ABSTRACT
In 1177 the Anglo-Norman adventurer John de Courcy conquered the kingdom of the Ulaid and established his own lordship based upon its historical center in and around Downpatrick. This action brought to an end one of the most enduring polities in Irish history. In his “Life of Patrick,” the late-seventh-century writer Muirchú described the territory of the Ulothi as lying between the Boyne and the Lagan. The same territory seems to be ascribed to the Uoluntii by the Greco-Roman geographer Ptolemy in the second century A.D. In the Ulster Cycle, surviving in literary texts from the eighth century onward, the territory of the Ulaid was said, in pre-Patrician times, to have extended over the whole of Ireland north of the Boyne, but the coincidence of Ptolemy’s and Muirchú’s location of the tribe makes this seem unlikely. It should also be noted that Ptolemy’s Isamnion (O. I. Emain) is a coastal promontory in County Down and not the site near Armagh city with which the medieval authors identified it.
