New Study Shows 6th Century Anglo-Saxon Mercenaries Fought in the Middle East

A fresh reexamination of artifacts recovered from ancient Anglo-Saxon burials has revealed some startling information about ancient Britain’s involvement in far-off military adventures in the sixth century AD. It seems there is good evidence to suggest that Anglo-Saxon people who lived in this period may have left Britain and traveled to northern Syria and the eastern Mediterranean region to participate in military conflicts, fighting on the side of the Byzantine Empire. 

A pair of English scholars, St. John Simpson, a senior curator at the British Museum, and Helen Gittos, a medieval historian from Oxford University, have concluded that some unique and exotic items retrieved during excavations at several ancient Anglo-Saxon burial sites came directly from northern Syria and the eastern Mediterranean. While the previous belief was that these objects had been acquired by wealthy Anglo-Saxon families with access to long-distance trade networks, Simpson and Gittos argue that this is not the case. 

In an interview with the Guardian, Simpson insisted that “compelling evidence” indicates that some of the men buried in elite Anglo-Saxon cemeteries like those excavated at Sutton Hoo, Taplow, and Prittlewell had been involved in efforts by Byzantine forces to conquer the Sasanians, an Iranian dynasty that controlled immense quantities of land and resources in the eastern Mediterranean region 1,500 years ago. 

• The Magnificent Treasures of Sutton Hoo, The Final Resting Place of Anglo-Saxon Royals 

• The Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 AD and the Rise of the Muslims 

Anachronistic painting by Piero della Francesca of the Battle of Nineveh (627) between Heraclius' Byzantine army and the Sasanians under Khosrow II, which was pretty much the end of the Byzantine–Sasanian War. (Piero della Francesca / Public domain) 

Telling Trinkets Amongst the Treasure 

What helped Simpson and Gittos reach their surprising conclusion was the banality of some of the goods recovered from sixth-century Anglo-Saxon burials. Among the objects they cite as revealing are Sasanian personal seals and silver drachms, which have little value and were not the kinds of items anyone would be acquiring in market exchanges. They were much more likely to have been mementos or souvenirs picked up by people who had visited far-off lands and were looking for remembrances of their adventures. 

And in these instances, those adventures would have been of a military nature, the British scholars assert. They reached this conclusion because the collection of burial goods they studied included some gear that would have been worn by men participating in armed conflicts. This included armored suits and riding apparel that were designed and manufactured in Eurasia and were known to have been worn by Byzantine warriors dispatched to Sasanian territory in the east.  

In Simpson’s words, the presence of such grave goods adds “an international dimension” to ancient Anglo-Saxon burial sites. 

“These finds put the Anglo-Saxon princes and their followers center-stage in one of the last great wars of antiquity,” he stated. “It takes them out of insular England into the plains of Syria and Iraq in a world of conflict and competition between the Byzantines and the Sasanians and gave those Anglo-Saxons literally a taste for something much more global than they probably could have imagined.” 

Both treasures and other more practical items are found in the Anglo-Saxon burials. (MOLA) 

The Sasanian Empire and its Enemies 

St. John Simpson is the curator of the British Museum’s Arabian and ancient Iranian collections. He is also an archaeologist who possesses a great deal of knowledge about the Sasanian Empire, which ruled from 224 to 651 and was an arch-rival of first the Roman Empire and later on the Byzantine Empire.  

At the height of their power the Sasanians controlled an immense swath of territory, which included all of modern-day Iran and Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia, plus sections of the Levant, the Indian subcontinent, the Caucasus region and Central Asia. For the Romans and the Byzantines, they represented a formidable foe, which would have given these European powers a reason to recruit fighting men from wherever they could find them—including in ancient Britain, as the evidence referenced by Simpson and Gittos seems to show. 

 At Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, archaeologists discovered an elite Anglo-Saxon ship burial that included Byzantine silverware among its rich collection of grave goods. They also found shoulder clasps for a uniform that likely came from Sasanian territory.