As I read the section in Madden about the Fourth Crusade, I saw that a group known as the Varangian Guard were mentioned several times. I thought it was an elite Byzantine unit but it turns out that they were actually Anglo-Saxon mercenaries. Apparently, following the Norman conquest of England, there was a substantial emigration of Saxons and some former Housecarls found employment in the Emperor's bodyguard, the Varangian Guard. The descendants of these English immigrants comprised the Guard encountered by the Crusaders in 1204.
As a unit, the Varangian Guard dated back to the mid-tenth century, when Constantine Porphyrogenitus recruited Christianized Russians (Scandinavian migrants, mostly) to act as marines. Their ferocity eventually earned them a position as imperial guards. At the battle of Manzikert, the Guard was virtually wiped out, defending the Emperor to the last man. This probably allowed for the Saxons to acquire positions within the rebuilt unit.
Unlike the provincial Byzantine forces, the Varangians apparently put up a good fight during the Crusader assaults on Constantinople, using their two-handed battle-axes to devastating effect. Here's an interesting link about the Saxons' role in the Guard: http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/articles/pappas1.htm
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Fascinating stuff! Something I know very little about...De Re Militari has been shifting their website around, as well as adding new material, but I don't think this is recent, I've simply never looked at this area or era. The old theme, a la Sir Walter Scott, is that the Norman/Saxon conflict lasted for decades. As far a I know, that was not the case (certainly not by the time of the Third Crusade, despite Scott's novels), but in those decades after the Conquest of 1066, there certainly was a lot of "ethnic conflict" of one sort or another. Interesting that there was actually a sort-of refugee population... Fascinating stuff!
ReplyDeleteI first heard of the guard when reading about a scandanavian succession. Princess Zoey actually toyed with the idea of marrying one of the commanders who subsequently went back to the baltic to stake a claim.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea they were still in existence by the time of the sack of Byzantium however.
Its interesting that Western and Eastern Europe were more intertwined than I first thought. I guess I had imagined Western Medieval Europe being completely separate and having no contact with the Byzantine Empire, but as I've read about the Crusades I've come to realize that they were both in quite a bit of contact with one another, as there have been references to many letters between the nobility of Constantinople and the papacy in Italy. Obviously they were aware of the presence of one another... and this is just one more example of how people from Western Europe were interacting with people from Eastern Europe.
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