Black Sea (44 page)

Tamgas
also occur in the Sarmatian graves scattered across Poland, engraved on stone 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 the 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.

An ancient 'multi-ethnic' community is a rich culture to grow up in. Bosnia was once like that. So was Odessa before the Bolshevik Revolution, or Vilnius, in Lithuania, before the Second World War. The symbiosis of many nationalities, religions and languages in one place has always appealed to foreign visitors, and never more than in today's epoch of nationalist upheaval. But nostalgia makes bad history. The symbiosis has often been more apparent than real.

Living together does not mean growing together. Different ethnic groups may co-exist for centuries, practising the borrowing and visiting of good neighbours, sitting on the same school bench and serving in the same imperial regiments, without losing their underlying mutual distrust. But what held such societies together was not so much consent as necessity - the fear of external force. For one group to assail or attempt to suppress another was to invite a catastrophic intervention from above — the despatch of Turkish soldiers or Cossacks - which would pitch the whole community into disaster.

It follows that when that fear is removed, through the collapse of empires or tyrannies, the constraint is removed too. Power struggles in distant places, to which one group or another feels an allegiance, reach the village street. Democratic politics, summoning unsophisticated people to pick up sides and to think in terms of adversarial competition, smite such communities along their concealed splitting-plane: their ethnic divisions. And, often reluctantly at first, they divide. The familiar neighbours, with their odd-smelling food and the strange language they speak at home, become part of an alien and hostile 'them'. Antique suspicions, once confined to folk-songs and the kitchen tales of grandmothers, are synthesised into the politics of paranoia.