The Irish Diaspora
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The Irish Diaspora

Tales of Emigration, Exile and Imperialism

Turtle Bunbury

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eBook - ePub

The Irish Diaspora

Tales of Emigration, Exile and Imperialism

Turtle Bunbury

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About This Book

The Irish have always been a travelling people. In the centuries after the fall of Rome, Irish missionaries carried the word of Christianity throughout Europe, while soldiers and mariners from across the land ventured overseas in all directions. Since 1800 an estimated 10 million people have left the Irish shores and today more than 80 million people worldwide claim Irish descent. The advent of the British Empire ignited a slow but extraordinary exodus from Ireland. The pioneering explorers of the Tudor Age were soon overtaken in number by religious refugees, the Wild Geese who opted to live outside of the Protestant state and to take their chances in the Spanish or French empires, or in America. The Irish played a pivotal role in the foundation of the United States of America, just as they would in the Civil War that followed eighty-five years later. The lives of Irish emigrants wove in and out of the major events of global history, including the Abbé Edgeworth, confessor to King Louis XVI at his execution during the French Revolution; Margaretta Eagar, governess to the daughters of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia; and William Lamport, who travelled from County Wexford to Central America, and became Don Guillén, a martyr for Mexican independence. Turtle Bunbury explores the lives of those men and women, great and otherwise, whose journeys whether driven by faith, a desire for riches and adventure, or purely for survival have left their mark on the world.

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Year
2021
ISBN
9780500776551

