In recent years, detailed research has quantified what had long been evident from anecdotal evidence: that far from being Shakespeare's ‘little world’, moated by the silver sea, medieval England was in fact rich in inhabitants who had crossed that sea, some for short sojourns, often occasioned by business or diplomacy, others for longer stays.Footnote ¹ There were merchants who came to trade, foreign-born bankers who staffed English branches of their Italian houses, and artisans who brought skills sought after among the native population. Many of these immigrants formed their own communities, like the Hanseatic merchants of the London steelyard, and were indeed often forced to do so by legislation and regulations seeking to limit their activities; others integrated apparently seamlessly, like the allegedly Breton-born Salisbury merchant John Aport who (like his synonymous son after him) rose to become mayor of his city without ever being naturalized, or the Italian-born Christopher Ambrose who served as mayor of York in 1486 and 1497.Footnote ²

If England's markets, by the 1460s recovering from the impact of the loss of the English King's French dominions and the wider economic downturn of the first half of the 15th century, continued to attract merchants from across the continent, the political upheavals of the Wars of the Roses served to deter others. In 1453 the country's long-serving ruler, King Henry VI (1422-71), of the Lancastrian line of the house of Plantagenet, had suffered a mental collapse which for a time deprived him of the ability to exercise his regal powers. By 1455 he had recovered sufficiently to resume his duties, but now faced an armed challenge from his second cousin, Richard, Duke of York, and the latter's associates, the Neville Earls of Salisbury and Warwick. The failure of the ‘Love-day’ ceremonies of May 1458, a final attempt to bring about a reconciliation of the respective supporters of Lancaster and York, in 1459 saw the country descend into open civil war. In March 1461, Henry VI was deposed and the duke of York's son installed on the throne as Edward IV. Victory at the battle of Towton in March 1461 saw the Lancastrian insurgency driven back to the kingdom's outskirts, while Edward's rule was accepted in its heartlands.

One group of refugees remained largely unaffected by England's internal turmoil. In the wake of the conquest of the last remaining fragments of the former Byzantine empire by the Ottoman Turks much of Christian Europe was awash with refugees, and a number of them crossed the Channel.Footnote ³ Of these, a few came to raise ransoms for captured friends and relatives, others sought funds towards expeditions to recover lost territories, and some, having lost their homes, were here to stay.

An example of the latter category was a Greek émigré whose name was variously rendered in English records as Emanuel Assanus, Assianus, Essanes, Sanes, or Suffianus. What makes him noteworthy is above all that he was part of a relatively select group of aliens who found a place among the upper echelons of English society, and whose careers are thus documented in a degree of detail. Moreover, where many Greek exiles led peripatetic lives, not settling anywhere for any length of time, Asanes’ progress was rather more purposeful. Alongside a small group of foreign-born ladies who married into the English nobility below the ranks of the royal family, such as Lucia Visconti, Countess of Kent, or Marie of Maine, Countess of Devon,Footnote ⁴ there were also one or two foreign-born knights who found their place in English society. Of these, the Silesian Sir Hartung von Clux, admitted to the Order of the Garter by Henry V in 1421, is perhaps the best known, but there were also others, such as the Dane Sir Andrew Ogard who fought for the English in France (including at the great victory at Verneuil in 1424, where he was knighted) and successively married into two East Anglian families.Footnote ⁵ Unlike these men, or indeed their counterparts at the Burgundian court, Emanuel Asanes did not, as far as it is possible to tell, become established in England through his service to the English Crown.Footnote ⁶ Nor, however, was he merely a temporary visitor. Unlike many of his erstwhile compatriots, he did not wander through a succession of northern European states and territories, but – as far as it is possible to tell – came to England and made his new home there.Footnote ⁷

