After Jurchen invaders from Inner Asia besieged and conquered Kaifeng in 1126–1127, and Constantinople fell to the Latin armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, political information about these courts and capitals was preserved and retransmitted by elite scholars, whose accounts of imperial collapse circulated amongst communities of diasporic literati. Producing parallel narratives of the fall of Kaifeng and the sack of Constantinople, Ye Mengde 葉夢得 (1077–1148) and Niketas Choniates (c.1155–1217) chronicled the collapse of these imperial centres in an effort to reconstruct post-conquest political communities. While Ye and Niketas were operating within separate conceptual frameworks of imperial authority and structuring their narratives according to different literary blueprints, their surviving memoirs documented personal displacement as well as cultural and political trauma writ large. By recording and commemorating the chain of events that culminated in the collapse of the Northern Song and Byzantine Empires from exile, both authors were converting orally transmitted anecdotes into enduring textual representations; in other words, they were transmuting communicative memory into cultural memory. Braiding dynastic history with personal recollection, their texts commemorated the breaching of imperial frontiers by ‘barbarian’ invaders, who had dislocated educated men like themselves into the hinterland, where dispersed networks of elites could be reconnected through the sharing of narratives about the recent dynastic past.