Black Sea (43 page)

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 towards 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.

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
In
Jo-
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.