This chapter is both brief and fragmentary, for such few evidences as can be garnered about the service of Englishmen, Scandinavians or others in the Varangian guards of the Lascarides and Palaeologi, as well as serving the puppets of the shadowy Latin Empire in Constantinople, are far too uncertain and infrequent to give any sort of coherent picture.

Of Constantinople itself, after the Latins had ravaged their fill, we have a remark by Robert of Clari which merits some note, as it may refer to the eventual fate of the last Varangians of the old Empire. He states that on the day after Alexius V fled the City, ‘priests and clerics in their habits – these were Englishmen, Danes and men of other nations’, had come to the Latins in procession and begged for mercy, saying that the Greeks were fled and that only poor folk were left within the City. This must be an error; of course there is no denying that English and Danish priests may have been in Byzantium, but in view of the religious chasm that had opened between the Latin and Greek churches, these can hardly have been numerous – at most one or two chaplains of each nationality for the troops in the Imperial mercenary force.