1

COLUMBANUS AND THE MEROVINGIAN KINGS

For all we Irish, inhabitants of the world’s edge, are disciples of Saints Peter and Paul.
COLUMBANUS TO POPE BONIFACE IV, 613
Bregenz, Austria, 611. Columbanus was unimpressed. The barbarian horde had brewed up a giant barrel of beer that they were now about to present as an offering to their god Wodan. The Irishman marched up to the cask and breathed on it. ‘And lo!’, recounted Jonas of Bobbio, a disciple of Columbanus, ‘it broke with a crash and fell in pieces so that all the beer ran out. Then it was clear that the devil had been concealed in the cask, and that through the earthly drink he had proposed to ensnare the souls of the participants.’
Establishing facts is notoriously difficult when it comes to validating the lives of pioneering holy men like St Columbanus. Much of our apparent understanding of such people is based upon semi-fictional, semi-romantic hagiographies and hyperbolic martyrologues etched with inky feathers long decades, or even centuries, after they purportedly lived. Competing agendas are concealed behind every word. Occasionally we are presented with fragments of skulls and bones, or croziers, staffs, crosses and bells, which are said to have belonged to these holy men. Much of this is connected to the emergence of numerous cults of supposedly ‘Irish’ saints (p. 29) that arose across Europe in the High Middle Ages (1000–1300).
Yet the life of Columbanus is more credible than most. There is at least some documentation about the twenty-five years that he spent proselytizing in Europe, not least because he was no stranger to controversy. Some of his own writings also survive, primarily monastic rules and hymns, but also some letters and, perhaps, a boating song.
He is widely assumed to have been a Leinsterman, possibly a member of the royal Uí Bairrche dynasty that dominated in present-day County Carlow. Jonas, who knew him in later life, maintained that his first attempt to become a monk had been thwarted in his late twenties by his attraction to women generally or perhaps to one woman in particular. Either way, when he expressed his conundrum to a female hermit, she advised that his wisest course of action would be to ‘take himself to a place of stronger pilgrimage’ abroad.1
He made his way north to the monastery of Bangor on the shores of Belfast Lough, where he became a disciple of Comgall, the monastery’s founder and first abbot. As a young man, Comgall is said to have accompanied St Columba on a proselytizing mission to the Picts in northern Scotland and certainly Bangor enjoyed strong links with Columba’s foundations at Iona. One wonders if Columbanus adopted Columba’s name in honour of a man who had likewise abandoned the land of his birth to embark upon a ‘stronger pilgrimage’ in faraway lands.
Columbanus was a middle-aged man by the time he crossed the seas to Brittany in about 590. Like the other peregrinatio who had gone before him, his pilgrimage was to be perpetual, a lifelong sentence, combining missionary zeal with private penance and stringent ascetism.
After a short period on the Morbihan peninsula of Brittany, he ventured deeper into the kingdom of the Franks, the realm that had arisen from the ashes of the fallen Roman Empire in the middle of the fifth century. Comprising much of present-day France and Germany, the kingdom was ruled by the Merovingian dynasty who had, for the most part, converted to Christianity.
For Columbanus, this was the perfect landscape to establish his monastic utopia. His strict devotion to purity and frugality found favour with Guntram, the elderly Merovingian king of Burgundy, who invited him to found a monastery amid the ruins of an abandoned Roman fortress at Annegray in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France. It proved such a popular destination for pilgrims that, with Guntram’s backing, the Irishman established two more monasteries at nearby Luxeuil-les-Bains and Fontaine-lùs-Luxeuil.
Columbanus had arrived in the Merovingian Empire at a time when large swathes of present-day France were already converted to Christianity. However, always the outsider, his determination to run his communities independently of any ecclesiastical authority set him at odds with the Frankish church hierarchy, with whom he hotly argued about the true date of Easter. He enjoyed a degree of protection from Theuderic II, Guntram’s young heir, for whom he served as a sort of spiritual advisor for several years. However, he was unable to win over the king’s grandmother, Brunhilda, the queen consort and real power behind the throne. Things reached a head in 610 when he refused to bless various illegitimate sons that Theuderic II had sired by his concubines. Brunhilda banished Columbanus from the kingdom and, for good measure, she ordered all those monks who had followed him from Ireland and Britain to leave too. Given that Theuderic II was then engaged in a brutal war with his older brother, Theudebert II, it was perhaps no bad time to move on.
Columbanus turned his evangelical eyes eastwards and set off up the Upper Rhine, reputedly composing a Latin poem while his men heaved upon the oars and brought his boat along that majestic river. If so, this surely ranks as one of the world’s earliest-recorded boat songs. One stanza runs:
En silvis caesa fluctu meat carina
Bicornis Rheni et pelagus perlabiter iuncta.
Heia viri! Nostrum reboans echo sonet heia!
[‘Lo, cut in forests, the driven keel, passes on the stream
Of the twin-horned Rhine and glides as if anointed by the flood.
Heave, my men! Let resounding echo sound our Heave!’]
Christianity was still a largely unknown entity east of the Rhine when Columbanus arrived in Alamannia (present-day Switzerland and west Austria). He spent the next two years preaching to the Alemanni and founded an oratory on the shores of Lake Constance. It was during this time that he is said to have destroyed the beer vat in Bregenz, which was precisely the sort of behaviour that ultimately led him to be ousted from the region. He decided to cross the Alps into northern Italy but, before he left, he entrusted the ongoing conversion of the Alemanni to St Gall, one of his most loyal disciples. If truth be told, St Gall, or Gallus, was also born in Ireland and lived to be ninety-five.
Meanwhile, Columbanus and his other disciples clambered through the Alps and came down into the kingdom of the Lombards, which covered much of modern-day Italy. They duly introduced themselves at the court of King Agilulf in Milan. The Lombard monarch warmed to Columbanus and offered him a sliver of land on the banks of the Trebbia River, near Piacenza, between Milan and Genoa. The place was called Bobbio and it was here that Columbanus founded his final monastery and so concluded an odyssey of more than 3,200 km (2,000 miles) since he first arrived in Brittany. In the centuries to come, Bobbio Abbey would become universally recognized for the excellence of its library. Dissolved in 1803, it also provided the inspiration for Italian novelist Umberto Eco when he sought a location to set his bestselling murder mystery, The Name of the Rose, in 1980.
Columbanus’s surviving writings show that he remained deeply proud of his Irish origins until the day that he died at Bobbio in 615. However, he remained virtually unknown in Ireland until interest in his life was reignited by men such as Luke Wadding (p. 37) during the Counter-Reformation a thousand years later. As patron saint of the world’s 200 million motorcyclists, St Columbanus now has one of the biggest flocks of all.