As with many of the Greeks scattered across the west following the fall of the Byzantine empire and its satellites, the man's origins are difficult to establish for certain, but letters of denization, granted him by Edward IV on 25 July 1467, claimed that he hailed from the Peloponnese.Footnote ⁸ Following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Despotate of the Morea, the political entity comprising of this peninsula, had been allowed to continue as an Ottoman vassal state, ruled in uneasy cohabitation by Demetrios and Thomas Palaiologos, the surviving brothers of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI. Before long, the activities of the rulers and aristocracy of the Morea in plotting a reconquest of Constantinople persuaded Sultan Mehmed II to put an end to its independence, and in a two-year campaign lasting intermittently from 1458 to 1460 he proceeded to conquer the territory remaining to the two Palaiologoi. The despot Demetrios allowed himself to be pensioned off by the sultan, but Thomas fled, first, in July 1460, to Corfu, and subsequently, in November of the same year, to Italy.Footnote ⁹

Emanuel Asanes Sophianos’ dual surnames supported his claim to Peloponnesian origins, as well as to his noble birth, for the Asanes and Sophianoi were two of the leading families of the Morea.Footnote ¹⁰ The Asanes traced their line back to the thirteenth-century imperial family of Bulgaria, the last representative of which, Ivan Asan III, had fled to the court of Constantinople in 1280. Both through Ivan's marriage to Irene, daughter of the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, and later matches made by his descendants, the family were closely connected with the Palaiologan imperial dynasty. In the 1450s, Matthias Asanes who served as the governor of the strategically important city of Corinth tightened his bond with the Palaiologoi by the marriage of his sister Theodora to the despot Demetrios. The Sophianoi, although less directly connected with the imperial family, were nevertheless among the principal landowners in the Morea and in the ranks of the archontes. Following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and the Morea, various members of both families took refuge in Italy.Footnote ¹¹

Emanuel Asanes Sophianos’ place within the pedigrees of the two families remains obscure, but it is likely that his double name indicated a connection with both, a practice popular among the Greek nobility in the fifteenth century.Footnote ¹² He was apparently part of the circle of the despot Thomas Palaiologos, perhaps indeed part of the entourage with whom he sailed for Italy in late 1460.Footnote ¹³ By a – sadly undated – letter, Thomas recommended Emanuel, ‘a noble, and – before leaving our homeland – a rich man, but now through common misfortune unlucky’, to Ludovico Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua.Footnote ¹⁴ Asanes’ mission to the marquess was the raising of funds for the recovery of the Morea, and it is possible that it was a similar mission that first took him to England. While Henry VI had taken some interest in Pius II's plans for a crusade to recapture Constantinople from the Ottomans and had sent ambassadors to the Council of Mantua, the outbreak of the latest round of the fighting in the ongoing wars of the Roses from 1459 to 1461 had effectively ruled out English participation in such an enterprise on any substantial scale. The relative pacification of the kingdom after Edward IV's accession and victory at Towton may have held out renewed hope that England and its young king might be prevailed upon to contribute to an expedition to the eastern Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁵

One possibility is thus that Asanes initially came to England in the early 1460s at his master's behest to solicit support and funds for Pope Pius II's planned crusade. If so, he might have been overtaken there by the deaths in quick succession of the pope and Thomas Palaiologos in 1464 and 1465. Alternatively, he might have remained in Italy until Thomas’ death, and only set out for England when his lord's demise had left him bereft of a master.Footnote ¹⁶

Whatever the truth of the matter, it seems clear from his decision to seek denization that by the summer of 1467 Asanes had resolved to make England his permanent home. The chronology of his life in England is at least partly conjectural, but if he initially gravitated to London it may have been at this early stage that he took chambers in New Inn, one of the inns of Chancery on the western outskirts of the city. While the primary function of the legal inns in London's western suburb was to provide a base for communities of lawyers and the training of law students, it is clear that in many instances they were also used by members of the gentry as prototype gentlemen's clubs, convenient and congenial surroundings in which to take residence when in the capital.Footnote ¹⁷ A good deal of what is known of the membership of particularly the smaller inns in the period is derived from later litigation over unpaid rents (known as pensions) to the inns, and it is from such records that we know of Asanes’ association with New Inn: between 1482 and 1488 he was named among the men sued by successive principals of the inn for debt; that is, the payments outstanding for his membership.Footnote ¹⁸

