Each month we present a chapter in the history of Scotland. We move forward in time each month.
Reign of Kenneth mac Alpin(continued)The Scandinavian threat dominated the first three-quarters of the mac Alpin dynasty, but it was not a united front and that could be exploited. Just as Kenneth mac Alpin may have allied himself with a Viking king of the Hebrides against his rivals in Dalriada in the 830s, and as Constantine I (862 - 77) almost certainly connived at the Norse siege of Dumbarton in 870, so their successors were at times also able to play off Norwegian Dublin against Danish York. The risks were considerable, for it was as likely that they might be caught up in squabbles between Dublin and York, and such seems to have been the fate of Constantine in 877. The means of self-preservation were predictable for a dynasty, which was still insecure, if surprising to those fed on a diet of a story of unrelenting hostility between Scandinavians and the other peoples of the Scottish mainland. One of Kenneth's daughters was married to a Norse king of Dublin sometime in the reign of his second son, Constantine I. The precedent for appeasement by marriage was established by Constantine II, but he was the shrewdest practitioner of it: This Gaelic king, who shared with his uncle and predecessor the name of the first Christian emperor and would end his days in a house of Céli Dé at St Andrews, did not scruple to marry his daughter off to a heathen King of Dublin, Olaf III. The battle fought in Strathearn in 903 marked the last of the Scandinavian invasions of the mac Alpin realm. But the safety of the realm from external threat and the stability of the dynasty were in jeopardy for fully another century. Just as the threat from Danish kings of York receded, kings of Scots (for such they were all called from Donald II (889- 900) onwards were involved in a dangerous tussle for control of Northumbria between Dublin and the kingdom of Wessex after Sitric, a Dublin nominee, died in 927. Constantine, faced with the prospect of having a West Saxon aggressor on his southern rather than a Danish one, became involved in a dangerous game of propping up a Danish buffer state. The policy was complicated by revived internal fissures within the York kingdom, which put at risk its control over Northumbria. The next invasion of Constantine's kingdom came in 934 in the shape of determined effort by Athelstan, King of both Wessex and kingdom of Strathclyde, and Dublin - an alliance that had perhaps been marked by the marriage of Constantine's daughter to Olaf of Dublin. This was probably a more damaging expedition than any of the extended Viking Raids that had been inflicted on the Scottish kingdom over the previous century. A combined army and fleet 'laid waste' to the east coast as far north as Dunnottar, the gateway to the Mounth; and Athelstan met with little organized resistance fro he returned 'without any great victory', but the scene was set for one of the most decisive battles in Scottish history, the defeat suffered by Constantine and his allies at Brunanburh, somewhere near the Humber in 937. |
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