Old New England

What do you know about the founding of New England?

No, not that New England, the other one.  Although there are some significant parallels, notably a king in a completely different country granting settlers land despite the fact that he didn't own it and it inconveniently happened to be already occupied by someone else.  (Hardly the only time this has happened, of course.  See the history of South and Central America, Indonesia, India, and pretty much the entire continent of Africa for other notable examples.)

This particular New England is on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea, in what is now Ukraine and Russia.  According to three medieval manuscripts -- the French Chronicon Universale Anonymi Laudunensis, Orderic Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History, and the Icelandic Játvarðar Saga -- it was founded in the late eleventh century by a group of pissed-off Anglo-Saxon noblemen who, after the Norman Invasions of 1066, didn't like that the country had been taken over by a bunch of Frenchmen, so decided to up stakes and leave.  There's some indication that they were led by prominent English thegn Siward Barn, who had been imprisoned by William the Conqueror, and after being released in 1087 disappears from the records entirely.

This, apparently, may have been because he went to Constantinople.

The English group was mostly made up of powerful and wealthy landowners; after the Conquest, the peasant class pretty much went on with their miserable lives just as before, only with new kings and masters.  Most of them probably reacted to William's accession to the throne the same way these guys did:

"King of the who?"

In any case, Siward and his disaffected noblemen decided to take off for greener pastures (figuratively, not literally, as it turned out) and sailed to the Mediterranean, sacking the city of Ceuta near the Straits of Gibraltar, and pillaging and plundering their way from Mallorca to Menorca to Sicily (which at that point was also being run by the Normans).

It was in Sicily where they found out that Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenos was in trouble from Muslim invaders (and also from the goddamn Normans, who just would not mind their own business), so they decided to head over to Constantinople and give him a hand.  The battle went poorly for the Muslims (ultimately they'd come back and pretty much take over the place, but this was a significant setback, at least for the time being); the Normans were routed completely, and limped back to Sicily to regroup and figure out who they would annoy next.  Alexius was grateful enough to tell the English they could stay in Constantinople permanently if they wanted.  Siward said thanks but no thanks -- figuring, probably correctly, that he'd remain in a subservient position if they stayed there, and after all that was why they'd left England in the first place -- and asked Alexius if he had any other deals to offer.

Alexius said "Sure do," and described a region on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea that Siward and his friends could have.  This was ignoring the aforementioned minor details that (1) Alexius didn't own the land in question, and (2) someone else did.  So it was no skin off his nose either way.  But Siward thought that sounded just ducky, and after all they'd already proven to everyone they could pillage with the best of 'em, so they took off for the spot in question, wiped out the people who lived there, and settled down.

They called the spot "New England."  They named some towns they founded "London," "York," and "Sussex," amongst others named after "other great towns in England."  Eventually they intermarried with the local population (what was left of it), and were assimilated into the Byzantine, and ultimately the Russian, Empires.

The most reliable of the three sources, Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History, spells out in detail how it all went down:

[They] went into voluntary exile so that they might either find in banishment freedom from the power of the Normans or secure foreign help and come back and fight a war of vengeance.  Some of them who were still in the flower of their youth travelled into remote lands and bravely offered their arms to Alexius, emperor of Constantinople, a man of great wisdom and nobility...  This is the reason for the exodus of the English Saxons to Ionia; the emigrants and their heirs faithfully served the holy empire, and are still honored among the Greeks by the Emperor, nobility, and people alike.

It's a pretty fantastic story, but is it true?

As amazing as it sounds, it appears to be.  It's attested in three unrelated sources -- details differ some, but they all substantially agree on the main points.  Further, linguist Ottar Grønvik found distinctive West Germanic -- i.e., Anglo-Saxon -- words, morphology, and syntax in Crimean Gothic, a Germanic language spoken in the region until the sixteenth century.  Most strikingly, there are still place names on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea that seem to come from this settlement; notably a Londina River and a town named Susacho (from "Sussex" -- later renamed Novorossiysk by the Russians).

None of which is proof, of course.  My training as a linguist impressed upon me the danger of taking chance sound or spelling correspondences as hard evidence of an etymological common root.  But I have to admit that the case still seems pretty strong to me.

