Kingdom of Dublin

A stone set on the strand

formationDrafted from Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881)

Scandinavian raiders had been striking the Irish coast for decades before any of them chose to stay. Around 852, Olaf the White established a fortified base where the river Liffey met the sea - a site with none of the natural advantages of Cork, Waterford or Limerick, all of which the Norse also held and all of which offered better harbours, but one that sat centrally within the whole Scandinavian world of the northern seas.

Why an unpromising river won out

At the time Dublin was founded, Scandinavian settlers already held Caithness and Sutherland on the Scottish mainland, the northern and western Scottish islands, the Isle of Man, and all of England north of the Humber. For a seafaring people whose interests spanned that whole arc of coastline, a base on Ireland's own east coast, facing directly toward Britain, mattered more than a superior harbour further south or west. Dublin's own position, unremarkable on a map of Ireland alone, made obvious sense on a map of the wider Norse world.

A capital before it was a city

What began as a fortified landing point grew, over the following decades, into the base from which Scandinavian power in Ireland was organized - not the only Norse settlement on the island, but the one that would outlast every other, surviving expulsions, internal rivalries and the rise and fall of individual kings for more than three centuries after its founding.

Driven out and back again

formationDrafted from trans.), Rolls Series (1867)

Norse rule at Dublin was not continuous. In 902 a coalition of Irish kings succeeded where individual raids and skirmishes had failed for decades, driving the ruling dynasty and its followers out of the town entirely. For a decade and a half the Liffey's Norse settlement simply ceased to exist as an independent power - its former rulers scattered to Britain and the wider Scandinavian world, some of them turning up in the historical record fighting in Scotland or northern England instead.

Sitric's return

The reversal came in 917, when Sitric, a grandson of Ivar, returned with a fleet and reestablished Norse rule at Dublin. He was not returning to an empty inheritance so much as reclaiming one: the same family that ruled Dublin also had a claim, through the wider Uí Ímair kindred, to power across the Irish Sea. Sitric Cáech himself would go on to become king of York as well within a few years of retaking Dublin, binding the fortunes of the two Norse settlements together for a generation - a connection that meant a setback for one dynasty in one kingdom could ripple into the other.

trans.), Rolls Series (1867) · Derby Museums Trust, Alastair Willis · CC BY 2.0

A kingdom that had already learned it could be lost

The expulsion and return mattered beyond the individual reigns it touched. Dublin's Norse rulers had already seen their kingdom collapse once and be rebuilt from outside; the town's later resilience through further crises - a crushing defeat at Clontarf less than a century later among them - owed something to a dynasty that had already proven a lost Dublin was not necessarily a permanently lost one.

Coins struck by English hands

peakDrafted from Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881)

The kings who ruled Dublin across the tenth and early eleventh centuries were, for long stretches, the same men who ruled York, or close kin to them - a single dynasty whose members moved between the Irish Sea and Northumbria as circumstances demanded, sometimes holding both thrones and sometimes losing one while keeping the other. Later chroniclers styled them, without much exaggeration, "the high kings of the Northmen of Ireland and England."

A currency that reveals a working relationship

The physical evidence of that connection survives in an unlikely place: the coins themselves. Early Dublin's own currency, though struck in the names of its own kings - Ivar, Sitric, Reginald, Olaf - was not minted by native craftsmen but by Anglo-Saxon moneyers, working evidently under some form of arrangement between Dublin's rulers and their counterparts, or subjects, across the water. A kingdom capable of directing English mint-workers to strike coin bearing a Norse king's own name was not merely raiding its neighbours; it was embedded in their economy closely enough to command their skilled labour.

What that reach actually meant

By the reign of Sitric Silkenbeard, who held Dublin through the last years of the tenth century and the first decades of the eleventh, the kingdom had become something more settled than the raiding base it had started as - a town wealthy and organized enough to strike its own coinage, hold shifting alliances with Irish provincial kings, and draw on Scandinavian military support from across the Irish Sea when war came looking for it, as it would in 1014.

Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881) · PHGCOM · Public domain

A king who stayed behind the walls

contractionDrafted from trans.), Rolls Series (1867)

By 1014 Sitric Silkenbeard's Dublin had drawn Leinster and a scattering of foreign Norse fighters, among them the Manx chieftain Brodir, into alliance against Brian Boru, the Munster king who had spent decades building a following strong enough to call himself high king of Ireland. The armies met at Clontarf, on the plain outside Dublin's own walls, on Good Friday.

A battle Sitric watched rather than fought

Sitric himself did not take the field; he stayed within Dublin's fortifications while his allies fought outside them. The battle broke decisively against his own side - Brodir's men were driven back, and in the retreat Brodir himself found Brian's tent, guarded only by a handful of attendants. According to the near-contemporary account, Brian rose from prayer, sword in hand, when he saw the attackers approaching; the two men wounded each other fatally in the exchange that followed, Brian's own dying blow taking off Brodir's legs before the Norseman's axe split his skull.

trans.), Rolls Series (1867) · Hugh Frazer · Public domain

What Dublin actually lost

Brian's death did not save the battle for Sitric's side - the wider engagement remained a defeat for the Leinster-Norse alliance, whatever symbolic victory his own enemy's death represented. Sitric kept his throne; watching from inside the walls rather than fighting meant he had a kingdom left to keep. But Dublin's capacity to shape events across the whole island, the kind of ambition that had drawn it into alliance with Leinster in the first place, did not survive Clontarf intact. The kingdom that endured afterward was a wealthy trading town still, but no longer one capable of contesting Ireland's own high kingship on its own account.

