I’d assumed that most of them were either killed fighting the Normans or got turned into peasantry when their lands were overtaken. Turns out that more than 5,000 Anglo-Saxons and Danes–elites and their men–fled England in 1088 alone for Byzantium. There, they settled around the Black Sea or became part of the Varangian Guard, a traditionally Scandinavian group of elite mercenaries who protected the emperor.

So that means that those of us who have early American families and are tied to the Washingtons (an Anglo-Saxon elite family) might have some very distant but historical-era cousins in the Balkans!