Crimean Goths

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Author:Laxman Burdak, IFS (R)
Map of Crimea
Map of Gothia – territory of the Crimean Goths

Crimean Goths (क्रीमियाई गाॅथ) were Greuthungi-Gothic tribes who remained in the lands around the Black Sea, especially in Crimea. They were the longest-lasting of the Gothic communities.

Scholars have suggested that the Greco-Latin variant of "Goth" is "Getae".[1][2][3][4]

Scholars suggest that Goths (Getae) and Jats are the same. Alexander Cunningham advocated, "Jat is the same word as Getæ, in all probability."[5]

Jat Gotra

History

Their existence is well attested through the ages though the exact period when they ceased to exist as a distinct culture is unknown; as with the Goths in general, they may have been diffused with the surrounding peoples. In the Fourth Turkish letter by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, they are described as "a warlike people, who to this day inhabit many villages" though in the 5th century, Theodoric the Great failed to rouse Crimean Goths to support his war in Italy.[6] At the time, it was customary to refer to a wide range of Germanic tribes as "Goths", so the exact ethnic origin of the Germanic peoples in Crimea is a subject of debate.

Aside from textual reports of the existence of the Goths in Crimea, both first and second hand, from as early as 850,[7] numerous archaeological examples also exist, including the ruins of the former capital city of the Crimean Goths: Doros, or Mangup as it is now known. On top of this, there are numerous articles of jewelry, weaponry, shields, buttons, pins, and small personal artifacts on display in museums in Crimea and in the British Museum which have led to a better understanding of the Gothic Kingdom.

In the report made by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq in 1595 of the Crimean Goths, he claims to not be able to determine whether the Germanic peoples of Crimea were Goths or Saxons, certainly the language cannot be directly linked to the well-attested Gothic language. Though most scholars agree the peoples must have been of Gothic origin,[8] some others have maintained that the so-called "Crimean Goths" were in fact West or even North Germanic tribes who settled in Crimea, culturally and linguistically influenced by the Ostrogoths.[9] For example, a group of Anglo-Saxons who fled the Norman Conquest did in fact get asylum with the Byzantine Empire and received land in Crimea , and given the suspiciously West Germanic character of "Crimean Gothic", it appears conceivable that it is far more likely the "Crimean Gothic" language descended from Anglo-Saxons who arrived around 1100 instead of Goths from several hundred years before that.[10]

Early history

According to Herwig Wolfram, following Jordanes, the Ostrogoths had a huge kingdom north of the Black Sea in the 4th century,[11] which the Huns overwhelmed in the time of the Gothic king Ermanaric (or Hermanric; i.e. "king of noblemen")[12] when the Huns migrated to the Ukrainian steppe.

The Ostrogoths became vassals of the Huns until the death of Attila, when they revolted and regained independence. Like the Huns, the Goths in Crimea never regained their lost glory.

According to Peter Heather and Michael Kulikowski, the Ostrogoths did not even exist until the 5th century, when they emerged from other Gothic and non-Gothic groups.[13][14] Other Gothic groups may have settled in Crimea. [15] It has also been speculated that the Crimean Goths were in fact Saxons escaping Christian persecution from the west, or North Germanic tribes who migrated southwards. Either way, the existence of Goths in Crimea is first attested from around the 3rd century, following which they were well reported.

During the late 5th and early 6th century, the Crimean Goths had to fight off hordes of Huns who were migrating back eastward after losing control of their European empire.[16] In the 5th century, Theodoric the Great tried to recruit Crimean Goths for his campaigns in Italy, but few showed interest in joining him.[17]

Byzantium:

The Principality of Gothia or Theodoro formed after the Fourth Crusade out of parts of the Byzantine thema of Klimata which were not occupied by the Genoese. Its population was a mixture of Greeks, Crimean Goths, Alans, Bulgars, Kipchaks and other nations, which confessed Orthodox Christianity. The principality's official language was Greek. The territory was initially under the control of Trebizond, and possibly part of its Crimean possessions, the Perateia.

Many Crimean Goths were Greek speakers and many non-Gothic Byzantine citizens were settled in the region called "Gothia" by the government in Constantinople. A Gothic principality around the stronghold of Doros (modern Mangup), the Principality of Theodoro, continued to exist through various periods of vassalage to the Byzantines, Khazars, Kipchaks, Mongols, Genoese and other empires until 1475, when it was finally incorporated in the Khanate of Crimea and the Ottoman Empire. This is generally considered to be the fall of the Crimean Goths.[18]

There is a theory that some Anglo-Saxons who left England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066 arrived in Constantinople in time to help the Byzantines repel an invasion.[19]

Religion

The first report of the Crimean Goths appears in the Vita of Saint Cyril, Apostle to the Slavs (Constantine the Philosopher) who went to Crimea to preach the gospel to the Khazars (c. 850). He lists "Goths" as people who read and praised the Christian God "in their own language".[20]. In 1606 Joseph Justus Scaliger claimed that the Goths of Crimea read both the Old and New Testaments "in the letters of Wulfila's alphabet".[21] These are the only two reports which refer to the existence of a written form of Crimean Gothic, but also confirm their Christian faith.

