WHEN PATRICK DIED in 492—or 496, depending on whichever version of the annals one prefers—he had been spreading Christianity among the Irish for more than sixty years. But Ireland had not changed much over that time. Pockets of Christianity existed around the royal courts and local centers of power, where Patrick and other early missionaries had been successful, but the vast majority of the country was still pagan. There are faint echoes of an organized Christian province that may have existed in the southeast of Ireland, where Palladius had probably been sent by the pope in 431, the year before Patrick is supposed to have arrived in the north. With direct sea links to the Roman provinces of Gaul and Hispania—modern France and Spain—raiders would have been bringing Christian slaves into the country for more than a century. And some native Irish fighting as mercenaries for Rome on the Continent could also have been converted and brought their new faith back home.
In spite of the best efforts of Patrick's later propagandists to ensure that Patrick received full credit for converting Ireland to Christianity, a number of other contemporary fifth-century names survived Armagh's campaign to spread the Patrick cult across the country and obscure any challenge to Patrick's supremacy. Along with Palla-dius in the south, a priest called Auxilius founded a church near present-day Naas, southwest of Dublin, a site long associated with the kings of Leinster. A man called Secundinus may have set up a Christian community close to the great royal site of Tara, while a third man—Iserninus—is associated with the founding of a church at Kilcullen, close to the royal center of the kings of Leinster at Dún Ailinne. Patrick's probable first foundation was at Down-patrick in County Down, a royal site of the kings of Ulster, while Armagh—center of the Patrick cult—was near Navan Fort, greatest of all pre-Christian kingship sites in the north. "Armagh" is only a different pronunciation of the ancient "Ard Macha." Church leaders in Europe must have had excellent information about the political setup in Ireland. It was probably deliberate policy to send missionaries directly to the local centers of secular power. From the beginning, Christianity in Ireland spread from the top down, a religion of the upper classes in Irish society.
Enough other names survive in early monastery texts to suggest that there were many bishops, priests, and missionaries from outside Ireland who operated both before and during the time Patrick evangelized the north. All must have tried to re-create in Ireland the same Roman model of Christianity they knew in Europe. Christianity may have started as a freethinking and populist offshoot of Judaism, but it had taken on an authoritarian Roman structure soon after the Emperor Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313. Bishops controlled all junior priests and subsidiary churches within their jurisdiction, just as magistrates and regional governors controlled lesser officials in secular Roman society. In the church this was and is still called the diocesan model. Unfortunately it did not work in Ireland where every petty king and tribal leader considered himself independent in his own territory, even if he acknowledged a more powerful regional king as his overlord.
Brother Sean O'Duinn, an authority on the early Irish church and a monk at the modern Benedictine Abbey of Glenstall in County Limerick, explained the difficulty facing early missionaries in Ireland. "From the beginning, Christianity was an urban religion," he said. "When the apostles left Jerusalem to preach the faith, they went to the great cities of the time—Antioch, Rome, Lyons, and Odessa. Even in the heart of the empire it took a long time before country people were evangelized. The word 'pagan' comes from a Roman word meaning 'countrymen,' so pagans were just people in remote areas who had not yet been Christianized. It was not like civilized Europe when the first missionaries came to Ireland. There were no towns or cities, no central administration. Instead you had dozens of tiny little states called Túatha and each, in theory anyway, was independent. The early missionaries had to go around to all the kings and leaders one by one. It must have been a difficult piecemeal kind of operation."
The first churches were built on tribal lands given by local kings. The first converts and the first native Irish priests often came from within the royal families themselves. The unique monastic form of the Irish church evolved because of this link between local church and local king. Church lands had to stay within the tribe, so giving spiritual authority to an outside bishop was acceptable only if authority on the ground remained tied to the local royal dynasty. The first missionaries were pragmatic men, organizing their church to suit the conditions in which they found themselves. Within a century of Patrick's death, a monastic model of Irish Christianity was firmly established where individual monasteries, linked to local or regional dynasties, were the centers of religious power in Ireland, ruled by abbots who might not even be priests but would be closely related to the local king. Abbots and monasteries feuded and fought amongst themselves just as kings and Túatha did, trying to increase their wealth and power and bring other monasteries under their control. In later centuries this would become full-scale warfare, with abbots leading their monastic troops in attacks on other monasteries.
