Karolina Sobariska was indeed a sort of patriot, although not in the sense which Mickiewicz hopefully invented for her. She was the last Sarmatian.
The village of Ribchester is in Lancashire, not far from Preston. Broad and shallow, the river Ribble flows round its margin, and on the spring day when I made my visit, there were children paddling in the river around boulders which had once been Roman masonry. Ribchester is built on the site of Bremetennacum Veteranorum, a Roman cavalry fortress on the road north to Hadrian's Wall. Most of its streets cover the native cantonments outside the ramparts, where Brigantian workers and discharged soldiers lived. Under the churchyard is the principia headquarters block with its pillared drill-hall for rainy days, and the underground sacellum, the strongroom where the regional military command kept its cash.
Here, towards the end of the second century AD, a large force of Sarmatian lancers arrived. They were Iazygians, the vanguard of the slow Sarmatian migration from the Black Sea steppe towards the west, who had crossed the Transylvanian mountains and entered the north-eastern Hungarian plains. From there, they began to raid the Roman frontier on the middle Danube until the emperor Marcus Aurelius led an army across the Danube and defeated them. He had intended, it seems, to have them massacred. But problems elsewhere in the Empire required his attention, and he offered them the option of enlistment instead. The Iazygians accepted, and were drafted to northern Britain. Some 5,500 cavalrymen, presumably accompanied by their horses and families, made the journey across a continent and a sea. They may have served initially on the Wall, where some of their horse-armour has been found, but within a few decades, in the early third century, they had been transferred to Ribchester, a powerful mobile reserve of cavalry watching the Ribble gap and the passes through the Pennines.
But the Sarmatians never went home. The Empire lost control of the plains north of the Danube, which meant that they could not be returned on discharge to found military colonies and form a Romanised cordon on the frontier. Instead, each generation was settled locally as it reached retiring age. For two hundred more years, until the final Roman evacuation of Britain in the fifth century, the descendants of Iranian-speaking nomads continued to multiply and to be found land in the lower Ribble valley, perhaps draining the marshes to provide farmland, possibly directed into horse-breeding. By the time of the first Anglian or Saxon settlement in the region, the Sarmatians must have formed a large and deeply rooted community in western Lancashire.
What happened to them in the end is unknown. Most probably, they lost their military, imperial character and simply merged into the general post-Roman population of Britain. The study of genetic history by the analysis of DNA traces is still a highly inexact science, treated with utmost caution by historians, and biology alone cannot answer the question of 'who people are'. But if one day it is established that there are distinctive Indo-Iranian genes, a DNA survey in the Preston hinterland might well reveal that the Sarmatians are in a sense still present.
History — the product, not the raw material - is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them.
'Discourse' matters. In history, the priority now given to what a writer signified by the choice of language or matter, the function of his or her narrative, has amounted to a successful revolution. A new quality of intellectual freedom exists, and nobody can now read history without asking what end the text serves, and how. But truth matters too. Apart from their discourses, did the historians get their facts right? As I have argued about Herodotus, no discussion about his part in designing a Scythian 'mirror' for Greeks is complete without some judgment about whether he was an accurate reporter or made things up.
This applies to the Polish cult of Sarmatism too. Sarmatism was, blatantly, a discourse about superiority. Its political claims were so preposterous, its style so 'Turkish' and orientalising despite its Indo-Iranian title, its function as a class myth of origin so shameless, that few historians bothered to examine the myth's relationship to fact. Naturally, the Marxist approach which dominated Polish historiography for fifty years found Sarmatism easy meat. In the words of the Wielka Encyclopaedia Powszechna (Great Popular Encyclopaedia), Sarmatism — as a theory of descent — 'was promoted by the oligarchy and the church in order to subjugate the masses of the pauperised petty szlachta . , . main elements of the ideology were limitless personal freedom for the nobility; xenophobia, self-glorification, national-class megalomania combined with a belief in historical mission, intolerance, bigotry and orientalisation of tastes and customs . ..'
