Original scientific paper
Goths Who are Also Slavs (Gothi qui et Sclavi)
Damjan Pešut
; Heritage Museum, Ogulin, Croatia
Abstract
The phrase "Gothi qui et Sclavi", found in the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea and in the Historia Salonitana of Thomas the Archdeacon has its genuine historical origin in the so-called "Croatian redaction" of the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea, in fact in the Chronicle of the Croatian Anonymus. The phrase refers to those Getae who settled in Dalmatia. The Getae were known from antiquity as inhabitants of the west Black Sea coasts, from whence they moved between the 1st and 4th centuries to Pannonia. In the middle of the 4th century warrior bands of Goths moved from the Baltic towards Italy and Upper Pannonia where they subjugated the Getae, so that in the later part of this century these two peoples mixed. Among the few historians of this period the most significant are Jordanes, who described the Getae in the northern parts of Dalmatia and Italia, and St. Jerome and Isidor of Seville, who wrote about the incursion of Goths to Italy. The Germanic ethnic groups to which the Goths belonged by the 8th century had either disappeared or been absorbed into other ethnic groups, and hence the Goths also ceased to exist. The Getae, on the other hand, mixing with Pannonian peoples generally known as Scythes, imposed their culture on the culturally lesser developed Ants and pre-Slavic peoples and so continued to exist in West Pannonia and north Dalmatia during all the Middle Ages. The Getae brought their traditional and other social values from the eastern to the western coasts of the Balkans. Mixing with the Scythes (Proto-Slavs) they established the preconditions for the genesis of Slavic languages. In Dalmatia the descendants of the Getae and Scythes and the later Venedae and Antes subordinated and assimilated the local Japods, Liburnians, Histri and Delmatae. From the ethnic substratum the Croats and other Slavic peoples developed. Therefore, the phrase "Goths who are also Slavs" is not the result of some "Gothomania" but a historical reality that should be read as "Getae who are also Slavs".
Keywords
Gothi; Getae; Croats; Croatian history; the Middle Ages
Hrčak ID:
126635
URI
Publication date:
30.12.1997.
Visits: 6.103 *