It is improbable that the inn represented to Asanes anything other than a London home: he is unlikely to have had any experience of the English common law, and by the second half of the 1460s was probably too old to seek full training in it. He thus had to build a new life for himself by other means, and he appears to have found an opportunity to do just that not long after his denization: he married a wealthy widow. The bride in question was Amy, the daughter of John Tregoose, a landowner from central Cornwall; her brother Richard was one of the most notorious lawbreakers in Cornwall of the troubled reign of Henry VI. Richard's death by an assassin's arrow in 1452 had left Amy as sole heir to the family property, which she brought to a first husband, the Camborne lawyer Richard Penpons who in turn had died in 1467.Footnote ¹⁹

Neither the exact date of the marriage, nor the circumstances in which it came about, are recorded, but it had certainly taken place by the start of 1474, when Asanes’ address was given as his wife's ancestral home of Tregoose in the Cornish parish of St Columb Major,Footnote ²⁰ and perhaps rather sooner, possibly not long after Richard Penpons’ death. About the circumstances, some speculation is possible. Much as Asanes might lay claim to having once been rich and powerful, in England he was little more than a penniless refugee. While it is possible that he turned Amy Penpons’ head with tales of his ancestry and noble status, he had nothing tangible to offer. It is thus, perhaps, not too fanciful to suppose that the marriage was a love match, but there is no concrete evidence to support such a conclusion. Amy Tregoose for her part was no longer a young woman. As her father had died in 1406, she must have been at least sixty at the time of Richard Penpons’ death and may have been flattered by the attentions of an exotic stranger. At the same time, this was hardly a maritagium diabolicum between a youthful interloper and an elderly noblewoman, like that between John Wydeville, brother of Edward IV's queen, and the septuagenarian Duchess of Norfolk which about the same time sent the compiler of the Annales apoplectic with indignation.Footnote ²¹ Thomas Palaiologos was himself born in 1409, and allowing that Asanes was his master's near-contemporary, it is possible that Emanuel and Amy were much of an age.

Whatever the circumstances of the match, it did provide Asanes with a respectable estate in the Cornish parishes of St Columb Major, St. Mewan, St. Austell, and Colan. He established himself at the ancestral seat of Amy's family at Tregoose in St Austell and must have been in possession when the antiquary William Worcestre visited in 1478 and noted the ‘tower that had formerly belonged to John Tregoose, esquire’.Footnote ²² In the first instance, however, and conforming to a pattern that was familiar to their English contemporaries, Sir Emanuel and his wife had to secure their title to the property against Richard Penpons’ feoffees. Proceedings in the court of Chancery were under way by about 1478, when one of the feoffees, Richard Powle, a yeoman from St. Columb Major, appeared and declared himself ignorant of any enfeoffment (the legal procedure used to place lands in the hands of trustees), but ready to abide by its terms, if they could be established.Footnote ²³ At that time, Asanes did not, apparently pursue the matter further, and the court thus found against him by default and awarded Powle damages. He could not, it seems, be coerced into paying these, and in 1480 began a fresh suit before the Chancellor, claiming that the feoffees’ claim against him was mere extortion. Two of the feoffees, Powle and the St Columb gentleman and landowner William Michell, now responded, pointed to Asanes’ earlier failure to follow up his claim, and suggested that his repeated law suits were entirely vexatious. Whether this was indeed so, or whether Asanes was simply unfamiliar with the processes of the English law (an unlikely scenario in the light of his apparent connexions among the legal community), the émigré once again defaulted, and in the autumn of 1480 a writ of sub poena (a royal command ordering the appearance in court of a defendant under pain of a substantial fine in the event of non-compliance) ordering him to appear in Chancery was issued.Footnote ²⁴ In parallel, Asanes also brought separate suits against two other Penpons feoffees, Richard Tomyowe and John Oo.Footnote ²⁵ No outcome of the matter is recorded, but significantly, Richard Powle was among a band of local men led by the local gentleman Richard Tregennowe who in early 1484 were accused of having assaulted Asanes at St Columb Minor.Footnote ²⁶