Why did the kings and chiefs of Ireland accept Christianity so readily? No early Irish saints seem to have died for their faith; Ireland produced no Christian martyrs. As we have seen, the Celtic pantheon of deities was highly inclusive, and druid priests probably thought the Christian god would fit in well. We know from Patrick's own writings that he incorporated many pre-Christian beliefs and traditions into the Christianity he preached; other early missionaries obviously did the same. More important, Christianity carried with it the seductive aura of Roman power and civilization, and the heady promise of literacy. Ireland might have been an illiterate land, but its leaders were well aware of what was happening on the Continent. They would have seen the power of reading and writing and realized how it could be used to enhance their control. In the constant jockeying for position among Irish tribes, shrewd leaders understood that a monastery under their protection was worth its weight in gold. Where kings and their advisors—the druids—understood the political advantages of Christianity, previously pagan sites probably became the first churches and druids the first priests, bringing many of their ceremonies and traditions with them into the new faith. Local deities turned overnight into saints as saints took on the miraculous powers of pagan gods and goddesses. Nowhere is this process more evidence than in the story of St. Brigid, one of the three founding saints of Ireland along with St. Patrick and St. Columba.
Today the word "saint" is associated mostly with Catholicism and a process of canonization by the pope of especially holy men and women. In early Christianity a saint was simply a man or woman who through his or her own character or actions seemed that much closer to God than ordinary people and so had power to act as an intermediary between the human and heavenly realm. Founders of monasteries were invariably considered saints by later generations. Their relics—such body parts as might have survived—became the most valuable treasure of any monastery. Sometimes it is difficult to know whether some of the saints described in later monastery annals from Christianity's earliest period in Ireland are real people or just pre-Christian gods and goddesses adopted into the new faith.
"The Irish eventually accepted Christianity," Glenstall monk Sean O'Duinn said, "but it was a very long process, taking hundreds of years. Over this time there was a certain convergence, a blurring of belief at the border of old and new faith." Many saints existed in this blurred no-man's-land between Christianity and paganism.
St. Brigid is a favorite source of argument among scholars. Was she a real person living in the sixth century A.D. who founded the first great woman's monastery in Ireland, the convent of Kildare, or did later monastic writers simply take the Irish earth goddess Brigid, whose name comes from the old Irish Briganti, meaning "the exalted one," and turn her into a Christian saint? The cult of the goddess Brigid was closely associated with the Kildare region, where a religious community claiming St. Brigid as their founding abbess was a major Christian center for a thousand years. There is evidence from Celtic Europe that priestesses in charge of certain shrines took on the human attributes of the goddess by taking her name. So the priestess of Brigid might be called "the Brigid."
Brigid scholar Paurigeen Clancy sees no difficulty in reconciling the Christian and pre-Christian stories. "If there's a strong cult of a pre-Christian goddess," she said, "it would make absolute sense to Christianize it and bring it into the new faith by having a holy woman take the name and so 'inherit' the mantle of the goddess." This is just the sort of convergence that Glenstall Abbey's Sean O'Duinn was describing. The founder of the church at Kildare may have been born into a druid family who had looked after Brigid's shrine for generations. The goddess turned into a saint but retained all the female archetypes of the divine. St. Brigid is called Muire nan Gaol, "Mary of the Gael." She is portrayed as the healer, the wise woman, speaking with animals and controlling the forces of nature. The list of miracles she performed, according to Cogitosus, who wrote The Life of St. Brigid the Virgin around A.D. 650, included hanging her cloak on a sunbeam, protecting crops from a storm, causing rivers to flood or change direction, and providing meat, butter, and bread in abundance whenever her people were in need. These are stories more relevant to a fertility goddess than a Christian abbess, protecting her people just as she had done for untold centuries before the coming of Christianity.
February i is Imbolg in the pre-Christian calendar. The first of the four "quarter days" celebrated the reawakening of the land after its winter sleep. At the center of a great stone circle in Lough Gur—a place of ritual and worship for at least four thousand years—a present day Imbolg festival gave clues to those first Christian centuries when old and new faith were learning to live together. We had come to Lough Gur to meet a seanchaí, a traditional Irish storyteller who was known locally for her tales of St. Brigid.
