This capacity to seem unthreatening made possible the final achievement of the Bosporan Kingdom: the taming of the Goths. This Germanic migration had fought its way down from the Baltic and arrived on the Black Sea in about 200 AD. The Goths had sacked both Olbia and Tanais in the early years, but in contact with the Bosporan Kingdom they soon softened and allowed themselves to be transformed into neighbours and customers. Panticapaeum studied their tastes and made some adjustments to the old Sarmatian-Bosporan jewellery designs which had been so successful. Willingly enough, the Goths let the Bosporans enrich their decorative tradition into something distinctly Sarmatian. Under the Goths, who gradually assembled an 'Ostrogothic' state in Crimea and the Pontic Steppe, the Bosporan Kingdom won another century of existence. But then came the Huns. They were not open to taming.
By the fourth century AD, for reasons still not understood with any certainty, the arrivals of successive waves of mounted intruders from Central Asia were not only taking place at shorter and shorter intervals, but were often accompanied by a new degree of savagery and destructiveness. As far as we know, the Huns were the first major nomad group to enter the Black Sea region as a plundering expedition pure and simple, apparently lacking all interest in settlement or trade. They destroyed Tanais and Panticapaeum for ever. The citizens fled or were murdered, and grass grew over both sites. When the next city was built on the Cimmerian Bosporus, in Byzantine times, it was on the slopes of Mount Mithridates rather than among the ruins on the summit.
As Mikhail Rostovtzeff wrote: 'How curious, this semi-Greek tyranny which lasted for centuries and gradually changed into a Hellenistic monarchy! ... How interesting, the mixed religion which slowly developed in the Cimmerian Bosporus! How singular, this prolific art, working mainly for export to Scythian dynasts and the Scythian aristocracy!.. . Since then there have been nearly two thousand years of contact between literate and preliterate cultures, between wealth-creating cities and tribal empires of the interior. But nothing like the symbiosis of the Bosporan Kingdom has ever reappeared.
Chapter Nine
Sarmatia is an imaginary country - which docs not change the fact that it is the fatherland of us all...
We live like spies, with a foreign biography in our own country. We enter in a forged register: 'place of birth, Sarmatia.' And we are fond of this forgery. A numismatist valuing two old coins will take more interest in the forged one, because it is not just — like the original — a token of value but also a token of aspiration. After a while, the forgery will be more valuable than the original. The scale of values is reversed, and that is why Sarmatia Felix, our fatherland, still lives within us.
Marek Karpiriski, 'Jacek Kaczmarski - Aneks do wniosku o awans', in PULS, Nos 64/5, Sept-Dec 1993
I am back, and I remain as much of a barbarian as my forefathers!
The Squire in Mickiewicz's The Confederates of Bar, who has just returned from a tour of Western
Europe
DEBATES ABOUT NATIONALISM tend to revolve around the concept of the nation as 'imagined community'. The phrase comes from Benedict Anderson's short and brilliant book of that title, and there is much to be said for it. Early modern nationalism, he argued, arose from an imaginative leap: the assumption by individuals that thousands or millions of people whom they would never meet shared their particular culture, language and outlook. In the time before mass communications or easy travel, this assumption about solidarity was fostered by what Anderson called 'the print revolution', the circulation of printed literature written in the vernacular, but it remained an act of faith.
Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europe experienced a widespread 'invention of nations'. Intellectuals assembled ballads and oral traditions into 'national literatures', synthesised standard written languages out of dialects, and composed histories of the nation from chronicles and folk-epics. From every capital city, a legion of Wolfgang Feursteins set out for the villages with notebook and pencil. They worked to a teleology: the belief that a reawakened national community would set out on the journey towards supreme self-realisation as an independent nation-state.
Yet the nation, as imagined or even forged community, is far older than the nation-state. It existed before the political mobilisation made possible by the print revolution. It will, in fresh mutations, exist when the nation-state has passed into history. Indeed, the practice of inventing history to legitimise some aspiring social group is also older than modern Romantic nationalism. John Dee, the Welsh wizard and con-man, seduced Elizabeth I of England with his argument that, as the Tudor descendant of Welsh kings, she had re-established the Celtic realm of Arthur not only over all 'Britain' but over the mythical Arthurian empire beyond the ocean: the Americas, announced Dee, were the rightful inheritance of this 'Great Britain'. But no sleight of history is stranger, or more laced with ironies, than the resurrection of Sarmatia.
At the end of the twentieth century, we think of Poland as a country of the Baltic shore. Polish origins seem to us to lie among proto-Slav farmers, settled along the river Vistula as it flows north to reach the Baltic in the Bay of Gdansk. But there was a time when Poland looked towards the Black Sea as its native coast, and when Poles claimed ancestry in a race of Indo-Iranian pastoral nomads -the Sarmatians.