So there you have it; a New England that pre-dated the more famous one by five centuries.  It'd be interesting to do some DNA testing of the people who live there now and see if there are any discernible traces of English ancestry.  Not that it's likely to happen soon; the coast of the Black Sea is once again a pretty dangerous place to wander around.  But curious to think that almost a thousand years ago, some Anglo-Saxon long-distance soldiers-for-hire may have settled there, never to see Merrie Old England again.

****************************************

Ballard, the Black Sea, and the bible

Biblical literalists are crowing with delight over a recent news story that is being widely reported (and subsequently linked and circulated all over the place).  Most iterations of this piece have titles like the version I found on ABC News Online: "New Evidence Suggests Biblical Flood Happened, Says Robert Ballard."

The upshot of the story is that Ballard, a prominent archaeologist (and the man whose team located the Titanic), believes that the Black Sea may have once been the site of a catastrophic flood.  What is now a deep, salty body of water was once a freshwater lake whose surface was far below sea level -- the seawater being held back from filling it by an ice dam across what is now the Straits of Bosporus.  As the weather warmed up following the last ice age, the ice dam receded and finally collapsed, allowing for a sudden, huge inrush of water from the Mediterranean, filling the Black Sea to its current level and drowning anyone who was in the way.

Such events are thought to have occurred elsewhere.  A flood of that sort seems to have happened in the current St. Lawrence Seaway (dumping enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to stop the Atlantic Conveyor for a time and causing a second, shorter ice age), and the Columbia River Valley (creating the "Channeled Scablands" of eastern Washington and Oregon).  So Ballard's idea is fascinating, and quite in line with our current understanding of glacial geology.  Further, it's not unprecedented to have a real event recalled, and mythologized, often many centuries after it happened; so it's entirely possible that this event was the origin of the biblical flood story, and also similar accounts in other traditions (such as the flood mentioned in Gilgamesh).

But of course, this is not how it was reported.  The story strongly implies that Ballard is saying that his evidence indicates that the "Great Flood of Noah" actually occurred, as described in the bible -- which is an outright misrepresentation of Ballard's position.

Don't believe me?  Here are actual quotes from the ABC News Online article:

The story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events.

Now Ballard is using even more advanced robotic technology to travel farther back in time. He is on a marine archeological mission that might support the story of Noah.

By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5,000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred. 

Noah is described in the Bible as a family man, a father of three, who is about to celebrate his 600th birthday.

Regardless of whether the details of the Noah story are historically accurate, Armstrong (author of A History of God) believes this story and all the Biblical stories are telling us "about our predicament in the world now." 

Ballard does not think he will ever find Noah's Ark, but he does think he may find evidence of a people whose entire world was washed away about 7,000 years ago.

Buried in the center of the article is a bit that says, "The theory goes on to suggest that the story of this traumatic event, seared into the collective memory of the survivors, was passed down from generation to generation and eventually inspired the biblical account of Noah," but this is so colossally outweighed by all of the biblical references that Ballard is made to look like some kind of literalist wacko out there diving into the Black Sea looking for evidence of a flood whose only survivors were the family of a 600 year old man.

If I were Ballard, I'd be pissed.

So, let's just get a few things straight, here.  Saying that a bunch of Bronze-Age sheepherders tried to rationalize a cataclysmic flood that washed away bunches of their ancestors by making up a story about god smiting the world for its wickedness is not the same thing as saying that the flood, as per the Book of Genesis, actually occurred.  The breaking of an ice dam is not the same thing as it "raining for forty days and forty nights."  If an ice dam near your house broke, releasing millions of tons of seawater, you would not have time to build an ark, you would only have time to put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.  You would also not have time to run really quickly and get a pair of wombats from Australia and a pair of three-toed sloths from Brazil, and so on.  And while the amount of water in the Black Sea is what is known in scientific circles as "a crapload of water," it does not amount to the entire Earth being covered with water.

The idea of a global flood is, to put not too fine a point on it, unscientific, unsupported, zero-evidence horse waste.  The fact that ABC News Online, and many other media outlets, reported Ballard's fascinating work as supporting the literal account of the bible is crummy journalism, and the reporters who produced this hack job of a story should be ashamed of themselves.