TURGEIS THE DEVIL

The Butcher of Clonmacnoise
AD 839–845

To attempt to follow, through all its frightful details, the course of outrage and massacre which continued to be pursued by the bands of Turgesius throughout the remainder of that tyrant’s turbulent life would be a task as wearisome as it is revolting.

—Thomas Moore, The History of Ireland

EVERY SO OFTEN IN HUMAN HISTORY, A GUY comes along who is so impossibly cruel and utterly unredeemable that the only logical conclusion is that he is the physical embodiment of pure evil packed into human form.

In ninth-century Ireland, that man was a faceless cataclysm of destruction known throughout history as Turgeis the Devil: the Butcher of Clonmacnoise, the founder of Dublin, and, to this day, one of the most hated men in the history of the Emerald Isle.

When Turgeis (also called Turgesius) the Devil swept into Ireland, it wasn’t the first time the Irish had encountered Vikings; the Norse had been making their trademark ultra-violent raids on the shores of the island since the late 790s. By the time Turgeis and his men showed up for the pillage party in 839, the hapless fishing villages of Ireland had already suffered through roughly forty years of intermittent (and totally annoying) pillaging and rampaging at the hands of angry Scandinavians in wolf pelts. It didn’t really shake them up all that much anymore.

What truly set Turgeis apart was that this guy took a well-established formula and cranked it into overdrive—not just in sheer scale but also in brutality.

Like many Vikings, Turgeis realized that storming through a village, setting fire to thatched-roof cottages, and kicking peasants with a boot made of reindeer fur was fun, but your typical fisherman and dirt farmer weren’t exactly dripping with gold and jewels and microwave ovens or other fabulous prizes. This powerful, coordinated, motivated Viking ruler realized instead that the key to success was to single out ultra-holy religious sites like churches, abbeys, convents, and monasteries—because, for some reason, Catholics really liked to stock their places of worship full of golden treasures, and the only people guarding them were a bunch of unarmed holy men equipped with little more than burlap sacks, leather-bound manuscripts, and a vow of nonviolence. For an illiterate, Odin-worshipping conqueror like Turgeis, who wouldn’t know the difference between a crucifix and a Big Mac if it was handed to him by the Hamburglar, the solution here was easy: Attack churches. It provides all the excitement of killing, maiming, and destroying, plus it hits your enemy where it hurts, and you can make a little cash in the process.

So in 839, Turgeis started big. He arrived with the most obscenely humongous Viking fleet Ireland had ever seen, and went straight for the crown jewel of Christianity in one of the most devoutly Christian places in the world. The Devil launched an attack on the city of Armagh—which at the time was the single holiest place in Ireland, the seat of the Catholic Church on the island, and the home of the venerated saint Patrick’s remains. (Yes, we are talking about that Saint Patrick, the dude with the green cupcakes and the snakes and all that.) After three full-scale assaults against a fanatically determined but badly outnumbered force of dedicated Irish peasant warriors—none of whom were expecting to be attacked by Vikings in the middle of the night—the torch-bearing Norsemen battled their way over the walls of Armagh and looted without care. While one brave Irish abbot did manage to escape with the shrine of Saint Patrick, the Vikings went nuts on everything else, killing monks and students, knocking over altars, and making the whole “Oops, now you’re getting pinched by everyone in the class because you forgot to wear green on Saint Patrick’s Day” thing look like a fun afternoon at a water park. According to some admittedly biased but understandably enraged Irish chroniclers, Turgeis’s wife, Ota (a priestess of Odin), even dared to offer up animal sacrifices in the chapel (something that most ninth-century Catholic monks would consider pretty heinous).