The idea that there might be elements of fact in the myth itself -that the Poles and specifically Polish noble families might actually be the descendants of Sarmatian immigrants - has seemed to most modern historians too silly to be worth investigating. But Sarmatism has waited until now to deliver its last and most disconcerting irony. There may be 'something in it', after all.
The early history of the Slavs is bound up with the late history of the Sarmatians, and with their gradual arrival in central and Western Europe. The Iazygians, who ended up at Ribchester, were the first Sarmatian people to reach the Roman frontier on the middle Danube. The last group to follow that route was the huge tribal confederation known as the Alans. They were the rearguard of the InJo-Iranian migration into Europe, which had begun with the Scythians some eleven hundred years before. Behind the last Sarmatian groups — the Eastern Alans and the Antae — rode the Huns. They were not Iranians but Turkic-speakers, who reached the Black Sea around 355 AD and inaugurated over a thousand years of Turkic supremacy in the Pontic Steppe.
Early in the third century, a new ruling group, heavily armed and wealthy, entered what is now southern Poland. When they buried their dead, they equipped them with wheel-turned pottery made on the northern Black Sea coasts, Sarmatian brooches and lances with iron heads inlaid in silver. They were unmistakeably a Sarmatian people, possibly the Antae, and their material culture showed that they had been in long and close contact with the Bosporan Kingdom. But the surest evidence for that contact - and the key exhibit in the argument about the Sarmatian ancestry of the Poles -is the tamga.
Tamgas are a family of signs. A tamga resembles a graffito monogram, a simple Chinese character or even a cattle-brand (tamgas were in fact used until recently to mark domestic animals in the northern Caucasus). Each one appears to be individual, to stand alone. Rostovtzeff thought that groups of them formed complete texts, 'the first stages in the development of a Sarmatian style of writing', but this is not convincing. Nor are they obviously pictograms based on some represented object, like the broken arrows and crescents and mirrors of Pictish symbol-carvings. In a few, a part of the pattern forms a stylised bird, but that proves neither that the tamga began as a bird-picture which was then stylised nor that an abstract design suggested a bird-form to some later tamga-engraver. Either sequence could be true.
Nobody knows, in short, what tamgas 'mean' or what they were really for. They are first found in the Bosporan Kingdom, dated to the first century AD, inscribed on the walls of underground tombs or on ritual objects. They are evidently not Sarmatian by origin, but at the same time they seem to have something to do with Central Asian religious symbolism of this period. What is clear is that the Sarmatians adopted the tamga from the Bosporans, and that its function then changed. After a fairly short time, the ritual purpose becomes less important, and the tamga is increasingly found engraved on the personal possessions of rich and powerful men and women. It becomes a property mark, but whether this refers to individual or clan property is not clear. Almost all known tamga signs have been found on Bosporan territory, most of them in the Greek cities.
Tamgas also occur in the Sarmatian graves scattered across Poland, engraved on s
tone or inlaid in silver upon iron lance-heads. Their spread reaches from Ukraine, including the Kiev region, westwards to what is now Silesia, and the distribution and the dating of the graves makes this look very much like the track of a Sarmatian-Alan migration.
The Polish tamgas do not show just that Sarmatians arrived there. They can be read to suggest that the Sarmatians never went away. Long before a Polish archaeologist, the late Tadeusz Sulimirski, made this case, chroniclers and genealogists had noticed that the heraldic clan symbols used by the old Polish nobility looked like tamgas. In fact, the older these crests were, the more strikingly 'Sarmatian', or rather Bosporan, they looked. This is not a matter of the great Sarmatism fad which began in the sixteenth century; such crests had been used as the devices of clans like the Roch, Chamiec, Mora or Doliwa in the Middle Ages, long before Sarmatism had been invented. Where, then, had they come from?
