A History of War in 100 Battles. Richard Overy

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      An engraving by Henry Warren (1794–1879) shows the death of the elderly Brian Boru at the hand of Brodar the Dane during the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

      It was here that a large contingent from overseas, together with men from Leinster and the Dublin Vikings, though not their king, gathered to do battle with Brian’s forces, who had been raiding the surrounding area to squeeze money and food out of the local Christian communities. The only extensive account of the battle comes from the Cocad Gáedel re Gallaib (The War of the Irish with the Foreigners), but it is light on detail. Both sides fought in much the same way, with shield walls to protect the fighting men, and dependence on sheer brute force and savagery. Hardly impartial, the Cocad describes the Viking forces as possessing arrows that were ‘terrible, piercing, fatal, murderous, poisoned’, steeped in the blood of ‘dragons and toads’, while Brian’s Irish wielded swords that were ‘glittering, flashing, brilliant, handsome, straight’. There was, in truth, little difference in the weaponry available to both sides; the difference may well have come in the numbers fielded, but the size of the two armies is simply guesswork.

      The rebels were probably drawn up as the annals describe, with the Vikings who had come from overseas in the front, including warriors and commanders from York, the Orkney Islands, the western Scottish coast and the Isle of Man, backed up by the Irish Vikings and finally with the men of Leinster in the rear. The medieval account has Brian’s son, Murchad, leading the men of Munster into the fray, to die in the attempt, supported by some mercenary Norsemen, while the men of Mide under Máel Sechnaill and a reserve from Munster held the rear. But the battle was almost certainly a confused, blood-soaked mêlée as each side endeavoured to encircle and slaughter the other. The clash of mail and armour, the roars and cries of the fighting men and the dying, and the growing mound of gore on the battlefield can be imagined without much difficulty.

      After a dozen hours of exhausting combat, Brian’s army won the day. The Viking invaders found that their ships had been dispersed as the tide went out. By the time the battle ended, the tide was high again (a fact confirmed by more modern calculations), cutting off any retreat along the coast. They were pushed back into the sea where, it is to be presumed, many drowned. How many died will never be known, but at the end of a fight in which both sides suffered heavy losses, it is unlikely that quarter was ever considered.

      When the fog of battle cleared it was found that Brian’s son Murchad and his teenage grandson Tairdelbach had both been killed, Murchard with his legendary twin swords, hewing Vikings left and right, until one of them disemboweled him with a knife. The principal victim of the battle was Brian Bóruma himself. A man of seventy-three by the time of Clontarf (some annals have him in his eighties), he sat in a tent praying while the battle went on. A band of Danes, wandering from the fight, came across his tent and, according to the Cocad, Brian was killed with an axe through his head, though not before he had cut off his attacker’s left leg and right foot. Brian’s death did not alter the outcome. Sigtrygg remained in Dublin, but his brief ambition to use the arrival of a large fleet of Viking invaders to secure dominance of Ireland, a menace to Irish independence much greater than the threat of a local rebellion, was eliminated in the aftermath of Clontarf and its legendary defence of a fractious Irish liberty.

      Traditional Italian accounts of the battle between a group of northern Italian communes and the famous German emperor-soldier Frederick Barbarossa amidst the woods and vineyards near the town of Legnano in northern Lombardy always held that the Italians were greatly outnumbered by their German enemy and achieved victory only because they were spurred on by a profound Italian patriotism. Recent research now shows the reverse case: an estimated 3,000 German heavy cavalry against 10–12,000 infantry and an unknown number of horsemen. In truth, even with these odds, the two sides were unevenly matched. In late medieval warfare, it was assumed that any disciplined body of professional knights-at-arms would sweep aside a mass of citizen infantry; led by the fearsome Barbarossa, a commander of prodigious reputation, the odds would have seemed more loaded still. The victory did, indeed, defy those odds to demonstrate that motivated foot soldiers could defeat even the most heavily armed and experienced cavalry.