Alans

Few ancient peoples travelled as far as the Alans, Iranian-speaking horse nomads who appear on the steppes north of the Caspian and Black Seas in the first century CE. Some of their bands rode with the Huns, Vandals and Goths across Europe as far as Spain and North Africa, while those who stayed behind built the medieval Christian kingdom of Alania in the North Caucasus. Their language lives on in modern Ossetian, and many scholars regard the Ossetians as their descendants.

The Alans are usually counted as a branch of the Sarmatians. Roman writers linked them with the older Massagetae, and modern historians connect them with the Aorsi of Roman sources and the Yancai of Chinese records, a nomad state that the Chinese later said had taken the name Alan. Their name is a local form of the old Iranian word for Aryan, the same root as the name Iran. In the first century they became the leading power among the Sarmatians between the Don and the Caspian. A Parthian inscription records a battle with an Alan king in 62 CE; the historian Josephus describes Alans raiding Media and Armenia through the Caucasus around 72 CE, and in 135 CE a further raid was driven back by Arrian, governor of Cappadocia, whose report on it survives.

The Alans were celebrated cavalry. Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that Alan men thought walking beneath their dignity, and their feigned retreat, wheeling round on pursuers, influenced Roman and Germanic warfare. From 215 to 250 Gothic expansion ended their dominance of the Pontic steppe, though the Goths borrowed Alan riding skills and animal-style art. Around 370 the Huns attacked the Don Alans and drew the survivors into an alliance; Alans then joined the Hunnic Empire in its push west, while other groups fought beside the Goths at the Battle of Adrianople in 378.

On the last day of 406 Alans crossed the Rhine with the Vandals and Suebi. One group under Goar took Roman service and settled around Orléans, and under his successor Sangiban these Alans helped stop Attila at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. Another under Respendial entered Spain in 409 and settled in Lusitania and Carthaginensis. After the Visigoths killed their king Attaces in 418, these Alans merged with the Vandals and crossed to Africa in 429, where the Vandal kings styled themselves kings of the Vandals and Alans until Justinian's conquest in 534. Place names such as Alenquer in Portugal and the Alano dog breed are thought to recall them.

The Alans who stayed north of the Caucasus contended with the Bulgars, Göktürks and Khazars, and between the ninth and twelfth centuries their tribal alliances grew into the kingdom of Alania. They accepted Byzantine Orthodox Christianity in the early tenth century. The majority of Alans had submitted to the Mongol Empire between 1239 and 1277, and Alan soldiers served the Mongols far afield; sources speak of 30,000 Alans in the guard of the Yuan court at Dadu, today's Beijing. Timur's invasion around 1395 brought massacres and drove the remaining Alans deep into the mountains.

The Alanic language, an Eastern Iranian tongue written in Greek letters in the few surviving samples, developed into Ossetian, and the very name Ossetian derives from Ās or Os, a name long applied to the Alans. Genetic studies of Alan burials have been cited in favour of direct Alan ancestry for the Ossetians, against the rival view that they are Caucasian peoples who adopted Alan speech. The Jassic people of Hungary are also traced to medieval Alan migrants, and a substantial minority of Ossetians today follow a traditional faith revived in the 1980s, alongside Orthodox Christianity and Islam.

Our maps for 100, 400, 700, 1000 and 1100 CE draw approximate Alan lands, labelled Alans or Caucasian Alans, on the steppe and in the North Caucasus. They sit beside the Roman Empire and Armenia in 100, the Huns in 400, the Khazars and Bulgars in 700, and Byzantium, Georgia and Kievan Rus in the later maps.