It is towards the middle or close of the fourth century that we come into much closer historical contact with the Irish, and indeed we know with some certainty a good deal about their internal history, manners, laws, language, and institutions from that time to the present. Of course if we can trust Irish sources we know a great deal about them for even seven or eight hundred years before this. The early Irish annalist, Tighearnach,[15] who died in 1088, and who had of course the records of the earliest Irish writers--so far as they had escaped extinction by the Danes--before his eyes when he wrote, and who quotes frequently and judiciously from Josephus, St. Jerome, Bede, and other authors, was of opinion, after weighing evidence and comparing Irish with foreign writers, that the _monumenta Scotorum_, or records of the Irish prior to Cimbaeth (_i.e._, about 300 B.C.) were uncertain. This means that from that time forwards he at least considered that the substance of Irish history as handed down to us might, to say the least of it, be more or less relied upon. Cimbaeth was the founder of Emania, the capital of Ulster, the home of the Red Branch knights, which flourished for 600 years and which figures so conspicuously in the saga-cycle of Cuchulain. What then--for we pass over for the present the colonies of Partholan, the Tuatha De Danann, and the Nemedians, leaving them to be dealt with among the myths--have our native bards and annalists to say of these six or seven centuries? As several of the best and greatest of Irish sagas deal with events within this period, we can--if bardic accounts, probably first committed to writing about the sixth or seventh century may at all be trusted--to some extent recall its leading features, or reconstruct them. [1] Milesius is the ordinary Latinised form of the Irish Miledh; the real name of Milesius was Golamh, but he was surnamed Miledh Easpáin, or the Champion of Spain. He himself never landed in Ireland. [2] 1016 according to O'Flaherty, in the eighth century B.C. according to Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, but as far back as 1700 B.C. according to the chronology of the "Four Masters." Nennius, the Briton who wrote in the time of Charlemagne, gives two different accounts of the landing of the Irish, one evidently representing the British tradition, and the other that of the Irish themselves, of which he says _sic mihi peritissimi Scotorum nunciaverunt_. Both these accounts make the Irish come from Spain, the first being that three sons of a certain Miles of Spain landed in Ireland from Spain at the third attempt. According to what the Irish told him they reached Ireland from Spain 1,002 years after flying from Egypt.