Notes sur quelques refugies Byzantins en Bourgogne après la chute de Constantinople

Abstract

This paper based on the documents of Lille’s state archive in France,
concerns the presence of Byzantine refugees in the states of Philip the Good,
Duke of Burgundy, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
The few Byzantines who passed through the Duke’s of Burgundy lands,
attracted by his fame, came in the hope of finding financial assistance on
which to subsist or with which to ransom their families captured by the Turks.
But rare were the refugees who settled in Valois Burgundy at their own expense
or in the Duke’s service.
Though the documents studied give little information about the Byzantine
families’ names, often distorted, and about the situation of the refugees,
they do prove that in the exodus after 1453 some Greeks rejected the traditional
land of refuge, Italy, for Valois Burgundy, attracted by the fame of Philip
the Good.