[LINK] "Another New England — in Crimea"

[rfmcdonald]

Strange Maps' Frank Jacobs recently turned up something astonishing: For centuries, a Byzantine-sponsored colony of English migrants who fled the Norman conquest existed on the Crimean peninsula.

“I don't want to change the world”, sang Billy Bragg in the early 1980s, “I'm just looking for a New England.” Some nine centuries earlier, a similar thought must have crossed the mind of an obscure Saxon nobleman as he sailed away from his recently vanquished homeland.

The story goes that in 1075, a Siward, earl of Gloucester led a flotilla from England into the Mediterranean. Onboard was the flower of England's native aristocracy, disenfranchised by the Norman Conquest of 1066. They reached Constantinople, gaining permission from the emperor to settle in Byzantine lands on the Black Sea's northern shore — if they could reconquer them.

They did, and founded a Nova Anglia, the towns of which echoed the names of the ones the settlers had left behind. No trace of the colony remains today, but this New England (on the Crimean peninsula, and immediately to its east) must have survived for at least a few hundred years. Well into the 14th century, the New Englanders' annual Christmas greetings to the emperor were conveyed “in their native language, English.”

[. . .]

The Norman conquerors, no doubt glad to be rid of this troublesome bunch, may have directed the English émigrés to recent conquests by their kinsmen in the Mediterranean. En route to Sicily, the English fleet ravaged Ceuta, seized Majorca and Minorca, but eventually laid a course for Constantinople after hearing of heathens besieging the imperial capital.