The Scoti Raids: When Irish Warriors Terrorised Romes Western Seaboard, 400-600 CE

In the chaotic decades following Rome's collapse, Irish warriors launched audacious raids across the Atlantic, striking coasts from Britain to distant Gallaecia in northwestern Spain. This groundbreaking history recovers a forgotten maritime world where currach-borne raiders demonstrated navigational sophistication rivaling any Mediterranean fleet, where the slave trade fueled Irish economies, and where British refugees fled Saxon pressure to establish new communities in Brittany and Spain. Drawing on chronicle accounts, archaeological evidence, and comparative analysis with later Viking raids, this work argues that historians have focused too narrowly on the Mediterranean, overlooking how the fifth-century Atlantic became a zone of connection as important as Rome's mare nostrum. The Scoti raids were agents of both destruction and creation, inflicting terrible suffering on Gallaecian communities while forging networks of exchange, migration, and cultural interaction that would shape the medieval Atlantic world and influence regional identities into the present. From ship technology to the human cost of violence, from the mythology of Irish-Iberian connections to Galicia's modern Celtic identity, this comprehensive study reveals how the Atlantic fringe was transformed during Rome's twilight into a dynamic maritime world that would persist through the Middle Ages and beyond.