The stone circle at Lough Gur, built around 2000 B.C., is one of the largest and best preserved in Ireland, 113 standing stones bordering a circle more than 150 feet in diameter. About 30 adults and children had come on a cold and damp winter evening to honor the ancient festival of Imbolg. Most came from the local area, including the priestess. These were not the sort of people one normally expects to be celebrating pagan rites, just local farmers and villagers, even a local schoolteacher. Catholicism has lost so much of its grip on Ireland in recent years that a growing number of people are looking back to their Celtic roots for spiritual meaning. The ceremony itself was a modern innovation since pre-Christian druid priests left no record of their rituals. There were prayers, singing, and a procession around the central fire, not so different from many Christian festivals across the ages. In the early dusk of a winter evening, with candles flickering against the standing stones on the perimeter of the circle and a fire blazing brightly in the center, it was not hard to imagine Patrick and other early missionaries attending similar ceremonies, watching and planning how best to incorporate native beliefs into their missionary teaching. The fire blazed brighter as the night grew darker, a damp mist blowing in across the standing stones that ringed the ancient circle. All the children carried candles as they circled the fire. The singing ceased and the worshippers gathered close to the fire as the seanchaí came forward, helped by two of the older children and leaning on a stout stick. She was settled in a chair beside the fire, and the priestess came forward to wrap a warm blanket around her to protect her from the chill. In a soft but clear voice, she started telling the story of Brigid, the Christian saint.
"It was Christianity's earliest time in Ireland," the seanchaí said, "and a high-king of Ireland got one of his slave girls in the family way. When the girl-child was born, she was the most beautiful child in all the land. And they say that Brigid, who was the fertility goddess of Ireland, came in and looked at the child in the cradle and gave her blessing. So they called the child Brigid. And the high-king said to the mother, 'You have been so good and given me such a beautiful daughter, I'm giving you your freedom.' So Brigid grew up in the house of the high-king, and when she reached the age of fifteen, the king said it was time for her to marry. But Brigid had other ideas. She was a very beautiful girl and many people wanted her hand. So she said to the Lord above, 'The king wants me to marry,' she said, 'but I do not wish it. I wish to take the veil and be single all my life.' So she said to the Lord Above, 'Will you make me hideous so I don't have to marry?' And the Lord thought so much of her that he gave her a terrible carbuncle over her eye. Her face swelled up and she became so hideous that no man would touch her. So the king said to her, 'Right! you've got your wish. Go away and take some women with you and take the veil.'
"So Brigid went away with a group of virgins and widows, and together they started a farm and did very well. In those days the bear and the wolf and the wildcat roamed Ireland, and after a few years the villagers came to Brigid and said, 'There's a wolf taking our sheep. We can't do anything about it. He kills our dogs and when we went to shoo him away, he almost took one of our children.' So Brigid walked out into the night and called the wolf to her, and she said to him, 'Wolf, have you taken sheep belonging to my people? We need those sheep for milk and meat and clothes.' 'Well,' said the wolf, 'I'm old,' he says, 'and not as fast as I used to be. But I too must live, and that's why I've killed your dogs and I will kill your sheep.' And Brigid stood and looked him in the eye and said: 'You won't; come here and stand by me.'And he came and he stood at the heels of Brigid, and she gave him a big plate of meat and a big bowl of milk. 'For that,' said she, 'wild animal that you are, you will guard the flocks from dogs like those you have killed, and from all of your kind, and you will be with me as my servant and guardian for the rest of my life.' And the wolf agreed and he was.
"And Brigid called the birds of the air and they came to her. And when times were hard and she had no flour, she called upon her namesake who was the goddess of fertility and the harvest, and the goddess ensured her crops were fruitful and that all who were under Brigid's protection flourished. Now the Devil saw all of this and didn't think very much of it and he said, 'I'll put paid to all this,' he said. But Brigid made a cross out of rushes, and she held it up and said, 'Let this cross be the sign of my God,' she said. 'And no devil will come near any house where this cross is held.'
"And so," the seanchaí concluded, "every year we make the Brigid cross fresh with rushes, so that every year we have fresh protection and a bountiful harvest. And so long as this is made, both St. Brigid and the goddess will guard Ireland."
