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The origin of Croats
Here is an interesting article about the origin of Croats from a Croatian historian Emil Hersak;
AVARS, BULGARS AND CROATS
a) The cornerstone of Croatian history is the statement, made by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the 10th century, that the Croats, originating from the "White Croats" in the North, arrived in Dalmatia in the reign of emperor Heraclius. On the emperor's order they supposedly took up arms, expelled the Avars from the land, and settled in it themselves (De administrando imperio XXXI). It was, of course, during the reign of Heraclius (610-641) that the Avars were defeated at Constantinople, that the above-mentioned Avar-Bulgar conflict broke out in Pannonia, and that Kubrat established Great Bulgaria in the North Pontic Area. Hence, suggestions have existed for a long time that there might have been cause and effect factors relating these events to the Croat migration, and that there even might be an ethnogenetical link between the Avars, Bulgars and Croats.
b) A major point in the theories has been a migration legend that is recorded in the corpus of Porphyrogenitus' work. As the legend goes: a tribe of the White Croats, led by five brothers - KLOUKAS, LOBELOS, KOSENTZES, MOUHLO and HROBATOS, and two sisters named TOUGA and BOUGA (b/v transliteration can be changed in the Byzantine Greek text) come to Dalmatia, where they found the Avars holding the land. After a time of warring they were able to defeat the Avars and subjugated them, but some of the descendants of the Avars survived in Croatia, and - as the text says explicitly - it can be seen that they are Avars (the idea is that the descendants of the Avars preserved some type of Mongoloid appearance, distinct from the Croat population) (De administrando imperio XXX).
c) Even today this legend has been generally taken as authentic, i.e. as an authentic legend reflecting more complex history, not exact history itself. For one thing it was recorded quite early (i.e. in the 10th century), at a time when the Medieval Croatian Kingdom was still relatively powerful, and without doubt a country about which the Byzantines wanted to gather various strategic details (the report of as much as 100.000 foot soldiers and 60.000 horsemen in the DAI is, of course, exaggerated to stress the importance). Several authors have assumed that the legend was first conveyed to the Byzantines by some member of the Croat nobility, who knew it from oral tradition. This is a real possibility, for a time-span of 300 years, although a bit stretched, is not too much for some oral tradition, especially in a society in which laws and other social traditions are still being transmitted by word of mouth (as was the case in Medieval Croatia), and especially in the nobility, which as a rule preserves memories of its origins much longer than the general population. Another indicative detail concerns one of the names of the brothers "Kosentzes" is in fact nothing other then the title "kosez", written with an Old Slavic nasal /e/. Quite genuine, since the "kosezi" truly were a noble class, well distributed in the Slovenian lands and in parts of northern Croatia, and especially in a region of Old Carantania that was known in the 11-12th century as Pagus Chrouuat. Kosentzes and Hrobat (whose name is an obvious eponym of the Croats) are the two most important brothers in the legend.
d) If the two sisters mentioned in the legend are excluded - as has for often been done! - The story fundamentally tells of FIVE brothers from a foreign land (the location of "White Croatia", despite the details, is still disputed) coming and defeating the Avars, in the first part of the 7th century. Hence, both recently, and in the past, there have been serious attempts to link the story with that of the Bulgar khan Kubrat and his FIVE SONS! Furthermore, it has been noted that Kubrat's name appears in Greek, Latin, Arabic and Slavic sources in several variations: Koubratos, Kobratos, Krobatos, Kouber (his son?), Crobatus, Chudbadr, Chubraat, Quetrades, Kour't?. Equating the form Krobatos, with the Hrobatos in the Croat tradition, the English historian J. Bury was once quick in concluding: "This Croatian legend has a strong family resemblance to the Bulgarian legend of Krobat (or Kubrat) and his five sons, and I therefore think that we should hardly hesitate to take Krobat and Hrobat as the same prehistoric hero of the Hunnic people..." (unfortunately my translation back to English of a Croatian translation of Bury's words - for the original see: J. Bury. A History of the later Roman empire from Arcadius to Irene (395-800). vol II London, 1889, 275-275). In his following sentences, Bury attempted also to derive the Croatian title "ban" (governor, viceroy) from Bayan, the name of the Avar khan who had led his people to Pannonia, or even from Batbayan, the eldest son of Kubrat. This type of concluding quickly led to the birth of the "Turkic" theory of Croatian origins.