Perhaps not surprisingly, Asanes sought to establish connections among the leading gentry of his adopted region. For this, the political situation at the time of his arrival was singularly inauspicious. The head of the greatest family of resident landowners, Sir John Arundell (d.1473) of Lanherne, feudal overlord of some of the Penpons’ landholdings harboured long-established Lancastrian loyalties, fought for Henry VI's queen, Margaret of Anjou, at Tewkesbury, and was subsequently fined the immense sum of 6,000 marks by the victorious Edward IV.Footnote ²⁷ Asanes thus set his sights on another powerful, if mercurial, local man, Sir Henry Bodrugan. Unlike Sir John Arundell, Bodrugan had impeccable Yorkist credentials. His early liaison with a daughter of Sir Philip Courtenay of Powderham had been a source of enduring public scandal, as she had at the time been married to the landowner William Beaumont, and their son (Beaumont's heir) was widely held to have been fathered by Bodrugan. Yet, a second marriage after 1470 to Margaret, Dowager Viscountess Lisle, a daughter of Edward IV's friend William Herbert (d.1469), earl of Pembroke, placed Bodrugan at the very heart of the Yorkist establishment.Footnote ²⁸

Edward IV's dual victories at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury in the spring of 1471, and the subsequent death of King Henry VI in the Tower had allowed Edward to consolidate his position on the throne, and – by inference – Bodrugan's in his locality. First questions over his loyalties seem to have arisen in late 1473, when the die-hard Lancastrian John de Vere, earl of Oxford, occupied the island fortress of St. Michael's Mount off the Cornish coast. On the King's instructions, Sir John Arundell and Bodrugan laid siege to the mount, but within a few weeks, Arundell died, and Bodrugan was left in sole charge. In December Edward IV relieved Bodrugan of his command of the siege, which was taken over by the sheriff of Cornwall, John Fortescue. Bodrugan, it was claimed, had been too lenient in his conduct, preferring to negotiate with the insurgents, and had in the process allowed them to resupply the fortress to such a degree as to potentially extend any siege by several months.Footnote ²⁹ Nor were these the only charges against Bodrugan. The King's justices heard repeated complaints from a range of local men, including Asanes’ own stepson, John Penpons, that Bodrugan had been guilty of gratuitous acts of violence, house-breaking and assault, accusations serious enough to come before Parliament in the early summer of 1474.Footnote ³⁰ Such was the man with whom Asanes now made common cause; but as a newcomer he perhaps had little choice. Not only were his landholdings concentrated in the heartland of Bodrugan influence around Truro, but the death of Sir John Arundell had left Bodrugan, in the words of the chronicler John Warkworth, the ‘chief reuler of Cornewall’.Footnote ³¹

If, as the available evidence suggests, Asanes arrived on the Cornish scene in or around 1473, it raises the possibility that he was himself present at the siege of St Michael's Mount, although concrete evidence is lacking. Certain, by contrast, is his participation in some of Bodrugan's other ventures about the same time. At the heart of many disputes among the Cornish gentry was the valuable tin mined in the county, and this was also what Bodrugan and his associates sought.Footnote ³² If a man of Bodrugan's status could often get away with bullying and robbing the county's merchant tinners – Amy Penpons’ own brother, Richard Tregoose, had been notorious for his brutality in doing just that – occasionally a victim might strike back and seek the protection of the law. This was true of Robert Cuthbert, a tenant of lands at Truro Vean, who in early 1475 appeared in the court of King's Bench at Westminster to complain that a band of men headed by Bodrugan, his natural son John Beaumont, and Asanes, had waylaid him in the town of Truro on the afternoon of 25 April 1474 and had robbed him of a piece of tin weighing some 300lb of a value of almost £4. Not content with this plunder, they had also deprived him of his horse, sword and dagger, and more than £6 in cash.Footnote ³³ About the same time, Asanes also headed a band of men, once again including Bodrugan and his son, appealed of robbery by another local man, Thomas Raulyn.Footnote ³⁴