Pagan and Christian beliefs, still coexisting side-by-side. A generation ago there would have hardly been a house in Ireland without a Brigid cross hanging on its wall, fresh every year. But Ireland is changing; old customs and old beliefs have lost their power among the Internet generation, although in the west—from County Kerry in the south to County Donegal in the north—it is still possible to find communities that honor the old traditions. At the tiny two-roomed schoolhouse of Dunquin, right at the tip of the Dingle peninsula, children gather rushes and weave their Brigid crosses every year under the guidance of a Gaelic-speaking schoolteacher who tells them stories of both saint and goddess. When they have made sufficient crosses, the children hand-carry them to every house in the village. The cross itself represents the Christian Crucifixion, but the four arms spreading out from a woven square of reeds at the center also suggest the rays of the sun, the ancient pre-Christian religious symbol. Clearly the origin of Brigid crosses is much older than the coming of Christianity to Ireland.
When an Irish monastic scholar called Cogitosus wrote the Life of Brigid in the mid-seventh century, he had little to draw on except ancient folk tales, although he linked Brigid with Ibar, another missionary bishop who preached the Gospel in Ireland at the time of Patrick. Ibar's association with Brigid suggests the possibility that he was a missionary working in the Kildare region. There are enough stories about the abbey in Kildare to suggest that women played a more central role in the early Irish church than is often thought. There was clearly a major church there as early as A.D. 500 that was both the seat of a bishop and under female control. A later Life of Brigid tells how Brigid was consecrated a bishop "by mistake," since a woman bishop would have been unthinkable in the Christian church at that time. Cogitosus suggests she was "bishop in all but name." Yet the fact that the story survives at all argues for a powerful female leader of the church in Kildare. In later centuries Kildare became a dual monastery for men and women, one of the most important centers of Christianity in Ireland. Liam de Paor, one of the most respected of all early Irish historians, wrote that while there is no good evidence of male monasteries in Ireland before A.D. 535–540, female foundations appeared as much as forty years earlier. "It may well be," he wrote in his landmark book St. Patrick's World, "that the great Irish monastic movement, that would dominate the ecclesiastical history of the country from the 7th through the 12th centuries, was pioneered by communities of women from as early as the 5th century."
The argument for strong women church leaders has precedent. There is clear evidence of important women deacons and leaders of religious communities during Christianity's initial spread across the Roman world. Only later did a patriarchal church leadership relegate women to second-class status. In Ireland Patrick himself wrote about women coming forward as "virgins for Christ." He went on to write: "They do not do it with their father's consent; on the contrary they endure harassment and false accusations from their parents, but nonetheless their numbers increase, as well as those of widows and women living in chastity." Later monastery annals say that Brigid was born in 452 and died in either 524 or 526. Whoever founded the abbey at Kildare would therefore have been converted by the first generation of missionaries to come to Ireland.
There is no question that the status and independence allowed women under early Irish Brehon Law may have contributed to their importance in the early church. Brigid herself, in most of the legends, stands up to her father when he wants her to get married. Women were usually of lesser value than men, but some women poets warranted the highest honor price while queens like Medb of Connaught clearly had a status equal to their husbands. Women in Ireland seem to have enjoyed an independence that women elsewhere in the world might have envied. Paurigeen Clancy sees these early Christian women as Ireland's first feminists. "Women were expected to get married," Paurigeen said, "but the church offered an alternative; not just going out and founding monasteries but literacy as well, the opportunity to learn how to read and write. It's no wonder they jumped at it." Yet Patrick's own words, and the story of how Brigid defied the high-king, make it clear that becoming a virgin for Christ often did not happen without heated opposition from family and tribe. So little is known about this first century of Irish Christianity, but women certainly played a far greater role in spreading Christianity through the country than later histories of the Irish church ever suggest.
Sometime around A.D. 500, a new group of founding saints arrived from Britain to galvanize the Irish church into its second growth spurt. Why it needed galvanizing is not known, although the efforts of Patrick and the other early missionaries may have been exhausted. Probably only a small percentage of the country had been converted. Farsighted kings saw advantages to the new faith, but many others ignored it. Christianity had yet to reach a critical mass in Ireland. A catalyst would be needed before the monastic explosion could begin.
