The Yotvingians

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The richest thing the Yotvingians left behind is a hole in the ground. In the sandy lake country around Suwałki, in what is now the northeastern corner of Poland, the barrows stand in groups under the pines — low mounds of earth and field-stone, the largest of them broad enough to hold a wagon — and inside them lie the burned bones, the iron spearheads and socketed axes, the bronze brooches, and now and then the bones of a horse laid down beside its rider. The mounds were raised between the second and fifth centuries of the common era and used for centuries more. They were dug into in the 1950s and after, and what came out of them is, for a people who wrote nothing, almost the whole of the body of evidence: the graves speak where the texts fall silent.

The people in those graves called themselves something we cannot quite recover. Their neighbors called them many things. To the Rus they were the Jatviagy; to the Poles, the Jaćwingowie; to the chroniclers of the German military order that finally broke them, the Suduwite or Sudovians; in the modern scholarly literature they are the Yotvingians, the Sudovians, the Jatvingians, the Sūduviai, all one nation. It is worth saying at the outset, because the two names confuse readers who meet them apart: Yotvingian and Sudovian denote the same people, or at the least two closely joined branches of it, and the records use the labels almost interchangeably. They were Balts — kin in speech to the people the world would later call the Old Prussians, and kin too to the Lithuanians who absorbed many of their survivors — and they lived and died in the deep woods between the upper Neman and the Narew, a country of forest and water that the maps would come to mark as Sudovia.

A people of the forest and the lake

The land made the people, and the land was forest. Yotvingian country lay southwest of the upper Nemunas, across what is now the Podlaskie region of Poland, the southern fringe of Lithuania, and a slice of the Hrodna province of Belarus — a watershed of lakes and slow rivers, the Czarna Hańcza, the Gołdap, the chain of the Augustów lakes, draining toward the Neman in the north and the Narew and the Vistula basin in the west. Before the tenth century their reach was wider still, running south toward Brest and west into the Narew basin, with the Lithuanian lands and the future sites of Vilnius and Kaunas at their northern edge. It was border country in every direction, hemmed by the Prussians to the west, the Lithuanians to the north, and the Poles and the principalities of the Rus to the south and east — and it would be the misfortune of the Yotvingians that all four of those neighbors grew strong at once.

Their tongue belonged to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European family, among the most archaic surviving branches of that family, and within Baltic it sat on the western side, beside Old Prussian. The classification is debated: some place Yotvingian as a dialect of Old Prussian, while the linguist Petras Būtėnas argued that it stood closest to Lithuanian, and on the evidence it may have been a western Baltic speech that leaned, in the end, toward the Lithuanian east. The trouble is that there is almost nothing to classify. The language is reconstructed chiefly from place-names scattered across northeastern Poland, northwestern Belarus, and southern Lithuania, and from personal names — the débris of a tongue, not the tongue itself. The one continuous written trace is a small manuscript wordlist, a Polish-to-Yotvingian vocabulary of roughly two hundred and fifteen words headed Pagan dialects from the Narew, which surfaced only in 1978. Scholars who have studied it, among them Zigmas Zinkevičius, read it as a heavily Lithuanianized Yotvingian, or Lithuanian with a Yotvingian substrate, or a mixed compilation; its authenticity is broadly accepted, errors and all. As a window onto a vanished speech, it is a keyhole. The language itself was gone by the seventeenth century, its last speakers drawn off into German, Lithuanian, and Slavic.

A people the name recalls may be older than any chronicle. In the Geography of the Alexandrian astronomer of the second century, among the peoples set down along the eastern Baltic, stand the Galindai and the Soudinoi — the latter a name that the eye and the ear connect at once to the Sudovians. The identification is attractive and widely repeated, and it would push the first notice of these people back into the world of classical geography; but it should be held as a proposal, not a proof. A name written by a Greek who never saw the place, copied through centuries of manuscripts, is a fragile thread. What is firmer is the archaeology, which shows a distinct material culture — the Sudovian or Sudauen group of the western Baltic world — settled in this country through the Roman Iron Age and the Migration period, the people of the barrows long before any chronicler wrote their name.

