The simple answer is no, there aren’t any accounts of knights or nobles from that part of the world visiting Britain in the late fifth or early sixth centuries. In fact, there aren’t many historical accounts of anything from late fifth- and early sixth-century Britain. Nonetheless, we do have plenty of evidence which gives us a sense of the possibility of this and how it might have happened. People from Britain and Ireland certainly did travel to the Continent during this period: enough Britons settled in Armorica that they shaped its language and political identity. In the early seventh century, the Irish cleric Columbanus went as far as northern Italy, where he established a monastery at Bobbio. Later in the seventh century, a Northumbrian called Benedict Biscop was travelling around Italy, acquiring books to build a library with at Wearmouth. At this time, the Pope appointed a man named Theodore as Archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore was from Tarsus, a city in what is now south-eastern Turkey. At the same time, the Pope appointed an African called Hadrian abbot of the monastery in Canterbury. It is important, however, to note that the level of involvement the Papacy had in seventh-century Britain was non-existent in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. One element from Theodore’s life is nonetheless relevant: much of the distance between Tarsus and Britain was ruled by a single polity. Theodore seems to have left Tarsus when it was captured by the Persians and have gone to the Roman (or ‘Byzantine’) capital of Constantinople. He happened to be in Rome, which was under Eastern Roman rule at the time, when the Pope was seeking a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Indeed, the most difficult part of the journey between Tarsus and Britain seems to have been going through Gaul (or Francia), which was partly why Hadrian, someone who had visited Gaul before, was sent with Theodore. It is important to remember that, in the sixth century, Galilee was part of the Roman empire. Babylon was not; it was part of the Sassanid Persian empire. It is also important to note that Galilee was not a particularly important place in this period, although it was certainly not a backwater. Babylon on the other hand, while a seat of a Nestorian bishopric, was no longer a major town. Esclabor and his sons were assigned these origins in the Post-Vulgate cycle because they were prominent places in the Bible. The stories of Esclabor and his son Palamedes identify them as non-Christian, because Islam was dominant in those regions by the time the stories were written. But c. 500, most people in Galilee were Christian and many of the inhabitants of Babylon would have been as well.

The most widespread signs of British contact with the eastern Mediterranean are deposits of D-ware, a type of high-quality pottery which has been found at high-status sites throughout western Britain. There has been some debate as to the origin of D-ware, with some scholars favouring Cyprus and others southern Anatolia, but it is certainly from that part of the world. Additionally, there have been some finds of Phoenician Red Slip Ware, taking us even closer to Galilee. LR1- and LR2-type amphorae have also been found, further indicating trade with the Roman Mediterranean. This is also a small indication of this trade in a written source. Leontias’s seventh-century hagiography of his contemporary St John the Merciful, a Patriarch of Alexandria, informs us that people in the eastern Mediterranean were aware of western Britain’s substantial tin deposits, due to trading contact. Of course, the presence of many artefacts from the eastern Mediterranean does not necessarily indicate direct contact with people from that part of the world, it merely indicates that they were connected through a broad trading network. We must note, however, that the distribution of such artefacts both in Britain and on the Continent makes it very clear that they reached Britain via the Atlantic, seaborne route, rather than the slow landward route through Gaul. Anthea Harris has noted that the many amphorae found at Tintagel correspond to those used in Eastern Roman military supply lines, and Michael Fulford and Pamela Armstrong have both established close similarities with the British assemblages and those found in the region around Constantinople. It has therefore been posited, by Fulford and Ken Dark, that Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) trade with western Europe had a political character, with the Emperor Justinian combining diplomatic efforts with trading ventures as part of his broader attempts to re-establish Roman political power and influence in western Europe. Indeed, this would be in line with Justinian’s diplomatic efforts regarding Britain as recorded by Procopius: ‘And he never ceased pouring out great gifts of money to all the barbarians, both those of the East and those of the West and those to the North and to the South, as far as the inhabitants of Britain’. Perhaps we can imagine a Roman soldier or official originally from Galilee travelling to Britain on such a diplomatic mission. Procopius also wrote that, when negotiating with Ostrogothic enemies in northern Italy, Justinian’s general Belisarius offered the Ostrogoths rule of Britain, but this is regarded (given its context within the negotiations) to have been sarcastic, as Belisarius makes clear his view that Britain is no longer under Roman rule, a perception firmly shared by Procopius himself. It is probably worth noting here that Procopius’s understanding of Britain’s geography seems to have been very poor. He names two islands, Britannia and Brettia, but it is Brettia which bears the characteristics of Britain. Whether Britannia is meant to be Ireland, or Brittany, or perhaps part of Britain, is unclear. Procopius also claimed that there were no horses in Britain, and that the area north of Hadrian’s Wall was a land of the death, with the air noxious to the living. So on the one hand we have hard evidence of eastern Mediterranean trading links with Britain, but on the other hand, both the writings of Procopius and the hagiography of St John the Merciful make it clear that people viewed Britain as a very distant place. Given that this is a matter of speculation in any case, I will suggest an alternative, more specific possibility for how a noble or knight from the eastern Mediterranean might come to Britain in this period. In 467, the Eastern Roman emperor Leo I appointed a new Western emperor. He chose Anthemius, an aristocrat and general who happened to be the son-in-law of the previous Eastern emperor, and had studied at the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria. When he came to Italy to take up rule of the West, he brought with him friends and followers from the Eastern empire. C. 470, Anthemius asked the Britons for military aid against the Visigoths. Our main account of this comes from Jordanes, who states that the Britons arrived by sea and were received in the territory of the Bituriges when they disembarked, which would make them Britons from Britain, rather than Brittany. This force was also large enough to engage the Visigothic army in battle, if unsuccessfully. The king of the Britons is named by Jordanes as Riothamus. Summoning such an important ally to aid in war would have been an extremely important diplomatic mission, so Anthemius would have sent people whom he trusted to see it done. It is quite possible that the messengers Anthemius sent to Riothamus included members of the personal retinue he had brought from the east. This is the only specific scenario we know of in which we might imagine a noble or knight from the ‘Middle East’ travelling to Britain in this period. Of course, it may be that no such thing happened, and it may be that a noble or knight from the ‘Middle East’ reached Britain in entirely different circumstances. Such is, unfortunately the nature of the place and period.

Primary Sources

Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica

Bede, Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow

Gallic Chronicle of 511

Jonas, Vita Columbani

Jordanes, Getica

Leontios, Life of Saint John the Merciful

Procopius, The Wars

Procopius, The Secret History

Secondary Sources

Ken Dark, ‘Early Byzantine Mercantile Communities in the West’

Michael Fulford, ‘Byzantium and Britain: a Mediterranean perspective on Post-Roman Mediterranean Imports in Western Britain and Ireland’

Caitlin Green, ‘A note on the evidence for African migrants in Britain from the Bronze Age to the medieval period’

Anthea Harris, Byzantium, Britain and the West: The Archaeology of Cultural Identity AD 400-650: The Archaeology of Cultural Identity AD 400-800

Mark Jackson et al, ‘Primary evidence for late Roman D ware production in Asia Minor’

Roger White, Britannia Prima

Ian Wood, ‘Before and After the Migration to Britain’