e) However the two sisters, as I said, were excluded from most interpretation. To this day it seems that almost nobody takes them seriously, yet they might throw some light on another detail that was noticed at the turn of the 19-20th century that was to influence future research. Namely, at this time A.I. Pogodin indicated the relevance of that two stone plates from the former Greek colony Tanais at the mouth of the Don, dated from the 2nd-3rd centuries, on which were the names Khoroathos and Khorouathos, along with the comment that a Khoroathos or Khorouathos had been an arkhontos in Tanais during the reign of Julius Sauromatus (175-211). If the name was derived from an ethnonym, as seemed very plausible, and since a Turkic presence at the mouth of the Don in the 2nd-3rd was not deemed possible, the most likely conclusion was that the name must be Iranian, i.e. Sarmatian (or Alanic). However, there were also some attempts at finding a Caucasian etymology, and one author, in the same context, even tried to derive the name of the other brother "Kosentzes", or "Kosez", from the "Kasogs" appearing in the Russian Primary Chronicle and in the Poem of Prince Igor. But that the Croatian ethnonym itself could have been indigenous to the Don-Azov area was further strengthened by a high concentration of ethnonyms with an -at suffix in this area. Along with various Iranian and other speculations as to what it meant, Trubachev finally suggested that it might be derived from *xarva(n)t, meaning in Iranian something like "those that have women". Such an interpretation was supported by the indications of a higher status of women among the (Iranian) Sarmatians, and maybe of some form of matrilineal descent, if not actual "matriarchy". Even the Greek myth of the Amazons, and their supposed geographic location by the Black Sea was pertinent in this regard. Thus, it would seem that the sisters in the Croat ethnogenetic legend may perhaps not be only a casual variation.
f) Interestingly, Paul the Deacon, in this History of the Langobards (that I have already mentioned in connection with the Bulgars in Molise), wrote that the Langobards, on the way to Pannonia, had to fight a group of Amazons at a river crossing and right after that they were confronted by a group of Bulgars! (Historia Langobardorum, I: 16-17). Would it be too much to see in this half-mythical/half-historical reference a faint indication of a Croat, Proto-Croat or Iranian groups that might have been in some sort of close relationship with a tribe of Bulgars? Most probably it would, at least until we have more information. But for me it is intriguing to think about it.
g) I must add that besides the Turkic and Iranian theories on the origins of the Proto-Croats, there has also been a Gothic theory, an indigenous "Illyrian" theory and obviously a Slavic, or more precisely "purely Slavic" theory. Each of these interpretations corresponded to a certain time, and to the needs of the time. Thus the Gothic theory appeared in the 12-13th century in the "Historia Salonitana" of Thomas the Archdeacon and in Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea (Pop Dukljanin), who both equated Croats with Goths. Personally, although not excluding the possibility of a Germanic trace in the Croat ethnogenesis, I believe that the Gothic theory was a new dynastic myth, that replaced the original (i.e. authentic) legend of the five brothers and two sisters, precisely at a time when the Croatian kings were trying to reaffirm their political right to the land they were ruling. In the late 11th century, after the schism in Christianity, Croatia was moving away from former ties with Byzantium, in which dynastic affirmation could be based on the story of Heraclius allowing the Croats to settle in Dalmatia as "foederati" of the Empire. Therefore it was more opportune to invent a Gothic genealogy, just as the Romans had once invented a Trojan genealogy, and the Britons had in their turn invented a Roman genealogy (cf. Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the British Kings"). But why pick Goths? Croatia had in fact once been part of Theodorik's Ostrogoth Kingdom, but the reason is most likely not this. Rather, of all the "barbarians" Theodorik's Goths had somehow left the best imagine of themselves in the medieval vision, to the point of being credited with doing God's work in eliminating the "sinful" Roman Empire. In this light, as Herwig Wolfram noted, even at the Council of Basil (1431-1449) the Austrians and Swedes were still arguing about which of them were the true descendants of the Goths (H. Wolfram, The History of the Goths. University of California Press, 1988. p. 2). It was only during the Renaissance that "Gothic" became a distasteful term, maybe because it had been used as positive in the era the Renaissance people were turning away from. Then typically, Croatian "literati" followed the trend and soon invented an illustrious Illyrian origin for the Croats, going back to the Roman days. This type of Illyrianism, soon expanded to include other Slavic-speaking peoples as well, and by the early 19th century it began to merge fully with Pan-Slavism, and eventually with "Yugoslavism" (which is only a subvariation of Pan-Slavism, with certain peculiar traits of its own).
