The medieval New England : a forgotten Anglo-Saxon colony on the north-eastern Black Sea coast
Although the name New England is now firmly associated with the east coast of America, this is not the first place to be called that. In the medieval period there was another
Nova Anglia, New England , and it lay far to the east of England, rather than to the west, in the area of the Crimean peninsula. The following post examines some of the evidence relating to this colony, which was said to have been established by Anglo-Saxon exiles after the Norman conquest of 1066 and seems to have survived at least as late as the thirteenth century.
There may have been another, older New England
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If it indeed existed, New England was founded by English refugees fleeing William The Conqueror, depicted here hanging with his buddies.
Photo: Hulton Archive (Getty Images)
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What it’s about: The other, older New England! When William The Conqueror, well, conquered Merry Olde England in the 11th century, some refugees fled to nearby Scotland or Ireland, and some fled all the way to Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire eventually granted them territory near the Black Sea which they named New England… or did they?
Published:
January 27, 2021 at 11:36 am
“When Pope Urban had said these and very many similar things in his urbane discourse, he so influenced to one purpose the desires of all who were present that they cried out, ‘It is the will of God! It is the will of God!’’’
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So wrote the monk Robert of Rheims in his
Historia Hierosolymitana (‘History of Jerusalem’) during the early 1100s. Some years earlier, on 27 November 1095, Urban II preached a public sermon outside the town of Clermont in central France, summoning Christians to take part in the First Crusade, a new form of holy war. It was a carefully stage-managed event, in which the pope’s representative, the papal legate Adhémar of Le Puy, supposedly moved by the pope’s eloquence, tore up strips of cloth to make crosses for the crowds. Urban had been travelling through France accompanied by a large entourage from Italy, dedicating cathedrals and churches and presiding over reforming c