2

VIRGILIUS OF SALZBURG

Luminous as bishop and worthy through merit and character Ireland brought him to the light of this world.
VIRGILIUS INSCRIPTION, ALCUIN OF YORK, c. 7841
Rome, 747. For the second time in two years, Pope Zachary found himself having to play the peacemaker between the Anglo-Saxon legate and the Irishman. Both men commanded his respect. On the one side there was St Boniface, nĂ© Winfrid, the Devon-born archbishop of Mainz, who had done so much to bring Christianity east of the Rhine. On the other, there was Virgilius, the Irish-born ruler of the diocese of Salzburg in present-day Austria. The last time they came before him was when Boniface complained that he had not been consulted by Virgilius when the latter assigned the conduct of his episcopal duties to a fellow Irishman, Dub dĂĄ ChrĂ­ch. The archbishop had also had cause to reprimand Virgilius for allowing an ‘unlearned priest’ to incorrectly baptize some Bavarians.
Virgilius’s latest activities had brought fresh dismay to Boniface. Not only had he wrongfully claimed that he had papal permission to occupy the Salzburg bishopric, he had also apparently made the heretical assertion that there was ‘another world and other men beneath the earth’, as well as perhaps a second sun and a second moon. The Pope expressed alarm at such ‘perverse and abominable teachings’ and ordered a synod to investigate the allegations.2 When Virgilius himself was summoned to Rome to explain himself, his supporters must have anticipated his imminent expulsion from the Church. No record of his visit survives but he defied the odds. Indeed, he weathered the storm so well that as well as retaining his abbey, he was also formerly appointed bishop of Salzburg in 749. Perhaps tellingly, his consecration was put on hold until after the death of Boniface in 755; the archbishop had been murdered by bandits in the present-day Dutch province of Friesland.
The formative years of Virgilius are shrouded in a typically impenetrable medieval fog. The most popular and utterly unverifiable accounts state that: he was born in 700; he may have been from Trim in present-day County Meath; he was originally known as Fergil; he was schooled at the island monastery of Iona, where he learned Greek; and he fetched up as the abbot of Aghaboe Abbey in County Laois. The latter is an attractive conjecture: Aghaboe was one of Ireland’s foremost educational centres in the eighth century and excelled at teaching its students the intricacies of commerce, agriculture and geography. The abbey ruins, all but destroyed in the Tudor Reformation of the sixteenth century, still stand today.
However, there is simply no evidence for any of these assertions, save for a tentative connection to Iona. What is known is that he found himself centre stage to European court politics in 743, just as the Carolingian dynasty established by Charles Martel was consolidating its power over the dying Merovingian kingdom of the Franks. Somehow, the scholarly Irishman made his way across northern France to the palace of Quierzy-sur-Oise in Picardy. This was the court of Pepin, a son of Charles Martel who was serving as majordomo (‘master of the household’) to Childeric III, the king of the Franks. Pepin, who had been educated by Benedictine monks in Paris, would become known to posterity as Pepin the Short, not for his stature but for his closely cropped hair, which contrasted with the flowing locks of his contemporaries. By the time Virgilius secured an audience with him, Pepin was de facto king of the Franks, although the throne itself was still occupied by the ineffectual Childeric III, who was fated to be the last of the Merovingian kings.
Virgilius belonged to a new wave of Irishmen who settled in Europe during the Carolingian age. Many were well-educated clerics who found work as teachers in the empire’s schools and courts. Their impact is hinted at through various manuscripts, correspondence, administrative records, theological works, contemporary annals and other fragments of the past that are extant in libraries and museums from Stockholm and St Petersburg to Rome and Vienna. Such sources help to colour in the remarkable rise of Virgilius.
Pepin’s patronage paved the way for him to advance, via short stints in Normandy and Bavaria, to Salzburg, where the Duke of Bavaria, Pepin’s brother-in-law, consented to his election as the abbot of St Peter’s monastery in 745. The abbey’s lucrative estates included several of the salt mines from which Salzburg, meaning ‘salt fortress’, derives its name. St Peter’s would later achieve a degree of global celebrity when it appeared in the Hollywood musical, The Sound of Music.
Virgilius is thought to have provided the impetus for Pepin’s game-changing use of royal unction at his coronation when he formally ascended the throne as the king of the Franks in 751. This, in turn, may have derived from a description of the ordination of kings in an Irish legal text called Collectio canonum Hibernensis (Irish Collection of Canon Law). In any event, Pepin’s anointment proved such a powerful blessing for the Carolingian takeover that this biblical rite became standard practice at coronation ceremonies for generations of European monarchs to come.
As well as his legal skills, Virgilius was an astute and broad-minded geometer, correctly predicting the existence of humanity south of the equator. This was a revolutionary thought for orthodox Christians at the time, as was his near damnable proposal that the Earth was spherical and that there might be a second sun, which prompted Boniface’s accusations of heresy.
During his thirty-four-year-reign as bishop, Virgilius rebuilt his cathedral, expanded the jurisdictive borders of his see and established Salzburg as an important centre of missionary activity. He oversaw the conversion of the Alpine Slavs of Carinthia (present-day southern Austria and northeastern Slovenia) and dispatched missionaries into Hungary. Among his principal assistants was the aforementioned Dub dĂĄ ChrĂ­ch, who later took charge of the island monastery of Herrenchiemsee in the Chiemsee lake of southern Bavaria.
Shortly before his death in 784, Virgilius initiated one of the earliest-known codices, the Liber confraternitatum ecclesiae S. Petri Salisburgensis (also known as the Salzburg Codex), an invaluable record that names a thousand deceased and living regal and ecclesiastical figures from across Europe, including the first nineteen abbots of Iona. St Boniface, his former nemesis, did not secure an entry. Virgilius was canonized in 1233 by Pope Gregory IX, ...

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