The Dragon Warriors of the Pontic Steppe

Nomad archer stringing
His bow.

Hardy nomads who roamed both Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the better part of a thousand years, it could be argued that the Sarmatians represented the ancient military legacy of Iran in its purest form.  Though they never conquered an empire of their own, Sarmatian warriors played a key role in the stories of many other ancient peoples – the Greeks, the Romans, the Dacians, the Vandals, the Parthians, the Huns, and the Sassanid Persians.

Peoples living as far apart as Wales, Poland, and Iran can, to this day, claim a measure of Sarmatian influence on their heritage, particularly its mythology.  Many knightly and chivalrous ideals of the high Middle Ages originally sprung from the Iranian warrior society that bred both the Persians and the Sarmatians, and many modern researchers contend that the legends of King Arthur and his knights were directly inspired by bands of Sarmatian auxiliaries sent to Britain by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The Sarmatians as a distinct culture appear to have originated on the Pontic Steppes on the northern shores of the Black Sea, and from here they expanded at the expense of the Skythians as well as Greek colonies.  Our first written reference of them dates to about 507 BCE, when a tribe designated the “Sauromatae” are said by Herodotos to have aided the Skythians in opposing Emperor Darius I of Persia.  In the following centuries, however, the Sarmatians gradually displaced or assimilated the Skythians – this was a gradual process spanning from the 4^th to the 1^st Centuries BCE, and is a very poorly understood occurrence.  Indeed, the very distinction between “Skythian” and “Sarmatian” seems to be vague at best.  Nonetheless, by the lifetime of Christ those regions formally known as “Skythia” were now being called “Sarmatia”, and would remain under this name at least until the 5^th Century.

Sarmatian Society and Warriors

The Sarmatians appear to have been a combination of the Asian and Caucasian ethnic groups, based on surviving accounts of their physical appearance.  Archaeology attests to some Sarmatian groups practicing head-binding on their infants (resulting in a grotesquely elongated skull by adulthood), but contemporary sources attribute this not to Sarmatians but to the Huns.  Like the Skythians, the Sarmatians were distinct for wearing tight-fitting trousers and coats, and for wearing their hair very long – facial hair was also common though less unkempt.

Sarmatian-style
'spangenhelm'

The Sarmatians were divided into a number of mutually-hostile tribes that were led by figures variously occupying the role of warlord, tribal chieftain, or petty king.  Some tribes do seem to have formed alliances, for example the Iazgyes and Rhoxolani who were closely associated with one another.  Very little is known about their religion except that they regarded a sword thrust into the ground as a sacred emblem, over which they swore blood oaths; Classical sources attribute the sacrifice of prisoners to the Sarmatians though considering the behavior of other nomad groups slavery or even assimilation into the community were probably more likely fates for captives.

The Sarmatians were nomads who subsisted almost entirely by hunting and by raiding the farms and towns of settled peoples – they could be described as landlocked pirates.  Their livelihood depended on their sturdy steppe horses, with whom they were extremely skilled.  When hunting they primarily used spears and composite bows, but they also used lassoes to capture both human and animal prey.  They were fabulous metalworkers and jewelers – a common trait amongst those tribes the Romans considered “barbarians”.  Like the Skythians they used wagons called yurts to transport their children and their material possessions, but every adult was expected to ride a horse.  Even so, the equestrian nature of Sarmatian behavior is not stressed to the same degree as that of the Huns (who supposedly relieved themselves, made love, and were born and died in the saddle).  Sarmatian women seem to have enjoyed an equal position to that of the men, and archaeology strongly suggests that female warriors and hunters amongst the Sarmatians served as an inspiration to the Greek myth of the Amazons.

Like the Skythians, Sarmatian warriors dazzled their settled neighbors with their speed and accuracy as mounted archers.  But the Sarmatians had developed a form of heavy cavalry warfare that was seldom if ever seen amongst the Skythians.  A fully armed Sarmatian cavalrymen was attired, almost literally head to toe, in scale armor (made from horses’ hooves, or, according to legend, dragon scales) including a conical helmet.  The latter piece is known to modern archaeologists as the spangenhelm and was adopted by the Romans, Germanic tribes, and Persians due to Sarmatian influence.  Some Sarmatians also equipped their mounts with scale barding.  Sarmatian weaponry was diverse, including two-handed lances (called a kontos in Greek), the Skythian-style composite bow, lassoes, and straight swords and daggers that were conspicuous for having a ring-shaped pommel.

Early Contacts

Sarmatian warriors had served both as allies and enemies to Greek states on the Pontic shores, the Skythians, and the Kingdom of Pontus for several centuries by the lifetime of Augustus, but up to that point they had had no contact with Rome, and little or no contact with their Parthian cousins (themselves ultimately descended from the Parni, a Skythian tribe).  In 16 BCE, Roman and Sarmatian met for the first time – Sarmatian raiders crossed the Danube, only to be driven out by the Roman governor of Macedonia.  It was to be but the first of many such friendly meetings.