If the first generation of Christian founders of the Irish church came from the Roman province of Gaul, it was Britain—especially Wales and Scotland—that birthed the second generation of Irish saints. St. Enda was Irish born but came from the abbey of Whithorn—in a part of Scotland known as Galloway that directly faced the Irish coast of Ulster in the north—to found a monastery on the Aran Islands. A key British figure was St. Finnian, from Llancarfan in Wales, who founded the monastery of Clonard in the Irish midlands. Another saint—St. Mochta—apparently crossed the Irish Sea to establish a monastery at Louth on the east coast.
Everything is hazy about this "Dark Age." What sources exist were written centuries after the events they were describing. Although Rome had abandoned Britain to its fate decades earlier, the province was able to hold out against barbarian invaders for a long time—the sixth century is also the time of the legendary King Arthur—and the British church appears to have been strong and vibrant over this period. It is frustrating to know so little about such an important time but there are occasional flashes of knowledge. Recent excavations at the site of Whithorn in Scotland show that this was a major Christian site, set right in the heart of country settled by Irish—the Dál Riada—sometime in the final centuries of the Roman period. The Christian abbey of St. David in Wales had been producing scholars and monastic founders for more than a century. If Patrick and the first generation of founders attempted to set up a diocesan model of Christianity like the one they had known on the Continent, it seems likely this second generation of founders from Britain were the ones who firmly established the monastic model that ultimately created such a uniquely Irish church. The torch was being passed, and St. Enda of Aran was probably the most influential of the new generation, the "young Turks" of Irish saints.
Like all early saints, what is known about St. Enda is more folklore than history. The only known description of his life was written more than eight hundred years after his death. Yet his monastic school on Aran seems to have been the most important center of religious training in the early sixth century. The founders of most of Ireland's greatest monasteries are said to have studied under Enda: Ciaran of Clonmacnoise, Kevin of Glendalough, Columba—in Irish "Colmcille"—who went on to become the third of Ireland's founding saints, and a whole lot more. Even Brendan the Navigator apparently stopped off at Aran to get Enda's blessing before heading off into the Atlantic and—so it is suggested—sailing as far as America. Like the Patrick cult, most of the stories about Enda were later propaganda designed to build up the importance of the saint and his monastery on Inismor, the largest of the Aran Islands that lie in the Atlantic off Ireland's west coast. But propaganda aside, St. Enda was clearly a very important figure.
Enda was probably born around A.D. 450, somewhere in the north of Ireland. Legend says he was a king's son who later became a king himself. After a particularly bloody battle, King Enda supposedly arrived at a convent run by one of his sisters where he decided to ravish one of the young novices who had caught his eye. Before he could touch her, the young girl, being both virtuous and a bride of Christ, died piously in the bedchamber where she had been sent to await the king's pleasure. Enda, so the story goes was "struck to his soul" in horror at her death. His sister the abbess, clearly not one to pass up the chance for a good Christian homily, told Enda he would die too if he did not repent and accept Christ. The king became a devout Christian and traveled to Scotland to complete his religious education at the Candida Casa—the White House—at Whithorn. Eventually he settled on the Aran Islands, arriving on a stone boat, the only kind a holy saint could ever consider using. A rock in a small bay on Inismor's east coast is still pointed out today as the boat of the saint.
There are a large number of early Christian church sites on Inismor, which was an important religious center by early in the sixth century A.D. "Aran of the Saints," as it was known, continued to be a major center of Christian pilgrimage for the next thousand years. Nothing remains of the monastery that Enda founded; early monasteries were of wood and wattle and daub, just like the farmsteads and home sites of everyone else. What remains today dates from a later period when monastic buildings were made of stone, although most of those were torn down in the sixteenth century to build the fort used by the forces of English dictator Oliver Cromwell to control the island. The tiny half-ruined church of Teaghlach Einne—the church of Enda—still survives, built in the ninth century, perhaps on the site of Enda's original wooden church. Legend says that Enda's tomb was to the north of the church, but the whole area is now covered by drifting sand. While the church itself is half-buried, enough has been cleared for a visitor to walk inside and stand—perhaps—where the man most responsible for introducing monasticism to Ireland once preached and taught.
