there they came into contact with their northern brethren from Norway who seemed to have already set themselves up to a certain extent upon the outlying Isles around modern-day Scotland since they had first raided there at the tail end of the eighth century in around 837 in an event which would reverberate with horror throughout the Irish contemporary chronicles of the time a fresh fleet appeared upon the Irish coast it was led by a battle-hardened sea king the first to be called such in the Irish sources which refer to his fleet as a royal one along with a vast fleet of a hundred and twenty ships Thor guest had arrived and everything in Ireland was about to change Thor guests often gala sized in the Irish sources as took easiest seems to have had dynastic links of some kind back in Scandinavia and he seems to have used this influence to bring together the various factions already in Ireland under his leadership he had probably been periodically raiding in Ireland but since as early as 820 and almost certainly had a good idea of the geography of the island both from his own man and from Irish prisoners the location of monasteries would have been important intelligence to establish as was an understanding of the political situation as such it seems entirely possible that the exact timing of the arrival was not random Ireland in the 8th 30s was divided amongst a multitude of petty kingdoms and chieftains yet they were loosely aligned to two royal centres of power one at tarah with a largely symbolic title of High King of Ireland was crowned periodically two kings of the influential Bowie Anil dynasty throughout the early to mid medieval period the other was in the south and Munster where the Great King Brian Boru would be born a century later at the time of Thor guests arrival however the armies of Munster had just marched to battle against terra plunging the midlands into chaos in other words the august could not have arrived at a better time Thor guests immediately made it clear that he was a different sort of invader Danish Vikings had been overwintering in Frank here for decades and likewise Norseman had been doing the same on the Northern Isles of Britain and now the Auguste aimed to do the same in Ireland yet he probably had no intention of stopping their likely planning on an outright conquest of the entire island the first signal of his intent was his choice to sack the most important holy site in Ireland and by extension one of the most important in Europe at the time the monastic Cathedral complex at our mark which he annihilated in 839 st. Patrick himself the patron saint of Ireland had ordained the complex at our mom as the center of Gaelic Christianity schools relics and monks alike were slashed apart and put to the torch in a final grisly act against the opposing faith of the Irish Thor ggest made a sacrifice to Odin upon st. Patrick's altar as far as he was concerned this was a holy war and the Irish responded in kind rising up in outrage against the atrocity against their faith Thor ggest remained at Armour for the winter as more and more long ships from all over Europe rode up the Irish River systems to rally to his cause like never before the waterways and coastlines of Ireland were not filled with piratical Raiders from beyond the sea by 841 Thor guests had seized a small settlement on the River Liffey just to the south of Tara on an excellent natural harbor with easy forwarding across the river there he established a strong defensible position by incorporating his long ships into the defences of the new town in an arrangement called a long forked the first of many to spring up in Ireland according to the Irish sources it was around this time the Thor guest had himself grandly declared as the king of all the foreigners in Ireland a title which would continue to be used by his kinsmen for centuries to come the settlement came to be known as Dublin and ominously for the rest of the kingdoms of Britain and Ireland its location was miss stone's throw away Dublin the first truly Viking state in Western Europe would prove to be a scourge for generations to come unlike in Frankia where successes have been fleeting and largely temporary up until this point the Danes and Norseman in Ireland were there to stay Vikings continued to flock to Dublin over the next few years as Raiders continued to fan out across the rivers and coaches of Ireland ravaging monasteries and amassing more and more wealth even native Irish men and women joined the invaders and a gritty frontier society was born [Music] by 8:45 however the August had become the most wanted man in Ireland and the kings of Munster and Tara put aside their differences for a time to defend their homeland it was the King of Tara male shock male who managed to trap the sea king in 845 and as a punishment for his sins he hath August loaded down with stones and thrown into LA coal to drown Thor guests death left a power vacuum in Dublin and within the other long forts that had begun to grow up elsewhere in Ireland a places such as Waterford Limerick cork and Wexford it had also ended the goal of an outright conquest of Ireland under the rule of a single dynasty newcomers continued to flood into the city from mainland Europe Denmark and Norway and by 850 a brutal civil war erupted between the various factions of the town the Irish sources call it the war between the black foreigners dames and the white foreigners Norwegians but there was another faction to the Irish foreigners Vikings who had been born in Ireland many of whom were the descendants of Irish women it was the Danes who got the earlier fur hand in war successfully scaling the walls of Dublin to put the town to the torch