Under Rome’s Julio-Claudian Emperors, we most often hear of Sarmatians serving as mercenaries during civil wars or tribal conflicts on Rome’s borders.  Between 30 and 60 CE, Sarmatian horsemen aided both sides in a Parthian civil war, both sides in a Bosporan civil war, and also provided an unstoppable cavalry contingent for the Quadian chieftain Vannius, who was himself fighting his fellow Germans on behalf of Rome.  The latter event, occurring in and around 50 CE, seems to be the first time that Sarmatians fought for, rather than against, Rome and her clients.  It also marked the beginning of contact between the Sarmatians and the Germans, with the result that wealthy Germanic tribesmen began to adopt weaponry and armor from the steppe-lands.

The Climax of Sarmatian Raiding

Sarmatian incursions past Roman and Parthian borders had been common for the better part of a century, but the 69-73 CE period seems to be the high-water mark of Sarmatian ambitions in the settled world.  In 69 CE, the Rhoxolani took deliberate advantage of the Roman Empire’s preoccupation with its long neglected pastime of civil war, and crossed the Danube with a horde of some 10,000 riders.  They thoroughly pillaged Moesia, glutting themselves on the wealth and wine of Rome only to be intercepted by the Flavian general Marcus Antonius Primus, who attacked them while they were drunk in their camp and slaughtered them almost to a man.  This defeat revealed the specialized nature of Sarmatian warfare.  The Sarmatian was almost invincible while still firmly locked in his saddle; a legionary was barely able to reach him, let alone kill him.  But on his feet, the Sarmatian was just a man, and one whose weaponry – indeed, very body – was not as stable on solid ground as that of a Roman soldier.

Apparently the Alans, one of the largest and most sophisticated Sarmatian tribes, decided Parthia and Armenia would be easier pickings.  In 72 and 73 CE, they raged through the Caucasus and assaulted Armenia, Albania, Atropatene, and finally Parthia herself, leaving broken communities and shredded remnants of armies in their wake.  Such was Parthia’s desperation, her King Vologaeses the First actually sent messengers to Rome, begging for military aid against the Alans.  This aid was not forthcoming – likely enough the Romans were at worst neutral, at best supportive, in their stance towards the Alans.  The pillaging of Mesopotamia and central Asia petered away in the late 70s, with separate bands of Alans returning north – the Parthians do not seem to have ever inflicted any meaningful defeats on them.

The Dacian Wars

The last two decades of the 1^st Century and the first decade of the 2^nd Century saw the triumph of Roman arms on both sides of the Danube, culminating in the Second Dacian War and the destruction of the kingdom of Decebalus in 105-106.  This was an era of particularly ugly violence on the Danube frontier, however, and this violence did not have a pleasant beginning for Rome.

In 92 CE, a mixed force of Quadi, Marcomanni, and Iazyges invaded Pannonia.  They were confronted by the Roman legion XXI Rapax and several auxiliary cohorts, but responded by surrounding and completely butchering these units, before proceeding to ravish the province.  As usual, these “barbarians” had come only pillage, not to conquer, and returned home laden with spoils and slaves.  But the implications were frightening to Rome.  The Marcomanni and Quadi were Germanic tribes (the latter former allies of Rome), while the Iazyges were Sarmatian.  Militarily speaking, these two cultures balanced each other out nicely – the Germans provided both light and heavy infantry, but their general weakness in the realm of cavalry was more than negated by the thunderous charges of the Sarmatian lancers.

Rhoxolanian cataphracts fleeing from
Roman cavalry on the Traianic
Column, Rome, early 2nd Century CE

The alliance of barbarian infantry and nomad cavalry was even more apparent a decade later, during Trajan’s two Dacian Wars (101-102 and 105-106 CE).  The Rhoxolani had allied with the Dacian King Decebalus, and provided large contingents of horsemen for his armies.  Since the events of 92, however, the Iazyges had been pursuing a more peaceful relationship with Rome; they were thus apparently absent from the Dacian Wars.  This absence undoubtedly saved hundreds or thousands of their young men from a premature grave – the Dacians and Rhoxolani were defeated, and the Dacian kingdom was turned into a Roman province in 106.  It had nonetheless been a bloody and destructive war, and it served as further proof of the potency of Sarmatian lancers, especially when they had firm infantry support.

The borders of the new province of Dacia in fact divided the Iazyges and the Rhoxolani from one another, and this cause great upset amongst both peoples.  There had been much intermarriage between the two tribes, and their warbands saw one another as brothers – they were not fond to see miles of Roman forts separating them from each other.  In a remarkable, and apparently successful attempt to defuse this situation, Emperor Hadrian is said to have given both groups permission to travel across Dacia to meet with one another.  The King of the Rhoxolani, Rasparagnus, was also awarded Roman citizenship as a reward for his pursuit of peace with his new neighbors.

