History of Dublin
The city of Dublin can trace its origin back more than 1,000 years, and for much of this time it has been Ireland's principal city and the cultural, educational and industrial centre of the island.
Founding and early history
The earliest reference to Dublin is sometimes said to be found in the writings of Claudius Ptolemaeus, the Egyptian-Greek astronomer and cartographer, around the year 140, who refers to a settlement called Eblana. This would seem to give Dublin a just claim to nearly two thousand years of antiquity, as the settlement must have existed a considerable time before Ptolemy became aware of it. Recently, however, doubt has been cast on the identification of Eblana with Dublin, and the similarity of the two names is now thought to be coincidental.Beginning in the 9th and 10th centuries, there were two settlements where the modern city stands. The Viking settlement of about 841 was known as Dyflin, from the Irish Duiblinn, which also led to the modern English name. This referred to a dark tidal pool where the River Poddle entered the Liffey on the site of the Castle Gardens at the rear of Dublin Castle. The Gaelic settlement, Áth Cliath was further upriver, at the site of the present day Father Mathew Bridge at the bottom of Church Street. The Celtic settlement's name is still used as the Irish name of the modern city. However, the first written evidence of it is found in the Annals of Ulster of 1368.
The Vikings, or Ostmen as they called themselves, ruled Dublin for almost three centuries, although they were expelled in 902 only to return in 917. The Thingmote was a raised mound, high and in circumference, where the Norsemen assembled and made their laws. It stood on the south side of the river, adjacent to Dublin Castle, until 1685. Viking Dublin also had a large slave market. Thralls were captured and sold, not only by the Norse but also by warring Irish chiefs.
Dublin celebrated its millennium in 1988 with the slogan "Dublin's Great in '88". Even though the city is far older than that, the rationale was that 988 was the year in which the Norse King Glun Iarainn recognised Máel Sechnaill II, High King of Ireland, and agreed to pay taxes and accept Brehon Law. That date was celebrated, but might not have been accurate, for it was in 989 that Mael Seachnaill laid siege to the city for 20 nights and captured it.
After the defeat of the Norse by the Irish High King Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf on 23 April 1014, the Norse were a minor political force in Ireland, firmly opting for commercial life. Viking rule of Dublin would end completely in 1171 when the city was captured by King Diarmait mac Murchada of Leinster, with the aid of Cambro-Norman mercenaries. The last Norse King of Dublin, Ascall mac Ragnaill tried to recapture the city with an army he had raised among his relations in the Scottish Highlands, where he had fled after the city was taken. The attempted reconquest failed: Ascall was captured as he tried to escape; on 16 May 1171, he was beheaded.
Late medieval Dublin
Diarmait mac Murchada's rule was brief as he died in May 1171. Leadership of Leinster and Dublin was assumed by his Norman son-in-law Richard de Clare. Diarmait had designated that Strongbow would succeed him as part of their military alliance and marriage agreement, but this was contested by Diarmait's son Domhnall and other Irish kings and leaders. Eventually, Henry II invaded Ireland himself to ensure that the Normans served in fief to him and did not consider separating from English rule. As a result of the Anglo-Norman invasion of southern Ireland, Dublin became the centre of English power on the island, replacing Tara in Meath, which had been the seat of the Gaelic High Kings of Ireland.After the Anglo-Normans took Dublin in 1171, many of the city's Norse inhabitants left the old city, which was on the south side of the river Liffey and built their own settlement on the north side, known as Ostmantown or "Oxmantown". Dublin became the capital of the English Lordship of Ireland when it was established in 1177, and County Dublin was the first county in Ireland to be shired in the 1190s. Important buildings constructed during this time include Christ Church Cathedral, St. Audoen's Church, and St Patrick's Cathedral, all of which are within a kilometre of one another. On 15 May 1192, Dublin's first written Charter of Liberties was granted by John, at that time Lord of Ireland, and it was addressed to all his "French, English, Irish and Welsh subjects and friends". On 15 June 1229, his son Henry III granted the citizens the right to elect a mayor who was to be assisted by two provosts. In Dublin itself, English rule was centred on Dublin Castle. The city was also the main seat of the Parliament of Ireland from 1297, which was composed of landowners and merchants.
In 1315, a Scottish army under Edward the Bruce burned the city's suburbs. In 1348, the city was hit by the Black Death, a lethal bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in the mid-14th century. In Dublin, victims of the disease were buried in mass graves in an area still known as "Blackpitts". However, archaeological excavations have found evidence of a tanning industry in this area, and so the name "Blackpitts" could refer to the tanning pits which stained the surrounding area a deep dark colour. The plague recurred regularly in the city until its last major outbreak in 1649.