although they were soon hunted down by the vengeful Norseman and ruthlessly massacred the native Irish tried their luck to with at least six unsuccessful sieges of Dublin recorded during the Civil War all of them repelled at great cost to the Irish just to the north of Dublin male shook nail continued his war of expulsion successfully routing Viking forces on at least two occasions and leaving hundreds dead on the field yet he could not definitively drive them out and more and more continued to arrive on his shores as word spread of the great riches and land to be one on the Emerald Isle by the mid-80s two distinct rulers surfaced amongst the two factions of Scandinavians of Dublin the Danes have been brought together under the rule of a native Scandinavia who may have recently been active in Frankia possibly at his father's side his name was a mare and he may well be the same figure as Ivar the bonus the leader of the great heathen army who swept through Britain in the 8th 60s the Norse however were led by an equally famous figure at the time yet one more obscured by history today his name was Olaf the white Olaf had allegedly arrived in Ireland at around the same time as the august's death and was probably like over the son of a famed Sea King the two young men used the power of their lineages both probably claiming direct descent from Odin to bring The Dubliners under control rather than continue the pointless and brutal civil war much to the Irishman's horror they made peace even declaring themselves joint kings and equals thus began the lengthy history of the Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin [Music] reports differ as to when exactly or even where Olaf was born it seems likely that he was the son of the Norse chieftain in yealt Helgeson a warlord active in the Irish Sea in the first half of the ninth century upon his father's death however Olaf quickly rose to supremacy amongst the Dublin Norse just as Ivar ragnarson rose amongst the doublet Danes in 853 tensions between the harbour know norse and the Habano danes were finally quelled when Olaf and Ivar became joint kings the first obstacle to tackle for their newfound alliance was the Irish High King of Tara male shock male who had been steadily rising in prominence amongst his kinsmen since his defeat of Thor ggest in 845 after it became clear that the Norseman and the Danes were in Ireland to stay however and weren't about to conquer the entire island support for male shook nail began to fall away Olaf was able to strike up an uneasy alliance with aid Findley the king of the northern who you kneel in order to curtail male shoot nails power this was to be the first of many alliances with native Irishmen against their neighbors finally by 862 male shook nail passed away and his lands were split between rival claimants this disunity allowed the Dublin Vikings to finally fully dedicate themselves to raiding the shores of Britain two great expeditions were launched in 865 one dubbed the great heathen army by Christian writers at the time seems to have been coordinated alongside Scandinavians active in Frankia Frisia the Irish Sea and probably the entire Scandinavian world its destination was the anglo-saxon kingdoms rich and prosperous lands just a few days sailing away from Dublin Ivar led this invasion but no less devastating was another invasion into pic land led at the same time by Olaf little is known of Olaf's attack on pic land and it seems that before long he was back in Dublin Ivar too was back after just a few short years yet in that short time he had personally overseen the annihilation of less than three ancient and revered European dynasties East Anglia Northumbria and Murcia two of which he probably had a personal hand in the actual murdering of the ruling family yet just as quickly as he had ravaged his way into the English sources IVA was back in Ireland in 870 in a brutal culmination of both of the Sea Kings careers the fortress of Dumbarton rock capital of the birth onic kingdom of outlet situated just to the south of pitt land yet another ancient and revered kingdom was destroyed for good the siege apparently lasted for four months and at its end the Citadel was raised in large numbers of angles Britons and pits were brought back to Ireland to be sold at the slave markets thus ended a kingdom that had thrived in the north since the fall of the Western Roman Empire Olaf's son Thorsten the red was also active in pict land around this time and he may have attempted conquests alongside the rulers of the Orkneys though he was eventually betrayed and killed by his would-be allies faced with a brutal onslaught against his heart lands in the south of modern-day Scotland and seeing his northern borders already crawling with Viking invaders the king of the pics at the time Constantine the first could do little but attempt to weather the storm he died fighting one such invasion but not before he managed to defeat Olaf in battle in 872 and sent the old seeking to Valhalla IVA probably died around the same time although little is known of his eventual fate the descendants of these two kings in Dublin the OEM air would go on to dominate the Irish Sea for at least a century or more to come and they thrived in Ireland for much longer [Music]

Channel: History Time

Views: 257,228

Keywords: iMovie, vikings, viking, irelands first viking age, ivar the boneless, ragnar lothbrok, ragnar lodbrok, olaf the white, turgesius, thorgest, flann sinna, thrones of britannia, irish history, ireland history, vikings in ireland, foundation of dublin, dublin history, the vikings, the last kingdom

Id: coe0NY7tyJ0

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 03 2018