Brooches, ornaments, and pottery of the Sudovian (Sudauen) group of the West Baltic culture, late Roman period — the kind of grave-goods recovered from the barrow cemeteries of the Yotvingian country. After Marian Biskup and Gerard Labuda, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Known through enemies and through graves

The central fact about the Yotvingians is also the hardest to write around: they kept no records of their own. Everything told of them in words comes from people who fought them, taxed them, or hunted them — and so the documentary Yotvingians and the archaeological Yotvingians are almost two different peoples, and a reader has to keep asking which one a given sentence rests on.

The words come from three quarters, all of them outside. The chronicles of the Rus — the Hypatian compilation above all — name the Jatviagy and record the wars waged against them by the southern princes. The Polish accounts set them on the Masovian frontier as a standing menace. And the chronicles of the German military order that conquered Prussia, the Chronicon terrae Prussiae of Peter von Dusburg foremost among them, written around 1326, narrate their final destruction from the conquerors’ side. These are interested witnesses, every one. To the Rus and the Poles the Yotvingians were raiders to be punished; to the order they were heathens to be subdued and a campaign to be justified. The picture they hand down — fierce, faithless, warlike, pagan — is the picture an enemy paints, and it has to be read as such, not adopted.

Read that way, a coherent society shows through the hostility. The Yotvingians farmed and herded and hunted the game of their forests, and they lived in fortified settlements, hillforts raised on mounds and ringed by water or steep slope, the same kind of stronghold that studs the whole Baltic country — the hillfort landscapes of their Lithuanian kin are the nearest surviving cousins to what they built. And they raided. The chronicles are unanimous on this and the point need not be softened: the Yotvingians struck at the lands around them, deep into Poland and into the Rus principalities, and the neighbors struck back. As early as the tenth century their war-bands appear as a force to be hired — the Kievan prince Igor took them as mercenaries in 944, and Vladimir of Kiev again in 983 — which is its own evidence of a people organized for war. The grave-goods agree with the texts here, if with nothing else: the barrows of the warriors hold the weapons of a fighting society, the spears and javelins and axes of light infantry, the occasional sword, the horse laid down with its owner. The label “Baltic Vikings” sometimes pinned to them is a modern flourish and best left as one, but a people built around the raid is not a misreading of the evidence.

Of their sacred world we know least of all, and honesty requires saying how little. They were pagan, as all the Balts were before the long Christianization of the region, and what filters through the hostile record and the comparative study of their kin suggests the common Baltic frame: the worship of the sky and its powers, of the dead, of the holy grove and the stone and the fire, raised in the open rather than in temples. The thunder-god the Lithuanians knew as Perkūnas, the sun the dainos call Saulė, the earth-mother Žemyna, the chthonic lord later peoples named Velnias — the deep furniture of the Baltic heaven and underworld — would have had their Yotvingian forms, and a list of Sudovian deities set down in Samland in 1530, after the survivors had been resettled there, preserves a few divine names. But the names on that list reach us through a foreign hand long after the fact, and to write a Yotvingian pantheon out of them would be to manufacture certainty the evidence does not hold. The strongest testimony to their religion is mute: the cremation, the barrow, the horse and the weapon and the brooch laid in the earth — the care taken with the dead, which speaks to a faith in something beyond the grave without telling us its words. Here the tradition-internal voice of the Yotvingians is almost entirely lost; what remains is the rite read from the ground, not the belief read from the page.

The closing of the trap

For most of their history the Yotvingians lived by the strength of their forests, which were hard to march an army through and easy to disappear into. In the thirteenth century the forests stopped being enough, because the pressure came from every side at once.

From the south came the Rus. Daniel of Galicia, the powerful prince of Galicia-Volhynia, mounted campaigns against the Yotvingians in 1248, 1253, and 1254; unable to hold against the combined weight of Rus and Polish arms, the Yotvingians agreed to pay tribute. In 1254 Daniel, the German order, and the Masovian prince Siemowit went so far as to partition the still-unconquered Yotvingian land on parchment — two-thirds to the order, the rest to the Masovians and the Rus — dividing the country before they had finished taking it. From the west came that order itself, the Teutonic Knights, who had been grinding through Prussia since the 1230s and whose long war against the Baltic pagans the Yotvingians could not stay out of. Their war-leader Skomantas — Skalmantas, also called Komantas of Sudovia — threw the Yotvingians into the great Prussian rising against the order, raiding Chełmno in 1263, leading thousands into the Kulmerland with Lithuanian help in 1277. From the north came the Lithuanians, in the end the inheritors more than the destroyers, who would draw the survivors into their own rising state.