At this point, conventional scientists get cold feet. The evidence is not abundant. Any hypothesis is flossed up out of guesswork: grounds for charges of romanticism, which is a worse academic crime than falsification of data. All the same, a circumstantial case exists. We know that a Sarmatian mounted élite, using the tamga, reached Poland in the third century and settled there for at least a hundred years - possibly longer. We know that Polish szlachta families came to think that they were the descendants of Sarmatians. Finally, we know that Polish mediaeval heraldry used a graphic language whose only known visual ancestor is the tamga. So the problem, it might be said, is merely a thousand-year gap between Sarmatians and szlachta about which we know almost nothing. It may be that these broken-off connections at either end of the gap resemble one another only by coincidence. On the other hand, it may be that a class of mounted warriors from the Black Sea steppe - or as we might call them, knights in armour — achieved such a grip over a primitive Slavonic population that they were able to spend a millennium slowly turning themselves into a mediaeval land-holding nobility.
Sulimirski charged at the problem like a lancer. In the Polish edition of his book The Sarmatians, he writes of the 'almost identical forms' of crests and tamgas, and asserts: 'It would appear that there can be no doubt about the origin of a significant proportion, if not the majority of Polish crests in Sarmatian tamgas.'' The Antae, a component group of the Eastern Alans, were not wiped out by the Hun invasion of Poland which took place in the fifth century, and 'their descendants . . . retained their high social position.' It must therefore be assumed, says Sulimirski, that 'a significant part' of the Polish szlachta really does originate with the Sarmatian Alans.
He goes further. Polish aristocratic mores, Sulimirski suggests, find many of their roots in Sarmatian custom. Ancient writers record the solidarity and sense of equality among Sarmatians, much like the szlachta motto that 'the petty squire on his plot /Is as good as the duke'. And might not the special Polish attitude to women have its roots among those Indo-Iranian nomads too? Sarmatian noblewomen were powerful and respected, while the Polish system of aristocratic descent still shows traces of matriliny. 'Who knows', Sulimirski defiantly winds up, 'whether Polish gallantry to women, which amazes foreigners, as does the responsible role of women in family and even social life, is not a survival or echo of Sarmatian matriarchal society?'
The Sarmatians, even if their progeny are still kissing ladies' hands in Poland and helping mares foal in Lancashire, have emptied themselves into history until none of them — apart from the Ossetians — remain. Those who migrated west from the Black Sea ceased to be nomads and pastoralists. Some of the first wave, like the Iazygians, were recruited by the Roman Empire and resettled in various parts of Gaul or Britain. Others moved north-westward until they came up against the strong and firmly settled Germanic peoples. Late Roman writers, trying to describe this, fell into the habit of describing all Europe east of the Germans as 'Sarmatia', a term which was gradually applied to all the Slav peoples of the region whether or not they had a ruling class of Sarmatian origin.
The Alans, in particular, had many strange fates. One group or war-party, setting out from the Balkans in the late fourth century, rode right across the dying Roman Empire through Austria and the Rhineland, and then, with Vandal and Suevian allies, into France, Spain and Portugal, winding up in what is now Spanish Galicia. Other expeditions moved more slowly across northern France, in some cases putting down roots and forming small Alan kingdoms of their own. Over thirty French place-names, including that of the town of Alenqon, allude to their presence, and there is some evidence of a long-lasting Sarmatian settlement near Orleans.
These kingdoms, replacing the shrunken remains of the Roman villa economy, seem to prefigure the mediaeval pattern of mounted knights ruling settled peasantries. For some scholars, the Sarmatians engendered 'the dawn of chivalry' in the West, not only as a new pattern of social order but in mythology, symbolism and taste. Timothy Taylor writes that 'the animal-based heraldry of mediaeval Europe. .. owes far more to this direct steppic influence than to the animal motifs — originally Persian and Thracian — mediated and transmitted by western Celtic art.'
The Eastern Alans had been the neighbours of the Huns in Central Asia, and had acquired some of their customs. One of these was skull-binding, the practice of deforming the heads of infants into an ovoid shape — flat receding forehead and long projecting cranium at the back. Partly overrun by the Hun offensive into Europe, many Eastern Alans joined their armies and travelled west with them. Some settled for a time on the Elbe, and - like their predecessors the Antae - came to mobilise and dominate the larger and less warlike Slavonic populations they found there.
