An Encounter with a Relic of the Dark Ages

Around 1555, the Holy Roman ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Ogier de Busbecq, recorded an account of a conversation he had with two Constantinopolitans claiming to be from the Principality of Theodoro in Crimea. Hence, he was shocked to find two people who spoke a language that sounded all to similar to his native Dutch from an area that spoke Greek. Busbecq was intrigued and when he pressed his interlocutors, one a Crimean, and the other a Greek, about this language, they said that it was indeed of Germanic origin. These two offered words, which de Busbecq recorded in his letter, that the ambassador recognized as cognates to his native Dutch. But who exactly were these alleged Germanic speakers of Crimea?

The Controversy of Sources

The identity of the “Germans” in the letter was subject to intense controversy among European scholars. Some later historians and travelers thought de Busbecq’s “Germans“ to be captured German speakers from the Baltic, an area subject to Muslim Tatar slave raids. However, Busbecq hypothesized that the language was either related to Saxon, or a remnant of the Gothic language. The tantalizing possibility that the Gothic language had survived in some remote corner of the world interested scholars, who had heard rumors about this language from men such as Joachim Cureus, who had claimed to hear a Germanic tongue when shipwrecked on the shores of Crimea. However, no one had actually recorded any of it.

Because of the lack of sources in Western Europe, the initial analysis of Busbecq’s claims rests on his sources. One was a Greek, as mentioned already, and the other one was a speaker of the language in question who had adopted Greek as his primary language. Hence, neither of them were fluent speakers of this Germanic tongue. Secondly, de Busbecq likely was influenced by his own native language when transcribing the words that he heard, but neither of these criticisms contradict his identification of the words as a Germanic. What we can say with certainty, it that the envoy had identified two speakers of a Germanic language from Crimea, a place where it should not have been found. To verify the identities of these informants, though, it is necessary to analyze Crimea’s political geography and older Byzantine sources.

The Principality of Theodoro

One of Busbecq’s informants was from Crimea, home of the former Principality of Theodoro, a small state on the southern shores of the peninsula. In de Busbecq’s time, it no longer independent, having fallen to Ottoman hegemony in 1475. The principality’s rulers, and likely most of its population, spoke Greek and followed Orthodox Christianity, ruling from the heavily-fortified city of Mankup, which de Busbecq’s informant correctly identified as one of the main cities along with another called Sciuarin. With this backdrop, it seems unlikely that Crimea, split between Greeks and Tatars, could host a group of Germanic speakers. However, looking through the history of Theodoro, it becomes apparent that Greek had not always been the main language of the region, as evidenced from the principality’s other name.

Theodoro had a thoroughly Greek character, a result of centuries of contact and dependence on the Byzantine Empire and later the breakaway Empire of Trebizond. Yet Byzantine historian Theodore Spandounes, writing under Andronikos III (1328-41), called the region Gothia. We see this name appear again in 1426, with the marriage of David of Trebizond to Maria of Gothia. The use of this name suggests that the mountains of southern Crimea were in some way associated with the Germanic group whom the Romans called “Goths.” This collection of Germanic-speaking tribes had founded the post-Roman Kingdom of Italy and forged a state in Spain that eventually fell to the Islamic conquest. The Gothic language had not been heard in Europe for at least seven centuries. Yet, de Busbecq had seemingly come upon a group of Germanic speakers from a state called Gothia. Were they actually related to the Goths of Roman lore? Evidence outside of de Busbecq’s account suggests that his records of what we now refer to as the Crimean Gothic language, were genuine.

Earlier Attestations

In Western Europe, the Crimean Goths appear little, if at all, until the 16th century. In Eastern Christian sources, however, they appear much earlier than Spandounes, who wrote in the 14th century. St. Constantine, a Byzantine missionary to the Eurasian steppe, provides some of our earliest evidence. The Vita Constantini, his biography, mentions that many peoples of Crimea, the Eurasian Steppe, and the Caucasus all glorified God in their own languages. Alongside Armenians, Persians, Turks, and Khazars, are a people called the Goths. This confirms that they were Christian, and they they had not been absorbed into the surrounding Greek and Turkic-speaking populations. Byzantine sources even attest to a rebellion against the Khazars by an Orthodox bishop named John of Gothia, the scion of a Crimean Gothic noble family. Therefore, although many of them had adopted the Greek language, there were those who identified as “Goths” in Crimea during the Middle Ages, an indisputable fact if we follow the Byzantine sources of the Early Middle Ages. But did the language survive as well, especially given the lack of inscriptions?

A Late Survival?

So far, the only evidence presented for the survival of Gothic is St. Cyril’s mention of the language’s liturgical use, which should come as no surprise. A Gothic monk named Ulfila had translated the Bible into Gothic in the 4th century, so it is possible that it was still in liturgical use. However, inscriptions from Mankup dating to the 10th century, discovered by Alexander Vinogradov in 2015, suggest that the language continued to have a vernacular use too. The inscriptions from Mankup are mostly religious in character, including a psalm, so it is difficult to glean much from these other than that Gothic was still in use in the 10th century. These examples complement de Busbecq’s records, which are similar to the Gothic of Ulfilas’ Bible, but diverge from it in other ways, as would be expected from the normal evolution of the language over 1000 years.

With the available evidence, we cannot be sure for certain that de Busbecq encountered Crimean Gothic speakers. However, given Crimea’s mountainous geography, it is possible that communities of Gothic speakers continued to survive there in isolated mountain villages until perhaps as late as the 18th century. This, alongside with the existence of a principality called Gothia in Crimea and the Mankup inscriptions, it is difficult to reject Busbecq’s claims. An honest evaluation suggests that de Busbecq genuinely encountered some of the last remaining speakers of Crimean Gothic, recording what he could, and preserving a small part of a linguistic gem and vestige of the bygone Late Roman Empire when the Goths ruled the Eurasian Steppe.

Sources and Further Reading

For the origins of the Goths, see Jordanes’ History of the Goths. Readers of Spanish may be interested in Jose Javier Esparza’s Los Visigodos. For a history of the Crimean Goths, see Alexander Vasiliev’s book The Goths in Crimea. De Busbecq’s letters can be found here. The life of Constantine is tougher to find, but is available in the book Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints & Princes.