In the sixteenth century, Polish writers began to assert that Poles were the descendants of the Sarmatians. At first, this claim did not seem grotesque. It was no more than a Polish response to a European fashion. In the Renaissance, the flattering of dynasties through genealogies dug out of classical learning had become a literary convention — driven forward, indeed, by the print revolution which made Greek and Roman histories available to courtiers. If Elizabeth of England was the heiress of the pre-Saxon Britons, if the Swedish kings were descendants of the Goths, the French kings sprung from Gaulish loins and the Muscovite tsars (in a particularly weird conceit) related through Rurik to the emperor Augustus, then it was not too eccentric for the Polish commonwealth to boast of origins in a race of Iranian 'barbarians' from the Black Sea.
But then, in the next hundred years, the Sarmatian myth took an extraordinary, freakish twist of its own. From being the official myth of a court, 'Sarmatism' became the mass faith of a class.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Polish nobility (szlachta) came to believe that it was they — not the Polish population at large — who were the exclusive descendants of the Sarmatians. They were not just a superior caste within Polish society, but a different race. Other classes, like burghers or peasants, must therefore have other, inferior racial origins. Soon, more pseudo-classical borrowing allowed scholars to refer to the lower orders as 'Getae' or 'Gepids' - lesser tribes of Thracian or Germanic origin, who were imagined to have migrated into east-central Europe as slaves of the noble Sarmatians.
The szlachta dominated the old Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. This enormous social group came to number something like 10 per cent of the population. Its members ranged from princely families wealthier than many European kings to muddy-arsed squireens who dug and hoed their own patches of rye. Its obscure origins lay in a clan system, recruited by military allegiance and adoption as much as by hereditary connection: a pattern which resembled traditional society in the Scottish Gaeltacht rather than the feudal order of Western Europe.
This 'Sarmatian Ideology' had a clear legitimising function. In the commonwealth, or 'royal republic', the nobility had achieved almost total ascendancy over the state. They elected the king. They composed the Sejm (parliament) and enforced on it the rule of unanimity: the Liberum Veto, which allowed a single dissenting voice to block all proceedings. They established, step by step, their own immunity to any central interference with their own limitless privileges. The szlachta did not so much rule as prevent anyone from ruling. This gave rise to the curious proverb that 'Polska w nierzqdem stop — roughly, that Poland is founded upon disorder (the word nierzqd also has connotations of prostitution, like the French use of bordel to mean c
haos or the English legal expression 'disorderly house', meaning a brothel). In this view, the szlachta alone constituted the true nation, and as Sarmatians its members were entitled to do as they pleased. That was the so-called Golden Freedom for which the szlachta repeatedly took up arms.
In the course of the seventeenth century, other elements were added to the ideology. One was xenophobia. Sarmatism was devoutly conservative, a hymn of thanksgiving addressed to the status quo. To the Sarmatian eye, Poland was perfect: Poland was the nobleman's paradise, the bravest, wisest and happiest Terra Felix on earth. It seemed to follow that any proposal for change was a threat of pollution by foreign influence. Royal initiatives to raise taxes or reform administration were attacked as the work of German or French advisers, poisoning the mind of the king in order to introduce absolutism and subvert Polish independence. The Reformation, especially for the middle and lower nobility, was perceived as another disruptive import from Bohemia and Germany, embraced by vulgar non-Sarmatians like urban merchants. A fanatical Counter-Reformation Catholicism became a component of Sarmatian patriotism.
Sarmatism also repositioned Poland's sense of geography - or of 'geopolitical destiny'. In spite of their Catholic enthusiasm, the neo-Sarmatians looked eastwards rather than westwards. For the 'descendants' of noble barbarians from the Pontic Steppe, the Black Sea coasts and the plains between the Danube and the Don seemed to be their ancestral home and heritage.
In this way, the Sarmatian idea was used to authenticate an aggressive foreign policy towards the East. The word 'Sarmatia' was restored as a description of all Slav populations and their territories. To the Polish nobility, convinced that they were the chosen race, this implied not only that the szlachta was the aristocracy of all Slavdom, but that Poland — in a period of almost continuous war against Russians, Tatars and Turks — had an historical claim to old Sarmatian realms in Russia itself, in the Cossack lands of Ukraine, in Moldavia and Bessarabia.
Sarmatism was also a style. It was a way of life: extravagant and ostentatious, sometimes wildly generous and at other times savagely violent and vengeful, based on rural life in wooden manor-houses and on a cult of the healthy, pious environment of the countryside. Hospitality, which mostly meant drinking and hunting, was a particular Sarmatian pride. Arcadia, however pure, could be boring, and some noble families posted small boys in trees to watch for the dust of an approaching carriage, which would then be virtually ambushed and the stranger dragged indoors to be entertained. His attempts to leave, often weeks later, were sometimes frustrated by removing his coach wheels.
The style was also, and famously, about dress and decoration. Here all the ironies of Sarmatism were concentrated. By the early eighteenth century, the Polish-Sarmatian noble was a startling, unmistakable figure. He shaved his skull, cultivated long, drooping moustaches (the Sarmatism of Lech Walesa's whiskers did wonders for Solidarity in 1980), and wore a long kontusz caftan held in over his paunch by a sash. His sword would be a curved scimitar, its hilt probably encrusted with gold and jewels. In short, he looked like a Turk - or possibly a Turkified Tatar.
