The Battle of Dollar was fought in about 875, when a Viking army defeated the forces of Constantine I, king of the Picts, at Dollar in what is now Clackmannanshire and drove the survivors back into the highlands of Atholl. It was a heavy defeat for the native kingdom of northern Britain and one of a run of Viking successes in Pictland during the 870s.
The Viking force had grown out of the Great Heathen Army that had earlier campaigned against the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. Operating from a base in the north of England, it turned to raid the lands of the Picts and the Britons of Strathclyde. Contemporary annals record only the outcome and its scale rather than the details of the fighting: one Irish chronicle notes a great slaughter of the Picts, and a later Scottish account speaks of the defeated being annihilated at Atholl.
Constantine survived the battle itself but was killed by Vikings in a separate engagement roughly a year later, at a place in Fife that the sources do not agree on, commonly identified with Inverdovat near Newport-on-Tay. His death is dated by different sources to 876 or 877. The chronology of this whole period is uncertain, and the surviving records are thin, but the reality of sustained and destructive warfare is clear: the Picts effectively vanish from the historical record after the upheavals of 875 to 878.
The chronicle that records the defeat at Dollar is often noted for a subtler detail: it is around this point that a native Scottish source first calls the beaten army the Scoti, where earlier it would have named them Picts. The generation that was crushed by the Vikings in the 870s sits on the fault line between the vanishing Pictish kingdom and the Gaelic-speaking realm of Alba that would grow into the kingdom of Scotland.
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