A throne any outsider could claim

contractionDrafted from Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881)

Sitric Silkenbeard kept his throne after Clontarf, and the reign that followed showed how far Dublin had already become a Christian trading town rather than a war-band's stronghold. In 1028, mindful of his own father's pilgrimage to Iona, and urged on by the clergy, Sitric travelled to Rome - the practice of Christian kings by then, and a striking one for a Norse ruler of Dublin. He returned to found Christ Church, endowing it around 1038 with land for a cathedral to the Holy Trinity. The city that had shaken the island's kings a generation earlier now measured its standing by pilgrimages and church foundations instead.

Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881) · Alicia Fagerving · CC BY-SA 3.0

A crown that changed hands without a battle

What followed Sitric's reign showed just as clearly how much authority Dublin itself had lost. He "went beyond the seas" and was succeeded in 1036 by Echmarcach mac Ragnaill, who in turn left the kingdom in 1052, probably to aid the exiled Earl Godwin in England. Into that vacancy stepped not another Norse claimant but Diarmait mac Maíl na mBó, king of Leinster, who took the kingship of Dublin by right of his own descent from Brian Boru's line through marriage - and who is recorded in the annals afterward not merely as an ally of Dublin's Ostmen but as "King of Leinster, of the Danish Isles, and of Dublin" outright. The town's own throne had become an office an ambitious Irish king could simply add to his titles, its Scandinavian ruling family reduced to one contender among several rather than the settlement's natural lords.

A tributary prize for the rest of the century

Diarmait's son Murchadh extended the family's reach as far as the Isle of Man, exacting tribute there in 1060 and defeating Echmarcach's own son; when Diarmait himself fell in battle in 1072 and both his sons had already died, the kingship of Dublin passed again, this time to Godfrey, son of Ragnall, of the Manx branch of the old dynasty - and after his death in 1075, to Muirchertach, son of the Munster king Toirdelbach Ua Briain, an outsider from a different Irish kingdom entirely. By the century's end Dublin was less a kingdom in its own right than a wealthy port town whose kingship was decided by whichever Irish over-king - Leinster's Uí Chennselaig or Munster's Uí Briain - could hold it, a pattern of outside domination that continued unbroken until an exiled king of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada, brought a foreign army of his own to Ireland a century later.

A berserker hired back too late

endDrafted from Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881)

By 1170 Dublin's own king, Hasculf, ruled a town whose fate was being decided less by its own strength than by events elsewhere in Ireland - an exiled Leinster king's invitation to Anglo-Norman adventurers had already put a foreign army in the country, and that army's leader, Richard de Clare, called Strongbow, had his own eye on the city. While Dublin's leaders were still negotiating surrender terms with the besieging force outside its walls, Strongbow's men stormed the town directly, taking it before any agreement was actually concluded.

Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881) · Sheila1988 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Flight, and a hired champion who came too late

Hasculf escaped by ship to the Orkney Islands rather than accept the new arrangement, and many of the town's remaining Norse inhabitants were pushed across the Liffey into a separate quarter while their conquerors settled the original city. Hasculf did not give up the throne quietly. He returned the following year with a hired Norwegian champion - a "berserker" in the old sense, a warrior whose fury in battle was itself supposed to be worth an army - landing at the same stretch of shore his own dynasty had first claimed for Dublin three centuries before. The attempt to retake the city failed.

What Strongbow's capture actually changed

Henry II landed at Waterford the same year Hasculf made his failed attempt, taking the submission of Strongbow and the other Norman adventurers and keeping Dublin itself under direct royal control rather than granting it out as another baron's lordship. The kingdom Olaf the White had founded on the same shore in 852 - expelled once, rebuilt once, broken at Clontarf and rebuilt again after that - did not survive a third loss. Dublin remained a city, and remained central to whoever ruled Ireland from outside it, but it never again answered to a king of its own.

The capital nobody had chosen before

afterlifeDrafted from Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881)

No Irish record calls the place where Dublin stands a city, or even a place of any real importance, before the ninth century. The annals know a harbour, the Dubhlinn, and a river crossing, the Ath Cliath, but no dun or rath at either site was ever the seat of an Irish king or the centre of an Irish territory. The kings of Ireland sat at Tara; the kings of Leinster, the province Dublin sits in, ruled from Naas and from Ferns. Whatever Dublin became, it did not become it as an Irish capital first.

What Henry found when he took it

Henry II made Dublin the seat of his own Irish lordship not because he judged it the natural capital of the island he claimed, and not because its harbour beat Wexford's or Waterford's - the ports through which England's own traffic with Ireland actually ran at the time. He took it because it was the principal city of the Ostmen he had just conquered, the largest and richest prize among the Norse and Hiberno-Norse territories Strongbow's war had put within his reach. He left Strongbow in possession of the Leinster lands his marriage had brought him, but claimed by right of conquest the Ostmen cities outright - Dublin, Wexford, Waterford and Limerick - and carved four royal manors for the crown itself out of the countryside that had belonged to Dublin's own Norse kings.

Dublin was the seat of Ostman sovereignty before Henry arrived. Once he took it, it became the capital of his own Irish dominion instead - and as that dominion grew to cover the island, the city grew with it into the capital of Ireland entire.

Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881) · John Speed · Public domain

A kingdom, then a name on a map

None of the Norse dynasty's own political weight survived into this new arrangement. Hasculf's failed attempt to retake the city with a hired berserker was the kingdom's last independent act, and no Ostman ruler held it in his own right again. What outlasted the dynasty was only the place itself, and the accident of which city a foreign king's war had happened to hand him - a Norse trading settlement's own choice of harbour, made three centuries earlier for reasons that had nothing to do with Ireland's internal geography, and never displaced again as the government of Ireland grew up around it.