Gothic peoples originally practiced forms of Gothic paganism, in turn a subset of Germanic paganism, before nominally being Christianised from the 4th to 6th centuries CE.[22] The Crimean Goths had converted from Arian to Chalcedonian Christianity by the 6th century. In the 8th century John of Gothia, an Orthodox bishop, led an unsuccessful revolt against Khazar overlordship. Following the split of Chalcedonian Christianity in the 11th century between the Roman and Orthodox branches, these peoples remained loyal to Constantinople as part of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Disappearance

There are numerous other sources referring to the existence of Goths in Crimea following Busbecq's report, though none providing details of their language or customs. The last known record of the Goths in Crimea comes from the Archbishop of Mohilev, Stanisław Bohusz Siestrzeńcewicz c. 1780, who visited Crimea at the end of the 18th century, and noted the existence of people whose language and customs differed greatly from their neighbors and who he concluded must be "Goths".[23]

Though there are no further records of the language's existence since the late 18th century, communities of Germanic peoples with distinctly separate customs and physical features have been recorded living in Crimea, leading some to believe that the Gothic language may have survived as a haussprache (home language) until as late as 1945.[24]

According to the Soviet ethnologist V. E. Vozgrin, the Goths interbred with the Crimean Tatars and converted to Islam. In The Crimean Tatars: the diaspora experience and the forging of a nation by Brian Glyn Williams, he quotes Vozgrin as saying: "In all probability their descendants are the Tatars of a series of villages in the Crimea who are sharply delineated from the inhabitants of neighboring villages by their tall height and other features characteristic of the Scandinavians."

It is likely that the Goths had begun to speak Crimean Tatar and Crimean Greek from long before the arrival of Busbecq,[25] thus they may well have integrated into the wider population, as later visitors to Mangup were unable to discover "any trace" of Gothic peoples.[26]

Legacy

Almost no signs of the Crimean Goths exist today. It was claimed by the Third Reich and by Adolf Hitler that the Crimean Goths had survived long enough to interbreed with later German settlers in Crimea, and that the German communities in Crimea constituted native peoples of that area. Hitler had intended to re-settle German people to Crimea, and rename numerous towns with their previous Crimean Gothic names. During the Nazi occupation of Crimea following its capture in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, Sevastopol was changed to Theoderichshafen.[27] Hitler's ultimate goal for his planned "Gau Gothenland" ("Gothland" or "Gothia") was to replace the local population with "pure Germans" and turn the Crimea into what he described as "the German Gibraltar"—a national foothold not contiguous to the rest of Germany, similar to how Gibraltar was not contiguous to the rest of the United Kingdom—to be connected to Germany proper by an autobahn. The plan was postponed for the duration of the war, and never went into effect due to the Soviet recapture of Crimea and Nazi Germany's eventual defeat.[28]

External links

See also

References

  1. ↑ Common Origin of Croats, Serbs and Jats
  2. ↑ Lozinksi 1964: "The Name Slav" by B. Philip Lozinski (Essays in Russian History, Archon Books,1964)
  3. ↑ Vernadsky 1952: "Der sarmatische Hintergrund der germanischen Voelkerwanderung," (Sarmatian background of the Germanic Migrations), G. Vernadsky, Saeculum, II (1952), 340-347.
  4. ↑ Iranic Identity of Mauryas
  5. ↑ Cunningham, Arch. Survey Reports, II, 54 ff.
  6. ↑ Wolfram, Herwig (1988) [Originally published in German, 1980]. History of the Goths. Translated by Dunlap, Thomas J. Univ. of California Press. pp. 271–280
  7. ↑ Vasiliev, Aleksandr A. (1936). The Goths in the Crimea. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America.p.14
  8. ↑ Streitberg, Wilhelm (1920). Gotisches Elementarbuch (5th and 6th ed.). Heidelberg: Carl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung. p. 17
  9. ↑ Schwarz, Ernst (1951). Goten, Nordgermanen, Angelsachsen. Bern: A. Francke.p. 162
  10. ↑ "The medieval 'New England': A forgotten Anglo-Saxon colony on the north-eastern Black Sea coast".
  11. ↑ Wolfram 1988, pp. 78–263 passim
  12. ↑ Here/Hari (army/noble) + mann/man + ric/rike (ruler))
  13. ↑ Heather, Peter (1998). The Goths. Blackwell.pp. 52–55
  14. ↑ Kulikowski, Michael (2006). Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric. Cambridge Univ. Press. p. 111
  15. ↑ Heather, Peter; Matthews, John (1991). Goths in the Fourth Century. Liverpool Univ. Press. p. 92 n. 87
  16. ↑ Wolfram 1988, p. 261
  17. ↑ Wolfram 1988, pp. 271–280
  18. ↑ [1]
  19. ↑ Shepard, Jonathan (1973). "The English and Byzantium: A Study of Their Role in the Byzantine Army in the Later Eleventh Century". Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion. New York: Fordham University Press. 29: 53–92. JSTOR 27830955.
  20. ↑ loewe 1896:114
  21. ↑ [Stearns 1971:16.]
  22. ↑ [Schäferdiek, Knut; Gschwantler, Otto (2010) [1975]. "Bekehrung und Bekehrungsgeschichte". Germanische Altertumskunde Online. pp. 350–409.]
  23. ↑ Loewe (1869:200).
  24. ↑ Schwarz (1953:163-4)
  25. ↑ Stearns(1979:39–40).
  26. ↑ pallas(1801:363–364).
  27. ↑ Wolfram 2001, p. 12
  28. ↑ Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War, 2008, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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