Somerled(c. 1113–1164)

Somerled, Somhairle in Gaelic and Sumarliði in Old Norse, was born around 1113 into the mixed Norse and Gaelic aristocracy of the western seaboard, most probably on Morvern or the Sound of Mull. His father Gillebride was a Gaelic lord whose family had been driven out of Argyll by the Norse expansion of the late eleventh century. The world Somerled was born into had been Norse for two centuries: the Western Isles, the Isle of Man, Caithness and Sutherland all paid tribute to the kings of Norway through the Kingdom of Mann.

By the late 1130s Somerled had become the unrivalled war-leader of the Argyll Gaels, retaking the lands his family had lost and styling himself Rí Innse Gall, King of the Hebrides. In 1140 he married Ragnhild, daughter of Olaf the Red, King of Mann, a match that tied the rising Gaelic power to the Norse royal house and produced the sons through whom his line continued.

His defining achievement came in 1156. On the night of the Epiphany, 5 to 6 January, Somerled met the fleet of Godred the Black of Mann in the Sound of Islay in a sea battle that lasted through the dark and into the dawn. By morning he had won the southern Hebrides, from Ardnamurchan down through Mull, Islay, Jura, Coll and Tiree. Two years later he extended his rule across the whole Norse-Gaelic west, from the Mull of Kintyre to the Butt of Lewis. The Lordship of the Isles, the great sea-kingdom that would dominate the western seaboard for the next three centuries, dates from this moment.

Somerled ruled the western sea as an independent Gaelic prince, with his own fleet of galleys the maritime power on which the whole Lordship would rest. In his last years he was the patron of Saddell Abbey on the Kintyre coast, the Cistercian foundation that became one of the religious centres of the Isles and the place of his burial.

The line he founded did not break. His son Reginald inherited the southern islands; Reginald's son Donald gave the family the name Clan Donald carries to this day. By the fourteenth century Somerled's descendants ruled an autonomous Gaelic state from Finlaggan on Islay, with their own parliament, their own coinage and their own fleet, and the MacDonalds went on to become the largest of the Highland clans and to fight alongside Bruce at Bannockburn. The Macdonald name in its many spellings, MacDonell, McDonnell and Donald, descends from Somerled, and the title Lord of the Isles is carried by the heir to the Crown to this day.