The monastic regime of St. Enda seems to have been appallingly severe, with constant fasting, discomfort, and continuous study and prayer. One story tells how he tested the holiness of his students by having them put to sea naked in just the frame of a currach—the traditional Irish boat where the frame was usually covered with animal skins. If the water came in, they were still in a state of terrible sin. Oddly enough, hundreds of disciples seem to have been attracted to this ascetic life. Legend says that no less than 120 saints are buried in the monastery graveyard near today's village of Cill Einne, no doubt having died of exposure after St. Enda's rigorous tests of faith. Enda himself comes across in the stories as a cantankerous and argumentative man. He kicked St. Columba off the island, denying him the use of a boat so the future saint had to swim 8 miles through stormy seas to the mainland. He also argued with St. Brecan, who had a monastery at the other end of the island, about who would control the biggest part of the island. On Inismor today, islanders still tell the story of the contest between the two saints. Enda and Brecan agreed to each say mass before dawn in their respective monasteries and then ride out toward each other. The island would be divided between them at the place where they met. Brecan, according to the Enda legends, cheated and set out before dawn, but God caused his horse's hooves to stick in the sand so he could not go on, allowing Enda to claim the lion's share of the island. There is little of the "pious monk" about early saints like Enda, more likely to curse an enemy than bless a friend, but this is typical of early Irish saints. A later Welsh scholar wrote: "The saints of this land are more vindictive than the saints of any other region." Perhaps we see dim reflections of earlier figures in these monastic records, druid priests who carried with them the power and fury of the old nature gods, hidden behind the mask of a new Christian faith. Brecan, the saint who tried to stop Enda from controlling Inismor, is also the name of a pre-Christian god on the island who was destroyed by another early saint. These ancient legends give hints of real people and real events at the beginning of the sixth century A.D.
Christianity was taking root in Ireland; the critical mass was forming. But it still needed a catalyst before Ireland could change from a pagan country into the Land of Saints and Scholars. At the end of the fifth century, Christianity was still restricted to small pockets of faith around some of the royal courts. By the start of the seventh century, dozens of wealthy and powerful monasteries—like Glendalough, Clonmacnoise, Inisfallen, Finglas, and others—dominated the land. What happened in between?
Michael Baillie provided clues to life in Bronze Age Ireland when he showed how oak trees preserved in bogs pointed to a great climate catastrophe in 1159 B.C. Now dendrochronology offers clues to why the Christian church became so successful in sixth-century Ireland. In his laboratory at Queen's University, Belfast, Michael unrolled a piece of graph paper more than twenty feet long that held tree ring measurements across seven thousand years of Irish history. The tree rings suggest that catastrophic climate disasters devastated Ireland several times over this period. A serious climate problem occurred in 2345 B.C., around the time Neolithic Irish farmers were first raising great burial mounds to honor their ancestors. The 1159 B.C. event ended Ireland's early Bronze Age and created a warrior society. Trees also suggest the climate was terrible around 430 B.C., the time when the Irish archaeological record goes silent at the transition between the Bronze and the Iron Age, the legendary period when the Celts are supposed to have first come to Ireland. In the Christian era another climate event with worldwide repercussions occurred in A.D. 540, according to tree-ring evidence. As Michael explained, "It shows up in trees in Ireland, Scotland, and England, right across Europe and up into Scandinavia. It's in American, Siberian, and Chinese trees. We're seeing the local symptoms of a massive environmental event that's tied right into the Dark Age period."
Archaeological journalist David Keyes, in his book Catastrophe, puts the disaster five years earlier in 535–536 and suggests that the massive volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in Java—many times bigger than its later 1883 explosion—caused the catastrophe. While not ruling out the volcano theory, Michael Baillie prefers the possibility of cometary bombardment, fragments of comet breaking up as they hit Earth's atmosphere. The dust and ash they would put into the atmosphere is equivalent to a massive volcanic eruption. "Based on an analysis of meteor showers by some British astronomers, the earth was at increased risk of bombardment between 400 and 600," Michael explained.
He put one of his bog oak samples under the microscope. "This tree's pretty typical," he said, "wide rings from A.D. 500 through the next three decades but in the late 530s the rings change character; they get incredibly narrow." He replaced the sample with a different slice of bog oak. "But this is the really interesting example." It showed a ring for A.D. 540 so narrow as to be almost invisible, then big fat rings for the next few years. "This is almost certainly reaction wood," Michael explained. "The tree was surrounded by other trees which were blown down at the time. So the tree's released and puts on massive rings afterwards. I've seen events of this sort in quite a number of trees."
