King Constantine II: The formation of modern Scotland in the Alba period

So over the next two weeks I am going to write about Alba – the historical nation, not the party – and show how modern Scotland was formed during the Alba period when the House of Alpin and then the House of Dunkeld ruled over the territories which make up the modern mainland of Scotland. The Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland were very much later additions to the Scottish kingdom, it should be noted, and while the nation of Scotland/Alba dates back to the ninth century, the territory of modern Scotland was not finalised until the 15th and 16th centuries with, respectively, the absorption of Orkney in 1472 and the final division of the Debatable Lands in the Borders in the 1550s.

First of all, to deal with something that often causes confusion among those reading about the early history of Scotland – are Alba and Albion the same thing? The easy answer is no, because the early use by writers in Greek and Latin of Albion referred to the whole island of Great Britain, and it was only from the early ninth century that Alba came to be used to designate the kingdom of Scotland. It is therefore perfectly acceptable to refer to “perfidious Albion”, because we all know what that means and it has nothing to do with Scotland/Alba.

In the first part of this brief series, I will be concentrating on the remarkable figure of King Constantine II, one of the longest-ruling and most successful of all kings of Scots. I am aware that his name can be spelled “Constantin” or more widely “Causantin” – his name in Gaelic – but for convenience and so as not to confuse anyone, I will refer to him as Constantine. I wrote about him some years ago, but only briefly, and today I want to write a fuller account of Constantine and especially how he made Alba a reality.

Why this man, why this obscure figure in Scottish history? Two main reasons. One: it was he who really forged Alba, and under him the kingdom became known as Alba because he insisted on the name. Two: Constantine is reckoned by many historians to be the first true king of Scotland, and he should certainly not reside in obscurity.

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Professor Ted Cowan, no less – one of our finest historians – makes the case that Constantine II, the son of King Aed and grandson of Kenneth MacAlpin, has a greater claim to be known as the first king of Scotland than Kenneth, who is usually said to be the first. Though we do not know how it happened – battle or inter-marriage – Kenneth united the Picts of Fortriu and the Scots of Dalriada under his rule in 843. After Kenneth died, to be succeeded by his brother Donald and then his son Constantine I, Aed reigned for only a year before he was killed in 878. His Pictish throne passed to Giric, who also reigned for a year or two before Eochaid’s similarly short reign. Donald II, son of Constantine I, had the unfortunate epithet Dasachtach – or the Madman – but managed to reign for 11 years until his death in battle, most probably against Norse invaders, in 900.

In the prevailing Tanist system where a new king was chosen from among the royal family, rather than by primogeniture, Constantine II took the throne in 900 at the age of just 21. He would rule the united kingdoms of Picts and Scots for the next 43 years.

Cowan is quoted in Magnus Magnusson’s Scotland: History of a Nation saying this: “In my view, Constantin mac Aeda (Constantine II) was Scotland’s equivalent of England’s Alfred the Great, and he should be on the lips of every schoolchild in the country … He married members of his family into the Viking war-bands and bought peace with them [and] he manufactured a new origin myth for the ‘Scots’ to give them a pedigree which showed how the Picts and Scots were related.”

We’ll come to that last part later, because it is a crucial development in the long drawn-out war of propaganda that helped in the creation of Alba, and thus Scotland.

FIRST of all, however, what do we know of the reign of Constantine II? As always with that period of Scottish history, there is very little in writing to record the details and events of any Scottish life, including the kings of Scots. Most of the written sources of what happened in Scotland in the ninth and 10th centuries are either English – the Anglo Saxon Chronicle – or Irish, in the shape of the Annals. It may be that the early kings of Scots used the same oral tradition of their ancestors and had bards or seannachies to maintain their family histories. For instance, we do not know Constantine’s exact birthdate, though it was no later than 879, and we can be fairly sure he was raised in the warrior tradition of the MacAlpins, though after his father’s death he appears to have been sent to Ireland to be educated by monks.

Not long after he took the kingship in 900, Constantine proved his worth in the ongoing war to prevent the Norsemen conquering the whole of Scotland – they already controlled most of the islands round the coast and held sway over Galloway and the Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde.

Constantine II, King of Scotland married members of his family into the Viking war-bands

Norwegian Vikings from Dublin and Danes pushing up from Northumbria were a twin pincer that threatened Alba’s very existence. Now centred in Perthshire, Constantine took the war to the invaders and in 903 or 904 he went after a Norse army that had plundered Dunkeld. We do not know exactly where he fought them, but somewhere in what is now Strathearn he inspired his men with the relics of St Columba and won a decisive victory.

From the Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, compiled centuries later, we learn what happened: “Bravely indeed the men of Alba fought this battle, for Columcille (Columba) was aiding them; for they had prayed to him most fervently, because he was their apostle, and it was through him that they received the faith.

