The Varangian Guard

One outlet for frustrated Englishmen lay in the east, reached only after an arduous journey via the trade routes that traversed the North Sea, the Baltic and thence via the Dnieper and the land of Rus to the Black Sea and Byzantium. The elite imperial troops of the city of Constantinople were traditionally recruited from amongst the peoples of the north, the so-called Varangian Guard, ‘the men of the pledge’, ‘the axe-bearers’. As early as the 1040s, John Raphael, the Byzantine emperor’s ‘protosparthios’, commanding a Varangian regiment in southern Italy, was in correspondence with England; his lead seal was rediscovered fairly recently in an archaeological dig at Winchester. The events of 1066 led to a great increase in the number of displaced or dispossessed Anglo-Saxons seeking refuge on the coast of the Bosphorus. By the 1080s, perhaps as many as 1,000 Englishmen were attached to the Varangian guard. Some of them are said to have established a settlement, known as ‘New England’, in the Crimea. Long before the Pilgrim Fathers sailed for America, England may already have spawned its first ‘colony’ as a direct result of the Norman Conquest.

In the aftermath of much later events in the Crimea, following the Crimean war of the 1850s and the setting up of the English camp at Scutari on the Bosphorus, the tombstones of various of the Varangian exiles from England, inscribed with their names and epitaphs, were discovered still lying about, more or less neglected in the city of Constantinople. The inscriptions were copied, but the copies were then burned in a fire in 1870. By the time that anyone returned to the stones themselves, hoping that they might be taken to Scutari for safe keeping, they had been smashed up for rubble. Thus perished, in the shadow of Florence Nightingale’s new English hospital, the last vestiges of the old English aristocracy itself forced into Byzantine exile by the ancestors of the very men who in the 1850s commanded Queen Victoria’s Crimean expeditionary force, the lords Raglan (son of the Duke of Beaufort), Cardigan (of the Brudenell family, introduced from France in the thirteenth century) and Lucan (alias George Bingham, an English name, although a grandson of the distinctly French-sounding Earl of Fauconberg, derived from Fauquembergues to the east of Boulogne, from whence came the Fauconbergs settled in Yorkshire by the early twelfth century). So tenacious was the aristocratic hold over land, and so close the connection between Norman ancestry (even spurious or conveniently invented Norman ancestry) and aristocracy that in popular mythology the Charge of the Light Brigade risked the shedding of almost as much Norman blood as William the Conqueror’s great charge at Hastings.

In the meantime, in the 1080s and 90s, the Varangians, including the Anglo-Saxons amongst their ranks, would have witnessed two highly poignant encounters, in October 1081 (fifteen years almost to the day since the Battle of Hastings), at Durazzo on the shores of the Adriatic, when, in a rerun of earlier events, the Varangians serving the Byzantine emperor clashed with and were defeated by a Norman fleet now seeking their fortunes in southern Italy, and again in 1096, when Bohemond of Taranto and his Normans were received in Constantinople, together with Duke Robert, the eldest son of William the Conqueror, King of England, at the start of that great venture known as the First Crusade. The frosty reception extended by Byzantium to the French-speaking crusaders perhaps owed something to the bitterness with which the Anglo-Saxons now exiled in Constantinople regarded their Norman guests.