Vistula Veneti - Historical Sources

Historical Sources

From the 2nd century AD, Roman authors saw the lands between the Rhine and the Vistula rivers as Germania. East of the Vistula was classed as Sarmatia. The 2nd-century geographer Ptolemy makes that boundary clear. In his section on Sarmatia he places the Greater Ouenedai along the entire Venedic Bay, which can be located from the context on the southern shores of the Baltic. He names tribes south of these Greater Venedae both along the eastern bank of the Vistula and further east. So it seems that his "Venedicus bay" was the Bay of Danzig, still inhabited by speakers of Baltic languages in the Middle Ages. The area was part of Old Prussia. Pliny the Elder also places the Veneti along the Baltic coast. He calls them the Sarmatian Venedi (Latin Sarmatae Venedi).

This region was barely known to the Romans a century earlier than Ptolemy. Tacitus, writing in AD 98 did not refer to the Vistula as a boundary, but simply locates the Veneti among the peoples on the eastern fringe of Germania. He was uncertain of their ethnic identity:

The Veneti have borrowed largely from Sarmatian ways; their plundering forays take them all over the wooded and mountainous country that rises between the Peucini and the Fenni. Nevertheless, they are to be classed as Germani, for they have settled houses, carry shields and are fond of travelling fast on foot; in all these respects they differ from the Sarmatians, who live in wagons or on horseback.

The Gothic author Jordanes, who wrote in Constantinople, ended his work Getica in 550 or 551 AD. He delivered an account of the origin of Sclavenes and he mentioned three group names: the Venethi, Sclavenes and Antes. In one chapter Jordanes presented the Sclavenes and Antes as the most numerous of the Venethi, however in another chapter he saw them as three different groups. Though Jordanes is the only author to make these claims, the Tabula Peutingeriana, originating from the 4th century AD, separately mentions the Venedi on the northern bank of the Danube somewhat upstream of its mouth, and the Venadi Sarmatae along the Baltic coast.

Henry of Livonia in his Latin chronicle of c. 1200 described a clearly non-Slavic tribe of the Vindi (German Winden, English Wends) which lived in Courland and Livonia in what is now Latvia. The tribe’s name is preserved in the river Windau (Latvian Venta), with the town of Windau (Latvian Ventspils) at its mouth, and in Wenden, the old name of the town of Cēsis in Livonia. (See Vends).