“The men of Alba, both lay and clerics, fasted and prayed till morning to God and Columcille; they made earnest entreaty to the Lord; they gave great alms of food and raiment to the churches and the poor, received the body of the Lord at the hands of their priests, and promised to do all kinds of good works, as their clergy would order them, and that their standard in going forth to any battle should be the crozier of Columcille.”

A great victory it was indeed, the Norse leadership being killed and many thousands of them driven out of Scotland entirely.

Now in command of all of Alba, the very Christian Constantine introduced new religious rites that were more in conformity with those practised by the Scots than the Picts. With this activity, he can either be seen as a divisive figure or a unifying force, but there’s no doubt he made Alba more in the mainstream of the church at the time.

THE Chronicles of the Picts and Scots recorded: “And in the sixth year Constantine the king and Cellach the bishop (of St Andrews) devoted themselves to guard the laws and discipline of the faith and rights of the church and the evangel on a footing of equality with the Scots.”

That process contributed to the replacement – indeed the annihilation – of Pictish language and culture with Gaelic. He did preserve the Pictish standing stones, however, which are the best clues we have to these mysterious people.

Constantine’s Alba was a small kingdom, but he had ambitions, and they lay to the south. First of all, however, he reorganised the government of Alba, creating provinces ruled by mormaers – earls by another name.

Christian though he was, Constantine married off his daughter to the pagan King Olaf of Dublin, an alliance that ensured that the west coast of Strathclyde was not attacked by the Irish-based Vikings, who back in 870 had besieged the Strathclyde capital of Dumbarton and carried off hundreds of people into slavehood.

He also made an alliance with the kingdom of Northumbria, which had sovereignty over the east coast from York as far north as what is now Edinburgh. In 918 he joined with Ealdred I of Bamburgh to fight the Battle of Corbridge against the occupying Norse-Irish forces of Ragnall ua Ímair. The accounts of the battle describe how Constantine’s Alba army smashed the Norse columns, but were attacked in the rear and the action was broken off.

A similar but mostly unrecorded battle soon afterwards saw the end of Northumbrian attempts to invade Scotland, but the next threat to Alba would come from the Anglo-Saxons. Athelstan was now determined to unite England under the House of Wessex and he had a vision of himself as master of all Britain.

Invading Alba in 927, Athelstan failed to come to battle with Constantine, but in 937, it was Constantine who went south to ally with his son-in-law Olaf Guthfrithson of Dublin and Owen the King of Strathclyde. In the mighty battle of Brunanburh, Athelstan’s force prevailed and Constantine returned to Alba a defeated king with his son lying dead on the battlefield.

A shattered man, Constantine ruled only six years more before abdicating in 943 to live out his days as a monk in a monastery, probably at St Andrews where he died in 952.

His long reign created a new kind of kingship for Alba – one that lasted for two centuries. No mean feat.

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But what about his legacy to Scotland, as mentioned earlier? Quoting Professor Cowan, Magnus Magnusson described how Constantine ingeniously added to the myth surrounding the Stone of Destiny: “The ‘original’ Scottish origin myth traced the lineage of the Scoti back to Biblical times: they were descended from an Egyptian princess named Scota, the daughter of the Pharaoh of the Oppression [Ramses II, 1304-1237 BC]. This enterprising princess left Egypt shortly after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. She wandered for 1200 years in the deserts of the eastern Mediterranean, before crossing to Sicily and making her way through the Pillars of Hercules [Straits of Gibraltar] through Spain and then across to Ireland.

“In her baggage she brought the block of sandstone, weighing 152kg, which was reputed to have been used as a pillow by Jacob when, according to Genesis 28, he had his celebrated dream about Jacob’s Ladder … From the east coast of Ireland, Scota beheld her own Promised Land – Scotland – and crossed over to it with Jacob’s sacred stone [The Stone of Destiny].

“Constantine II, according to Ted Cowan, made a significant addition to this imaginative account: he instructed his bards to give Scota a husband – Gaedel Glas (Gathelos), a prince of Scythia and ancestor of the Picts. That gave the Picts and Scots a common ancestry, as a deliberate part of the nation-building on which Constantine II was engaged. As part of the redefining of the new integrated kingdom, Scota’s far-travelled stone was moved to Scone, where it was put to use as the seat on which the rulers of the united Scottish kingdom were inaugurated – the ‘Stone of Scone’ or ‘Stone of Destiny’, as it came to be called.”

So it is to Constantine II that we owe not only the name Alba, but also the Stone of Destiny’s place in our Scottish history. Next week we’ll find out how Alba developed in a period when foul and bloody murder –not to mention all-out warfare with the English – dominated life in Scotland over many decades.