Of course, this had nothing to do with what the historical Sarmatians had worn. Reliefs and wall-paintings of the Bosporan Kingdom show the men in trousers and belted tunics, bearded and long-haired. This neo-Sarmatian outfit was actually the clothing of Poland's enemies, the oriental gear of Turk and Tatar warriors appropriated by those who boasted that they were the bastion of Catholic and European Christianity against the pagans. The grandest Sarmatian hero of them all, King John Sobieski, is still honoured as the 'saviour of Christendom'; at the battle of Vienna in 1683, he relieved the siege of the city and inflicted on the Turkish armies a defeat so crushing that the Ottoman Empire never seriously threatened central Europe again. But at that battle the Polish troops looked so much like the enemy that they were obliged to wear a straw cockade, in case their Habsburg allies mistook them for Turks.
Poland today still insists on its 'European', Western allegiance, now based not only on the Catholic faith but on diligently Western institutions and tastes. On the surface, nothing of that orientalising style remains. And yet in subtle ways Poland is a much more oriental culture than Russia. While the Muscovites hid from the Mongols in their northern forests, the Poles were already open to influences from the Black Sea steppes. The Tatar quriltai, as I have suggested, helped to inspire the Polish decision to elect kings by a mass gathering of mounted nobles. The idea of a 'noble democracy' may have nomad origins, like the cloudy beginnings of the Polish herby (clans), and the relationship between Polish rulers and urban colonies of foreign merchants — Germans, Scots, Jews, Armenians — was an echo of the symbiosis of Iranians and Greeks by the Black Sea.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Sarmatism collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity. But in its fall, it also destroyed Poland itself, and the independence for which the nobility had fought so fiercely for so many centuries.
It had been obvious for many years that unless the decaying Commonwealth were reformed and modernised, Poland would disintegrate and be annexed by its neighbours. Russia, under Catherine II, already exercised a de facto protectorate over Poland, and a first Partition had taken place in 1772. The last Polish king, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, was a sophisticated European who sought to build a modern state with a strong central authority; the 1791 'Constitution of the Third of May', composed on the most progressive Enlightenment principles, made the monarchy hereditary, reformed the administration and government, and abolished most of the ancient abuses which had allowed the szlachta to retain a stranglehold over change. But it was too late.
It is wrong to say that the nobility, as a class, opposed reform. By 1791, the American and French Revolutions had converted educated Poles to the reform cause, and a large part of the szlachta, realising that without radical change the nation was doomed, supported the king. The members of the Sejm who voted through the Constitution, abolishing noble privileges, were themselves aristocrats. But the great Sarmatian families remained blindfolded in their own arrogance. It was not Russia but reform, on 'foreign' and 'Jacobin' principles, which seemed to them to threaten the survival of Poland. If the szlachta lost its independence, then Polish independence was lost too - for the szlachta was the nation.
In 1792, a group of Sarmatian magnates — most of them from eastern Poland, in what is now Ukraine — appealed to Catherine II to intervene. They raised their standard against King Stanislaw August in the rebellion known as the 'Confederation of Targowica', and nearly a hundred thousand Russian troops surged across the frontier. There followed the Second Partition; the desperate but unsuccessful rising of 1794 led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko; and then the Third Partition which wiped Poland off the map of Europe for 123 years. Sarmatism, in short, achieved precisely what its ultra-conservative patriotism sought to prevent. It allowed foreigners to destroy Poland and abolish Polish independence.
But, to the end of their lives, many of these Targowican barons failed to understand what they had done. They kept their vast estates, travelling now to St Petersburg and Odessa rather than to Warsaw and Krakow. They had lost the political influence they had enjoyed in the old commonwealth, but to be appointed Marshal of Nobility in some Ukrainian county was not a bad substitute. It baffled and appalled them when some of their sons and daughters took up arms for Polish independence in the nineteenth-century insurrections, often to end up in a forest grave or a Siberian penal colony. But this, no doubt, was further proof that the terrible French germ of Jacobinism was still infectious. Meanwhile, the fact that they themselves were secure and prospering could only mean that all was well with Poland too.
One of those who signed the Confederation of Targowica was Seweryn Rzewuski. He was one of the patriarchs of a great family which was proud of its Targowican connection and which saw no reason for remorse in the years which followed. He was also the grandfather of Karolina Sobariska, born Rzewuska.
In the end, there is only one plausible track tow
ards the mystery of her inmost feelings. This track leads through a hall of mirrors into a chapel with a self-portrait above the altar: the monstrous solipsism of conservative aristocracy. What was good for the Rzewuskis was good for Poland. What diminished the ancient liberties of the Rzewuskis was treachery to the liberty of Poland.
She saw, perhaps with genuine pity, the fate of those she betrayed. They walked Paris pavements, borrowing money to feed their children, or sat all day in Dresden cafes over a cup of coffee, or dug trenches in the Siberian permafrost under the eye of a sentry. They talked all the time about 'Poland', whatever they meant by it. Some of them had been to bed with her. Some of them were honest enough in their way. But they were not 'our sort of people'. The tradition in which she had been brought up taught her that they were another, lower species who shared her country, who might be owed some protection in return for loyal service, but who could not be expected to think as 'we' thought, or to understand what 'we' understood.
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