It is an image of the apocalypse, acres of forests dead and dying with just a few trees struggling to survive through that terrible year; birds and animals mostly gone, the people in shock, wondering what had become of their world. It was a planet-wide disaster with catastrophic results. There is evidence of crop failures and widespread famine around the world; everywhere societies were in turmoil. In Byzantium the historian Procopius described an eighteen-month darkening of the sun. In China there are records of frost and snow in midsummer; the country erupted in violence and rebellion, spawning new dynasties that finally resulted in the reunification of China under the Sui dynasty thirty years later. On the other side of the Pacific, Teotihuacan, greatest of all pre-Columbian cities and center of a mighty Mexican empire, collapsed in anarchy and revolution.
Bubonic plague usually follows climate disruptions as disease-carrying animals move outside their usual territory in search of food, infecting animal and human populations with no natural immunity. Just two years later, in 542, Europe was hit by plague. Once such a conflagration starts, there is no stopping it until the outbreak has burned itself out. Justinian's Plague—named for the Roman Emperor of Byzantium—quickly engulfed his capital of Constantinople and spread across Europe like a forest fire to reach Ireland by 544. A writer in Spain recorded dismally, "The world we knew died." Irish monastic records—the Annals of Ulster—for the year A.D. 544 record the arrival of "the first mortality called blefed [bubonic plague]." Four years later the records have upgraded it to a mortalitas magna, a great death, and provide a long list of the important people who died that year, including kings and abbots.
Across the Christian world, people thought of these disasters in biblical terms. "The sun goes dim—a dust veil effect of some kind—the crops die and then plague follows." Michael Baillie summed up the sequence of disasters. "You put that package together," he went on, "especially when you add in some strange evidence that suggest earthquakes, and it begins to bear a striking resemblance to God's anger against the land of Egypt in the book of Exodus. Almost a generation later, Zacharias of Mytilene wrote in 556 that 'the sun was darkened by day and the moon by night' and adds that what they lived through was like the plagues of Egypt coupled with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This would be a selling point for Christians, a trigger for the wholesale Chris-tianization of Ireland."
Trees and crops recover relatively quickly from the initial climate disaster, but plague has a much longer-lasting effect. It may carry off only 10 to 15 percent of the population in the first attack, but it has a nasty habit of staying around, returning again and again to infect those without natural immunity who either survived or were born after the first attack. For some reason, plague is most devastating to those in the prime of life. The able-bodied—the backbone of society—die in the first outbreak, but children and old people die in greater numbers next time around. And when a society loses its children, it loses any hope for the future.
Plague spreads faster in crowded conditions. With no towns in sixth-century Ireland, the royal courts were probably major centers of contagion. As traders, scholars, poets, priests, and warriors traveled across the land, the disease spread from Túath to Túath. The great quarter-day pagan festivals, drawing people together from a wide region, would also have accelerated the spread of the disease. Although Christian monks certainly died just as fast as their pagan neighbors, it is easy to imagine church leaders explaining the plague as divine retribution against a sinful people who had not yet accepted Christianity. People turn to religion in times of stress. The mortalitas magna remained endemic in Ireland for more than a century, returning generation after generation, the worst outbreak of bubonic plague until the Black Death almost a thousand years later.
There is a revealing description in the Caen (law) of Eimin Bran about the seventh-century saint Eimin. Plague was raging through Ireland again, as it had at regular intervals since the first outbreak in 544. The king of Leinster came to the saint, accompanied by all his chieftains, and offered that they would all become monks if only the saint would save his people. After praying all night, St. Eimin made a bargain with the king. As evil filled the land and plague was the result, the saint could not stop the deaths but he agreed that his holy monks would sacrifice themselves in such a way that God's anger would be set aside; one monk would die for every Leinster chieftain who died from the plague. The deal was considered important enough to be set down as a caen, a law jointly made by priests and kings to govern the land. In return the king and his chiefs were to obey God's laws, protect Eimin's monastery from all enemies, and agree never to collect taxes or rents from it or its dependent churches. If the king broke the bargain, those monks still alive would curse him and his people, and Leinster would no longer be under the saint's divine protection.