By 1400, many of the descendants of the Anglo-Norman conquerors had become absorbed into the Gaelic culture, adopting the Irish language and customs. Meanwhile, Dublin was becoming extensively populated with settlers from England and Wales, and the rural area around the city, as far north as Drogheda, also saw extensive English settlement. Eventually, this was the only region of the Lordship that was effectively controlled by the English, and it became known as The Pale due to fencing and other fortification built to protect these settlers from the native Irish. The inhabitants of The Pale eventually developed an identity similar to that of other settler-colonists of a beleaguered enclave of civilisation surrounded by "barbarous natives". The siege mentality of medieval Dubliners is best illustrated by their annual pilgrimage to the area called Fiodh Chuilinn, or Holly Wood in Ranelagh, where, in 1209, five hundred recent settlers from Bristol had been massacred by the O'Toole clan during an outing outside the city limits. Every year on "Black Monday", the Dublin citizens would march out of the city to the spot where the atrocity had happened and raise a black banner in the direction of the mountains to challenge the Irish to battle in a gesture of symbolic defiance. This was still so dangerous that, until the 17th century, the participants had to be guarded by the city militia and a stockade against "the mountain enemy". It has also been reported that throughout the Middle Ages, the city paid tribute, protection money, or "black rent" to the neighbouring Irish clans to avoid their predatory raids.
Medieval Dublin was a tightly knit place of around 5,000 to 10,000 people, intimate enough for every newly married citizen to be escorted by the mayor to the city bullring to kiss the enclosure for good luck. It was also very small in area, an enclave hugging the south side of the Liffey of no more than three square kilometres. Outside the city walls were suburbs such as the Liberties, on the lands of the Archbishop of Dublin, and Irishtown, where Gaelic Irish were supposed to live, having been expelled from the city proper by a 15th-century law. Although the native Irish were not supposed to live in the city and its environs, many did so and by the 16th century, English accounts complained that Irish was starting to rival English as the everyday language of The Pale.
Image:Silken-Thomas-attack-Dublin-Castle.gif|thumb|right|Siege of Dublin, 1535. The Earl of Kildare's attempt to seize control of Ireland reignited English interest in the island.
As English interest in maintaining their Irish colony waned, the defence of Dublin from the surrounding Irish was left to the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare, who dominated Irish politics until the 16th century. However, this dynasty often pursued its own agenda. In 1487, during the English Wars of the Roses, the Fitzgeralds occupied Dublin with the aid of troops from the Duchy of Burgundy and proclaimed the Yorkist Lambert Simnel to be King of England. In 1537, the same dynasty, led by Silken Thomas, besieged Dublin Castle because they were angry at the imprisonment of Gerald Fitzgerald, 9th Earl of Kildare. Henry VIII sent a large army to subdue the Fitzgeralds and replace them with English administrators. This was the beginning of a much closer, though not always happy, relationship between Dublin and the English Crown.
16th and 17th centuries
While the "Old English" community of Dublin and the Pale were satisfied with the thorough English conquest of the whole island under the Tudor dynasty and disarmament of the native Irish, they were deeply alienated by the Protestant reformation that had taken place in England, as they were almost all Roman Catholics. In addition, they were angered by being forced to pay for the English garrisons of the country through an extra-parliamentary tax known as the "cess". Several Dubliners were executed for taking part in the Second Desmond Rebellion in the 1580s. The Mayoress of Dublin, Margaret Ball, died in captivity in Dublin Castle for her Catholic sympathies in 1584, and Dermot O'Hurley, a Catholic Archbishop, was hanged outside the city walls in the same year.In 1592, Elizabeth I opened Trinity College Dublin as a Protestant University for the Irish gentry. However, the important Dublin families spurned it and sent their sons instead to Catholic Universities on continental Europe.
The Dublin community's discontent was deepened by the events of the Nine Years War of the 1590s, when English soldiers were required by decree to be housed by the townsmen of Dublin and they spread disease and forced up the price of food. The wounded lay in stalls in the streets, in the absence of a proper hospital. To compound disaffection in the city, the English Army's gunpowder store on Winetavern Street exploded accidentally in 1597, killing nearly 200 Dubliners. The Pale community, however dissatisfied they were with English government, remained hostile to the Gaelic Irish led by Hugh O'Neill.
As a result of these tensions, the English authorities came to see Dubliners as unreliable and encouraged the settlement there of Protestants from England. These "New English" became the basis of the English administration in Ireland until the 19th century.
Protestants became a majority in Dublin in the 1640s when thousands of them fled there to escape the Irish Rebellion of 1641. When the city was subsequently threatened by Irish Catholic forces, the Catholic Dubliners were expelled from the city by its English garrison. In the 1640s, the city was besieged twice during the Irish Confederate Wars, in 1646 and 1649. However, on both occasions, the attackers were driven off before a lengthy siege could develop.
In 1649, on the second of these occasions, a mixed force of Irish Confederates and Anglo-Irish Royalists were routed by Dublin's English Parliamentarian garrison in the Battle of Rathmines, fought on the city's southern outskirts.
In the 1650s after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, Catholics were banned from dwelling within the city limits under the vengeful Cromwellian settlement but this law was not strictly enforced. Ultimately, this religious discrimination led to the Old English community abandoning their English roots and coming to see themselves as part of the native Irish community.
Under the Restoration, James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, at that time the Lord Deputy of Ireland, made the first step toward modernising Dublin by ordering that the houses along the river Liffey had to face the river and have high quality frontages. This was in contrast to the earlier period, when Dublin homes faced away from the river, often using it for waste disposal.
By the end of the seventeenth century, Dublin was the capital of the English run Kingdom of Ireland – ruled by the Protestant "New English" minority. Dublin was one of the few parts of Ireland in 1700 where Protestants were a majority. In the next century, Dublin would become larger, more peaceful, and more prosperous than at any time in its previous history.