Irish Claddagh rings have an unexpected history—it involves pirates.
You’ve seen the iconic heirloom with two hands clasping a crowned heart. Do you know its history?
Nearly 350 years ago, a teenage Richard Joyce waited for the ship that would carry him from Galway across the Atlantic Ocean. A son of a once wealthy merchant family, Joyce was being sent to the West Indies to start his new life as an indentured servant.
Joyce would never make it to the Caribbean. A twist of fate would instead see him return home 14 years later, with the smithing skills to craft one of Ireland’s most enduring symbols of love, loyalty, and friendship: the Claddagh ring.
Named after the small fishing village opposite Galway city, the Claddagh ring depicts two hands clasping a crowned heart. Similar rings, known as “fede” or fidelity rings, had been worn throughout the Mediterranean since Roman times, but Joyce is credited with introducing a crown into the design sometime in the 1690s.
The Celtic band is a common family heirloom, traditionally passed down from mother to daughter, who would give it to her husband-to-be. Over the centuries, famine, poverty, and war saw the Irish diaspora settle across the world. Migrants pawned their jewelry to pay for passage or brought their treasure to new lands.
The Claddagh ring persists today as both an icon of affection and Irish ancestry. But what are its true origins? Historians untangle what we know about Joyce and the ring he’s credited with creating.
Pirates and corsairs in Europe
Two decades before Richard Joyce was born, a burgeoning uprising in Galway was put down by English forces and the city’s 14 influential merchant families, including Joyce’s, were forced to give up their land and businesses. It’s likely Joyce was following in the footsteps of relatives by traveling to the Caribbean to start a new life.
According to historian James Hardiman, Joyce’s ship was intercepted by Algerine corsairs shortly after setting sail from Galway in 1675. Fifteen-year-old Joyce was captured along with everyone else onboard—a mix of other indentured servants, merchants, and crew–and taken to a slave market in Algiers to be sold at auction.
Corsairs were a real danger in the late 1600s. Ottoman territories like Algeria were almost wholly autonomous but lacked an official navy, relying on corsairs to protect their coasts.
In theory, pirates plunder and pillage outside the law, while corsairs were privateers regulated by authorities. In practice, the line between the pirates and corsairs was often blurred. Both raided ships and villages across the Mediterranean, sometimes marauding as far as Iceland, and ransoming their Christian captives.
“At times whole squadrons of corsairs were cruising off the coast of the United Kingdom,” says Bernard Capp, emeritus professor of history at The University of Warwick and author of British Slaves and Barbary Corsairs. The British navy was spread too thin to repel corsairs from its coastline, leaving sailors with the difficult choice of either braving the seas or watching their families sink into poverty.
It’s estimated nearly one million European slaves were captured between the 16th and 19th centuries. Rich captives could buy their freedom while the less wealthy were sold as slaves, most of them forced to work manual labor on ships, farms or in mines in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
Joyce learns to craft jewelry
In Algiers, Joyce was bought by a wealthy Turkish goldsmith. It is unclear whether Joyce remained in Algiers with his new master, was transported elsewhere around northern Africa, or shipped back to Constantinople.
Hardiman writes that Joyce was a “tractable and ingenious” craftsman who quickly became adept in soldering, casting, inlaying and many other skills required of a medieval jeweler. Iranian-style jewelry studded with jade and other precious stones were popular during the Ottoman period, and Joyce may have applied his newfound skills to crafting rings, earrings, necklaces, and intricate jeweled turban aigrettes.
When William III became King of England in 1689, he immediately negotiated the release of all his subjects enslaved in Algeria, including Joyce. Joyce’s master supposedly offered him half his property and his only daughter’s hand in marriage to stop him from leaving, Hardiman wrote. Joyce refused and returned to Galway to work as a goldsmith, where he is said to have created the first Claddagh ring.
Romantics say Joyce made the ring for his fiancée, who was still waiting for him when he returned, while others suggest he met a new woman. Either way, historical records show Joyce eventually fathered three daughters, and died around 1737.
Joyce’s most famous creation was the latest development in the long history of fede rings. Derived from the Italian word for trust, these rings depicting two clasping hands were commonly used in ancient Rome, typically as a wedding ring or symbol of faithful love.
Even though they’d been used since medieval times, fede rings became a popular motif in both northern and southern Europe during the 12th century. A heart was added sometime in the 16th Century, and Joyce is credited with crowning the heart before 1700.
“Fede rings at that time avoided associations with royalty, so the addition of a crown would have been very intentional. Joyce may have added it as a tribute to the king for helping him get his freedom,” says Eoin O’Neill of Galway City Museum.
Teasing history from myth
Walk around Galway’s crowded quay and you’ll overhear a dozen different stories of the Claddagh ring’s origin. One says it was dropped into a maiden’s lap by an eagle, another suggests the ring was a clandestine mark of Irish resistance against the English.
“Ireland is full of history and myth mixed together. It’s sometimes hard to [separate] one from the other,” says O’Neill.
Official records are scant and there is no concrete proof of Joyce’s odyssey, but O’Neill says Hardiman’s history of Galway, published in 1820, provides the closest contemporaneous record of events. “It’s possible that someone recounted this story to Hardiman who knew Joyce personally,” says O’Neill.
Once belonging to a private collector, the oldest known Claddagh ring was sold to Galway City Museum in 2021, where it now sits overlooking the Claddagh waterfront. Dated circa 1700, the central heart motif is wonky and lacks the definition of a perfect heart, but Joyce’s stamp is still visible inside the band. Joyce’s mark, combined with Hardiman’s account, points to him as the creator of the Claddagh design, says O'Neill.
“When you see somebody with a Claddagh ring abroad, it always inspires a conversation. Jewelry is at its best when it has a power, and these certainly do. They have given us an identity,” says Phyllis MacNamara, owner of Cobwebs jewelry shop in Galway.