Interestingly, there is no clear evidence of bad blood between the Asanes and the one man who might reasonably have felt aggrieved at their marriage, Amy's son John Penpons. Already faced with the unpalatable prospect of having to await his mother's death before he could come into his inheritance, her remarriage meant that he had to stand by while an outsider, and an alien refugee at that, took control of it.Footnote ³⁵ In view of his mother's advanced age, John Penpons had no need to fear that she would have issue by Asanes to whom parts of his inheritance might be alienated and who would give the Byzantine a life-interest by the courtesy of England (a convention under which a man who fathered a child on an heiress might keep hold of her lands for term of his life, even if the offspring subsequently predeceased him) in the Penpons lands,Footnote ³⁶ but the actions of a dowager and her second husband could do damage to an heir's prospects in other ways. Even as late as the summer of 1493 Amy's grandson, another John Penpons, was forced to go to law against John Adam, a chaplain, who had acquired a title to some two hundred acres and four tinworks of the Tregoose property in and around St Austell through the good offices of Sir Emanuel.Footnote ³⁷ By contrast, several other settlements, while ostensibly to John's detriment, were apparently designed for the wider benefit of the Penpons family. In 1480 the Asanes settled property in Penryn on John Penpons’ sister Joan, the wife of Richard Kendale.Footnote ³⁸ In a further settlement made in the summer of 1482, and in return for quarterly rents of 46s. 8d., Sir Emanuel and his wife granted a group of properties in and around Tregoose to John Penpons’ daughter Alice and her husband, John Arundell of Tolverne, and their heirs in perpetuity, while holdings at Tregoose were settled on the couple for the duration of Amy's life and sixteen years thereafter; after which they were to revert to Amy's heirs, at that point probably represented by her son's male descendants.Footnote ³⁹ While the possibility that the Asanes’ alienation of large parts of John Penpons’ inheritance was motivated by personal enmity cannot be discounted, a more likely explanation seems to be that John, who disappears from the records after 1477, had died by 1480, and that Amy was seeking to secure her patrimony for her descendants during the heir's minority.

In the second half of the 1470s Bodrugan and his erstwhile associates one by one secured general pardons from King Edward IV. Asanes was among the last of them to do so, purchasing his letters as late as 11 June 1480.Footnote ⁴⁰ Sadly, information on Asanes’ career gradually peters out thereafter. In the spring of 1484 he was still defending his landholdings against a range of incursions by local men,Footnote ⁴¹ but subsequent references to him are increasingly limited to charges over the non-payment of his fees at New Inn. In late 1486, Sir Henry Bodrugan rebelled against Henry VII and in the following year was attainted by Parliament. Whether he met his end in the dramatic circumstances suggested by some of the sources, was simply killed in the fighting at Stoke (where Henry VII crushed the supporters of the pretender Lambert Simnel), or – even less glamorously – eventually died in exile of old age is uncertain; but both he and his natural son John Beaumont who had been party to many of his exploits were removed from the Cornish scene, thus depriving Asanes of his principal ally. The Greek refugee's own feelings at the dynastic squabbles that shook his adopted country, in the light of his own experience in the Morea more than two decades earlier, can only be guessed at. In any event, he also may not have lived on much longer. He is last heard of in the summer of 1488, when he was last sued by the principal of New Inn, and thus perhaps died about that time.Footnote ⁴² Since he had no landholdings other than those of his wife, no inquisition post mortem was either ordered or taken. If he made a will, it is not known to survive, and the place of his burial is likewise obscure.

The career of Emanuel Asanes is a rare example of that of a Greek émigré whose fortunes after leaving the ruins of the Byzantine world can be mapped in some detail. Unlike the activities of many Greek refugees who make brief appearances in the records of their eventual host countries, those of Asanes may be traced from his service as an envoy of the despote Thomas Palaiologos, via his denization in England, to his later career as a provincial landowner and law breaker. It is impossible to be certain to what extent his experiences were paradigmatic, and it is reasonable to suppose that they were not. Unlike, for instance, his contemporaries, the brothers Effamatos, two Greek-born goldwire drawers who established themselves in the arguably more congenial, and more cosmopolitan mercantile centre of London, Asanes made his home in the far west, in Cornwall.Footnote ⁴³ Did others do likewise? If so, they were not numerous. It may, nevertheless, be worth wondering whether any dimly remembered tradition of Asanes’ career in Cornwall played a part when two centuries later an immigrant from Italy was buried in the church of Landulph (in the east of the county) and had his funeral monument adorned with an elaborate (and probably spurious) genealogy tracing his descent from Thomas Palaiologos.Footnote ⁴⁴