'the terrible battles in which the Romans conquered Ireland.'
Posted by Robert on November 27, 2022, 10:52 am
I have just read the above title as part of Gregor Tassie's review of the six CD edition of combined works of Beethoven and Gerald Barry. In the interests of accuracy and just in case there is anyone who does not know. The Romans never conquered Ireland, indeed they never set foot on the island. The name Giraldis Cambrensis makes it abundantly clear where he was from: Cambria, i.e. the Latin Cymru. As such he was part of one of the earliest conquests of Ireland, not by the Romans but by the Norman Welsh and English beginning in 1169 and quickly placed under the command of Henry II, King of England. Furthermore we are talking about the late 12th century AD by which time the Western Roman Empire and its presence on the island of Great Britain, to all intents and purposes, had not existed for seven hundred years or so. It remained in existence as the Byzantine Empire. In the late 12th century the Byzantine Empire had more than enough on its plate with crusading Christians, Serbian and Bulgarian dissention and the unstoppable rise of the Seljuk Turks, without daring to contemplate a possible conquest of Ireland. For what it's worth Cambrensis' Expugnatio Hibernica is a textbook example of colonial ideology in its portrayal of the native people of Ireland as utterly different, inferior, barbarian, and cursed by God and nature.
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