The end came between 1278 and 1283. In those years the Teutonic Knights subdued the last of the western Baltic peoples who had held out — the Skalvians, the Nadruvians, and the Sudovians — and the conquest of Sudovia, recounted by Peter von Dusburg, left the country largely emptied. The population was killed, driven off, or carried away. Some of the northern Yotvingians fled east to Hrodna in the Lithuanian lands and were taken in; others the order resettled in Sambia, on the Prussian coast, in the district that kept their name as the Sudauer Winkel, the Sudovian Corner, a transplanted remnant living out its identity far from the lakes that had made it. By the end of the thirteenth century the Yotvingians had ceased to exist as a nation in their own country. The land lay open and was slowly recolonized; the people were divided among the powers that had divided their map.

This should be set down plainly and without melodrama, and without the conquerors’ frame. The Yotvingians were not savages cleared from the path of civilization. They were a people of the European forest, organized, armed, and old in their land, who were caught in the closing of a vise — a crusade pressing from the west, ambitious Christian princes from the south, a rising Baltic monarchy from the north — and who were destroyed by it within a single century. That they raided their neighbors is true and is part of the record; that this made their destruction a deserved tidying-up is the chroniclers’ verdict, and it is not the historian’s.

The recovery

A people who left no voice can still be given back a body, and that is largely what the modern study of the Yotvingians has done. The recovery runs along the three lines that the loss ran along, reversed.

The first and the deepest is the archaeology. The barrow-cemeteries of the Suwałki lake country, excavated through the second half of the twentieth century and after, have supplied nearly everything the texts withhold — the houses and hillforts of the living, the cremated dead with their grave-goods, the long arc of a distinct material culture reaching back through the Migration period and the Roman Iron Age to the centuries when no chronicle yet named them. The rich warrior burials, some with horses, the brooches and pendants of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the weapons and the ornaments — these are the Yotvingians as they were, not as their enemies described them, and the collected finds of the Sudovian culture on the public record now run to a substantial body of material. Where the documentary trail gives a thin and hostile sketch, the spade has filled in flesh.

The second is the critical reading of the very chronicles that condemned them — the Rus annals, the Polish notices, the Teutonic accounts of Dusburg and the rest — sifted now for the facts inside the hostility, the dates and the campaigns and the names weighed against the bias of the hand that wrote them. The third is the patient linguistics: the wordlist from the Narew, the harvest of place-names across three modern countries, the personal names, assembled into the partial knowledge by which a dead Baltic tongue is held in the comparative science of the Indo-European languages.

The Baltic tribal groups around 1200 — the Yotvingians (Jaćwingowie) set among the Old Prussians, Curonians, Samogitians, and Lithuanians, in the country between the Neman and the Narew. Marcin Engel and Cezary Sobczak, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

There has been an afterlife of identity, too, of a more uncertain kind. The name did not vanish entirely: a clergy census in the Hrodna area of Belarus in 1860 recorded tens of thousands of people who identified as Jatviags, the memory of descent outliving the nation by six centuries; and in the late 1980s intellectuals in the Polesie region of Belarus invoked the Yotvingian inheritance in a short-lived movement to recognize a western Polesie identity. These are the long echoes of a name, not the survival of a people, and they belong to the modern history of memory rather than to the medieval history of the nation.

What can be said in the end is modest, and it is better to keep it modest than to dress it up. The Yotvingians were a Baltic forest people who lived a long time in a hard and beautiful country, fought their neighbors and were feared by them, buried their dead with care under the pines, and were broken and parceled out in the thirteenth century by the powers that surrounded them — fellow Balts to the north like the Old Prussians under the same crusade, the seafaring Curonians along the coast under the same long pressure, all of them caught in the closing of the pagan Baltic world. Of their gods and their songs we have almost nothing in their own words. Of their lives we have the graves, and the graves are eloquent enough to keep them from disappearing entirely into the verdicts of the men who killed them.

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