St. Eimin sounds like a modern pragmatist, knowing nothing could stop his monks dying of plague and so making use of their deaths to advance the Christian cause. But it is wrong to apply modern attitudes to ancient times. St. Eimin's story offers a glimpse of what probably happened in many places across Ireland after 540: terrified people believing the old gods had failed them and converting to Christianity in hopes that the priests of the new religion would save them, while the priests truly believed that the plague was a sign of God's anger against the wickedness of the people. St. Eimin's promise was doubtless fulfilled. Since plague does not discriminate between Christian and non-Christian, probably as many monks died as did people from the Leinster royal court, but their deaths would be seen as holy sacrifices. This is a common theme in the lives of sixth-and-seventh-century saints, how in time of plague they would give up their lives so others may live. This was a deeply superstitious age. A catastrophe like the climate disaster of 540 and the ensuing outbreaks of plague would have been seen by non-Christians as the anger of the gods while Christians would genuinely have believed that prayer and the holy intercession of saints could make a difference. Saints were taking over the role of pre-Christian gods and goddesses as intermediaries between people and the forces that ruled their lives.
Historian Elva Johnston tells a story about a sixth-century saint who was begged by the people down in County Kerry to save them from a terrible monster that was killing people all over the place. The saint's name—Mac Creiche—happens to be an Irish word used for a type of bubonic plague. So the saint calls down the fire from heaven and destroys the monster, but it keeps returning in different forms, once like a monster with terrible claws, next like a giant badger that breaths out a deadly poison. And each time the saint fights in single combat with different forms of the monster until it is finally defeated.
"You can see," Elva said, "how the idea of a saint defending the people against a natural catastrophe that's come to Ireland from outside, like a monster, would be very appealing. Everyone's going to want that sort of heavenly power on their side."
Monasteries also held the relics of the great founding saints, and the mid-sixth century is when the cult of relics began to take hold. Relics, usually any remaining body parts of particularly holy saints, were viewed rather like spiritual antibiotics. You would go to a particular monastery because it might have the tooth of St. Patrick, and maybe if it was brought out, you would be cured.
Elva Johnston believes these few decades in the middle of the sixth century were one of the most important times in Irish history. "Everything we now think of as early Irish society was coming together then," she explained. "Historical records aren't very good, but it's clear many important earlier royal dynasties disappeared in the sixth century and new power structures were forming. Society broke down because people who died from the plague tended to be prominent, important people at the royal courts where contagion was far worse than out in the wilds. Who or what would fill the vacuum? Around this time we begin to see a very powerful monastic church emerging, with monasteries emerging as major landowners."
Within a generation of the worldwide climate disaster in 540, most of the monasteries that gave rise to the Golden Age of Irish Christianity were already in existence. Among them the great monastery of Durrow, supposedly founded in 543 by St. Columba, Clonmacnoise, founded in 545 by St. Ciaran, and Clonfert, founded—according to legend—in 547 by St. Brendan (the Navigator). All these monasteries were closely linked to local kings, many from ambitious new dynasties who had taken advantage of the power vacuum existing in mid-sixth-century Ireland.
In the south an ambitious dynasty—the Eóganacht—burst out from their royal site on top of the Rock of Cashel—in County Tip-perary—to become the new kings of Munster. The Uí Néill, who would dominate Irish kingship for the next five hundred years, expanded out of original homelands west of the Shannon in Con-naught. In the north they and their allies took over most of present-day Donegal, Derry, and Antrim, pushing the once-mighty rulers of Ulster back to the sea. In the midlands the Uí Néill took over the ancient kingship site of Tara, exploiting the symbolic power of a religious site in use since Neolithic times to claim the high-kingship of Ireland. Religious leaders in Armagh, who were as ambitious as any secular ruler, were quick to ally themselves with the rising power of the Uí Néill. It gave Armagh the protection of the most powerful dynasty in the land while the Uí Néill got the blessing and protection of St. Patrick in heaven, important for any new dynasty trying to legitimize its hold on power. This link between Armagh and the Uí Néill helped ensure that the cult of Patrick would take precedence over other Irish saints, just as Armagh itself came to dominate the Irish church.