h) Now, while it is truly impossible (and silly) to try to deny the dominant role of Slavs in Croatian ethnogensis, it was another problem when Pan-Slavist ideology, taken to the extreme, tried a priori to refute any possibility of non-Slavic elements being involved in the ethnogenesis of either the Croats, or any other Slavic-speaking people (cf. the fate of the Norman theory in Russia, that finally resulted in willful destruction of Scandinavian archaeology material in that country). In our case, the problem was compounded by Yugoslav state ideology, where Gothic, Turkic, Iranian theories were officially regarded not only as necessarily false, but also as subversive. True, the attempts to revive Gothicism were highly problematic (to say the least), since they were in some cases inspired by the racist views of Nordic and/or Germanic superiority that were being strongly in the first part of the 20th century. Gothicism taken literally, not in the way I tried to describe it in the previous paragraph, ALMOST became the official doctrine in Croatia during the wartime pro-Nazi regime. It was therefore logical that after W.W.II Gothicism was banned in the new Communist Yugoslavia, to the point of negating that any Germanic groups might have left some traces in the Croatian ethnogenesis. Likewise, there was no discussion on the Turkic and Iranian theories, except to say how impossible and ridiculous they were. Thus, it came rather as shock, when about ten years ago the state media mentioned that some historians were claiming that "Croats were not Slavs". In fact, the late Nada Klai? (who was at the end of her career and had already earned herself the image of an iconoclast) had favorably commented the works of O. Kronsteiner ("Gab es unter den Alpenslawen eine kroatische etnische Gruppe", etc.), and W. Pohl ("Das Avarenreich und die kroatischen Ethnogenesen"), published some time earlier in the Weiner slavistisches Jahrbuch (vol 24 B, 1978). Kronsteiner and Pohl were claiming that the first Croats (Proto-Croats) were an Avaric warrior class or category among the Alpine Slavs. Besides the title "ban" that I already noted, other significant Mediaeval titles were added to this thesis: "cacatius" (kagan) used as a title among the Carantanian princes, the above mentioned "kosez" - apparently from Turkic gaziz/chaziz/haziz, and even župan, first noted in the sources in 777 in the Latinised form "jopan", relating to the Carantania. Obviously, since the Slovenes had with much justification claimed the historical legacy of the Mediaeval Carantanian state this Avaric-Croat-Carantanian reinterpretation hit their ethnovision as well. There had, of course, been earlier attempts to link the beginning of Slovene political organisation with a Croat group (e.g. by Ljudmil Hauptmann before W.W.II), but in the ideology of the Yugoslav state such suggestions were avoided, since they were seen as overt expressions of Croatian nationalism.
i) As for the Iranian theory, it was confined for some time only to "political emigrants" living abroad. S. Saka?, who had upheld it in 1937, presented a new elaboration in an émigré journal in 1945. Only in the late 1980s did it become better known in Croatia. I am somewhat pleased to say that the journal "Migration Themes" of which I am the editor-in-chief published a short paper by Ivo Goldstein, Nada Klai?'s successor as the head of the Dept. of Mediaeval History at the University of Zagreb, in which he described the Iranian theory as "the least unlikely" (see: "O etnogenezi Hrvata u ranom srednjem vijeku", Migracijske teme, 1989, br. 2-3, pp. 221-227). Today, however, the Iranian theory is well on its way to becoming almost official in Croatia. It is mentioned explicitly in textbooks, and is nicely depicted in the secondary school historical atlas (see: Hrvatski povijesni zemljovidi. Zagreb, Školska knjiga, 1993. p. 7). Unfortunately, the extreme Iranism that was developed among our émigrés abroad is also very present, so that the search for roots often ends up in Afghanistan or Iran proper, at any rate in Achaemenian antiquity, i.e. in the 6-5th centuries BCE, where there was once a region called in the Avestan texts Xarauvati, and in Greek - Arakhosia. This seems to be good example of how in a relatively small modern nation, or more precisely in a nation who feels itself to be small, an illustrious ancestry is once again being invented, to fill the need of a genuine identity that has been repressed by decades of ideological violence.
h) I personally do believe that an Iranian component in Proto-Croat ethnogenesis is likely (not to say "least unlikely"), but here one cannot go much further than Tanais and the Don, and likewise such Iranism is nothing exceptional in the Slavic-speaking world. As to the Turkic theory, which even Trubachev later adopted, I can't rule it our either, yet I am pretty certain that some of the words or titles suggested as Avaric or Turkic, such as župan (which has cognates in Polish and Baltic), most probably have a different origin. If people on this list will be interested I will attempt to gather a list of possible Avar, Bulgar or Old Turkic loans in Croatian but this might take some time. On the other hand, the reasons why the Turkic theory was not received with hardly as much "public favour" in Croatia, as the Iranian interpretation was, probably lies also in deep-rooted and very unfortunate prejudices, that can be traced to Mediaeval visions of Gog and Magog, Tatars and Tartarus, and to memories preserved in the chronicles and epic poems of battles with the Huns, Avars, Magyars, Tatars and Ottoman Turks. Croatia was often at the endpoint of all these invasions, and the historical coat-of-arms of my country, a red and white checkerboard shield (now in the middle of our national flag), symbolizes in heraldry a battlefield (just as it does in the game of chess). Interestingly enough, an even older symbol that can also be seen on our coat-of-arms (in the present version) is a moon and star on a blue night sky. However, this is probably irrelevant.
by Emil Heršak
Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies,
22.09.1996
Zagreb, Croatia.
emil.hersak@zg.hinet.hr
http://groznijat.tripod.com/fadlan/e_hersak.html
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Originally Posted by Onur
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