Allies and Enemies of Rome

In the 2^nd and 3^rd Centuries CE, we find Sarmatians fighting both for and against Rome, while deeply influencing the development of the Empire’s cavalry arm.  In 135 CE, Alans who had just returned from pillaging Parthia (a second time) invaded the Roman province of Cappadocia, where they suffered a defeat at the hands of the Roman governor Flavius Arrianus.  Arrianus was so impressed at their fighting skills, he published a book describing the battle.  He tells of the terrifying power of the Sarmatian lance-charge in particular, claiming to have seen two and three of his legionaries impaled from a single blow.

Arrianus was far from alone in his respect for the heavy cavalry of Sarmatia.  It was during the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (117 – 161 CE collectively) that we find clear evidence of Sarmatian influence on the Roman cavalry.  Inscriptions attest to units of both catafractarii and contarii operating across the Empire in the 2^nd Century.  The former, in truth, may have been based more closely upon the heavy cavalry of the Parthians rather than the Sarmatians.  But “contarius” is a Latin word implying “wielder of a kontos”, the kontos of course being the Greek word for the Sarmatian lance.  Tombstones and altar dedications raised for or by Roman soldiers first began to show the occasional Iranian personal name in this period, as well.  Perhaps some of the recruits into the contarii units already had some experience wielding a kontos on the other side of the Roman frontier.

During the Germanic Wars that raged on and off during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161 – 180), the Sarmatian Iazyges appear as implacable foes of Rome, and allies of the Quadi and Marcomanni as they had been several generations before.  The climax of the Roman-Iazygian conflict came in the bitter winter of 173-174 CE, when the Iazyges were defeated by a Roman army in a battle apparently fought directly over the frozen Danube.  The Romans are said to have fought at this battle with a particularly ferocious energy – even biting their enemies in the face – while the Sarmatians were probably not at their best, nervous on their horses and clad in their weighty armor whilst standing on a sheet of ice.

As a result of this victory, the Iazyges sued for peace, and 8,000 of their warriors surrendered to Marcus Aurelius.  Respecting their quality and believing their promises of submission, the Emperor put them to work – no less than 5,500 of them were supposedly sent to Britain, where many must have ridden down Caledonian warriors during the violence of Commodus’ reign (180 – 192).  Inscriptions attest to Iranian warriors worshipping Iranian gods present throughout Roman Britain in the late 2^nd and 3^rd Centuries.

The Third Century and After

Marcus Aurelius was hardly the last Roman emperor to campaign against Sarmatians, or have to repel them from Roman territory.  Maximinus Thrax, likely Gallienus, Aurelian, Probus, and Carus and his sons can be added to that list, along with at least some members of the Tetrarchy of 284 – 313.  The poor historical sources for this period, as well as the intensified Germanic and Persian threats (not to mention the increased civil strife), mean that we have little precise information on violent interactions between Roman and Sarmatian in the 3^rd Century.  We know that Emperor Carus had to put some effort into driving Iazyges out of Pannonia, and that a decade later the junior Tetrarch Galerius put an allied warband of Sarmatians to good use countering the heavy cavalry of Persia.

Vandal or Sarmatian horseman on a
North African mosaic, 5th-6th Century CE

In the 4^th Century many Sarmatian tribes had become so closely associated with their Germanic neighbors they may have even begun to lose their separate identity.  Constantine’s son Constantius is known to have inflicted defeats on several Sarmatian peoples in the 350s, including the Limingantes – descendants of a group of slaves who had revolted against their Sarmatian masters and set up their own tribe.  Twenty years later the Alans shared in the fortunes of the Goths, fleeing the Huns into Roman territory and providing a strong cavalry wing for the Goths much like how the Rhoxolani did for the Dacians nearly three-hundred years before.  The Alan horsemen played a key role in the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378, and joined them in their wanderings afterwards.  In the late 4^th and early 5^th Centuries, however, many Sarmatian peoples still living in Sarmatia seem to have been destroyed or assimilated by the Huns.  The Sarmatian heyday was at its close.

By the 5^th Century the Sarmatians had largely disappeared from history with one solitary, glaring exception – the Alans.  They joined the Vandals in their invasion of Spain in 409 CE, and twenty years later accompanied them into north Africa, where the “Kingdom of the Vandals and Alans” was set up.  This Kingdom was to last until 533, when conquered by Belisarius, and saw a unique blending of Germanic and Sarmatian societies – we find Alan lords with Germanic personal names, and Vandal warriors equipped like Sarmatian cavalrymen, all marrying each other’s daughters.  Not all the Alans went into Africa, however – some under the leadership of a warlord named Sangiban fought for the Huns at Catalaunian Fields and at Nedao River. 

Alans were still fighting as sometimes allies, sometime enemies of the Roman Empire in the east as late as the 14^th Century, and they are considered the ancestors of the modern-day Ossetians.  Sarmatian influence is detected in the language and culture of Poland, Serbia, and Croatia, and many researchers argue for a direct connection between the legend of King Arthur, and the Sarmatians Marcus Aurelius shipped to Britain.

Even if they never formed their own kingdom, and never came close to conquering the world as the Mongols did a thousand years later, the Sarmatian horsemen definitely left their mark on human history, from their hero-obsessed mythology to their equestrian tradition, the finest in the ancient world.