One of these conquests had a powerful impact on later history. The words Choroatus and Chorouatos (Croat) occur on inscriptions found at Tanais, on the Don. It looks as if the term was originally the name of a group of Alan warriors who lived for a period in the Azov steppes and then migrated again towards the north-west. There they subjugated and then merged into Slavonic peoples living on the upper Vistula and in northern Bohemia. Byzantine and Arab chronicles in the tenth century describe a people called Belochrobati (White Croats) in that region, whose kings drank mares' milk and whose babies were subjected to skull-binding. Migrating southwards across the Hungarian plain towards the Adriatic, this group settled in the area which was to become modern Croatia. The name 'Serb', too, originally belonged to another Eastern Alan band which was recorded in the Volga-Don steppe in the third century and which reappeared in the fifth century on the east bank of the Elbe. In the same way as the Sarmatian 'Croats', they dominated and then melted into Slav populations around them. Some remained there, ancestors of the Slav-speaking Serb minority which still lives in Lusatia in modern Saxony. Others, like the Croats, moved south across the Danube to a permanent home in the Balkans: the future land of Serbia.
Fragments of Alan population survived in Asia for many more centuries. William of Rubruck, in the thirteenth century, was only one of several European travellers who met Christianised Alans living at the court of Tatar khans, and Marco Polo heard of similar communities in China during the Yuan/Mongol dynasty. In the fourteenth century, the missionary bishop Brother Pellegrini reported a large community of Orthodox Christian Alans, possibly mercenary soldiers, living on the south-eastern coast of China, but nothing else is known about them.
The Crimean coast between Feodosia and Alushta was still known as 'Alania' in the Middle Ages, and there were disputes about who was the rightful bishop of the Alans. These last Sarmatians on the Black Sea appear to have linked up with the Crimean Goths until 'Gothia' was overthrown by the Turks and Tatars. The final mention of the Alans, as inhabitants of Crimea in the time of the Tatar khanate, dates from the seventeenth century — only a hundred years before the Russian conquest.
Although their overlords were Moslems, the Crimean Alans remained Orthodox Christians and their faith was tolerated. By i6oo, they had become a small, inoffensive community which had grown almost indistinguishable from more recent Christian settlers along t
he Crimean coast - indistinguishable, except for one thing. Their heads were egg-shaped. More than a thousand years since they learned the practice from the Huns, the Eastern Alans were still binding the skulls of their babies.
Chapter Ten
The law-abiding town, though small and set On a lofty rock, outranks mad Nineveh.
Phocylides, quoted by Dio Chrysostom in
'Borysthenitica'
The old Irish term for province is coicead, meaning a 'fifth', and yet, as everyone knows, there are only four geographical provinces on this island. So where is the fifth? The fifth province is not anywhere here or there, north or south, east or west. It is a place within each one of us — that place which is open to the other, that swinging door which allows us to venture out and others to venture in.
Mary Robinson, President of the Irish Republic, on signing the Declaration of Office in Dublin Castle, 3 December 1990
IN AUGUST 1992, a small, savage war broke out on the shores of the Black Sea between Abkhazia and Georgia. It ended, just over a year later, with the defeat of the Georgian forces led in person by President Edward Shevardnadze and the emergence of a precariously independent Republic of Abkhazia.
Human settlement around the Black Sea has a delicate, complex geology accumulated over three thousand years. But a geologist would not call this process simple sedimentation, as if each new influx of settlers neatly overlaid the previous culture. Instead, the heat of history has melted and folded peoples into one another's crevices, in unpredictable outcrops and striations. Every town and village is seamed with fault-lines. Every district displays a different veining of Greek and Turkic, Slav and Iranian, Caucasian and Kartvelian, Jewish and Armenian and Baltic and Germanic.
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