User:Angusmclellan/Ciniod
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Kenneth (died 13 February 858) was, according to some versions of national myth, the first king of Scots. The contemporary record, although limited for northern Britain in the ninth century, shows that he was in fact one of the last kings of the Picts. In modern scholarship, he is generally referred to as Cináed or Cináed mac Ailpín, the Classical Gaelic version of his name, although other Pictish kings with the same name are normally called Ciniod.
Cináed | |
---|---|
King of the Picts | |
Reign | 840s–858 |
Predecessor | see text |
Successor | Domnall mac Ailpín |
Burial | |
Issue | Constantín Áed Máel Muire perhaps others |
House | House of Alpin |
Father | Alpín |
The great majority of the kings who ruled in Pictland, in the kingdom of Alba, and then in the kingdom of Scotland until the end of the High Middle Ages belonged to the House of Alpin and traced their descent from Cináed. The earliest genealogies, dating from a century and a half after his death, make Cináed a descendant of the Cenél nGabráin kings of Dál Riata. More nearly contemporary evidence suggests that the family may have had links to Argyll.
According to myth, Cináed destroyed the Pictish kingdom and founded a new kingdom of the Scots in eastern and central Scotland with its heartland in the valleys of the River Tay and its tributaries. The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba gives some details of Cináed's reign, although these cannot be confirmed from the Irish annals or the surviving records of Anglo-Saxon England. Later writers added a great deal of perhaps unreliable detail to the accounts of Cináed's life.