Type “Sarowani” into a search engine or a reference work and you will not find a tribe. We found no passage in a medieval source that names it. This article sets out what we checked, which attested names come close to it in sound, and how a misunderstanding can easily turn into a “people”.
The brief for this article was to write a people-profile of the Sarowani, a Slavic or Sarmatian tribe, perhaps on the upper reaches of the Elbe, Saale or Oder. The vagueness of that description is itself a finding. When one cannot even say whether a tribe was Slavic, Sarmatian or something else, nor where it is supposed to have lived, there is usually no source behind the name, but a rumour, a confusion or a typo that has taken on a life of its own.
So we searched first and wrote afterwards. The complete list of names in the Bavarian Geographer, the most important early medieval enumeration of Slavic groups, contains no Sarowani, Sarovani or Sarowane. The English-language overview “List of early Slavic peoples” has no entry of that or a similar form. The articles on the similar-sounding names Zeriuani, Sorbs and Severians do not know the form either. And an earlier article on this website, the one on the Bobrzanie, mentioned “Sorbian Zarowane” on the Kwisa (Queis); this article does not support that remark. We found no passage for it.
This is no proof that nobody ever bore that name. The absence from the lists we checked only means that the name cannot be documented with the means we had. That distinction runs through the whole text: what stands in a source, what is a scholarly interpretation, and what is legend or simply noise in the transmission? The article therefore does not describe an invented tribe. It shows how one goes about a name like this.
With early medieval tribal names, spelling is rarely stable. Latin scribes heard foreign names, wrote them down by ear, and later copied them from exemplars, easily confusing letters such as u and v, c and t, or e and o. Modern authors then carry the names over once more into German, Polish or English. A single name can thus turn into half a dozen forms, and some of those arise only in secondary literature.
We therefore searched not only for “Sarowani” but also for Sarowanen, Sarovani, Sarowane, Sarowanie and Zarowane, and for connections with the Elbe, Saale and Oder. We found no source and no scholarly publication that deals with a tribe of this name. A sentence such as “the Sarowani did not exist” would still be too strong. What holds is this: in the source lists and overviews we checked, the name does not appear, and anyone using it ought to be able to name the passage. Where no passage exists, the name remains unattested.
Honesty also requires saying what we did not do. We did not go through all manuscripts and editions, and we did not search the major chronicles of Thietmar or Helmold, or the Old Rus Primary Chronicle, in full text for variants. The statement refers to the lists and overviews named here, not to the entire tradition. If you know a specific passage, check it, and we would revise the article.
Anyone asking about an unknown Slavic tribe east of the Frankish realm sooner or later lands at the Bavarian Geographer. That is the name given to a short Latin text titled “Descriptio civitatum et regionum ad septentrionalem plagam Danubii”, roughly “Description of the fortified districts and regions north of the Danube”. It lists peoples east of the Frankish realm and gives each a number of civitates. What this Latin word means here is disputed: scholars think of fortified districts or settlement areas, but nothing is certain.
The text was discovered in 1772 in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. It seems to go back to an exemplar in the holdings of Reichenau, and scholarship dates it to the ninth century. Bernhard Bischoff thought of a monk active in the 830s to 850s. Aleksandr Nazarenko considers the 870s more likely. Henryk Łowmiański suspected that the list consists of two parts that may date from different periods and come from different authors. All of this is interpretation, not established fact.
The list contains several dozen names, from the Nortabtrezi (usually equated with the Obodrites, which is an interpretation) through the Surbi, the Sorbs, to groups in Silesia such as the Sleenzane (Slensanie), Dadosesani (Dziadoszanie), Opolini (Opolanie) and Golensizi (Golensizi). The Milzane, the Milceni of Upper Lusatia, appear as well. What is not there is a name beginning with Sar- or Zar- and ending in -wani. So the list has no gap into which a “Sarowani” would fit, and it is not hidden behind another reading we simply do not know: the closest forms are others, as discussed below.
The limits of the list still matter. It is not a complete directory of tribes but a snapshot from a Frankish point of view, with figures nobody can verify and with several names that to this day cannot be assigned to any territory. A tribe that is not there may nevertheless have existed. But one must not present it as “named in the Bavarian Geographer”, and that is precisely the mistake one meets again and again in popular literature.
Zeriuani, a realm so great that all the peoples of the Slavs are said to have sprung from it and, as they assert, to trace their origin from it. (our own translation)Bavarian Geographer, Descriptio civitatum et regionum ad septentrionalem plagam Danubii, entry “Zeriuani” in the second list; Latin wording after the reproduction on jassa.org: “Zeriuani, quod tantum est regnum, ut ex eo cuncte gentes Sclauorum exorte sint, et originem, sicut affirmant, ducant.” (line numbering differs by edition)
Read aloud, “Sarowani” contains three things: an initial S or Z, an r sound, and the ending -wani. In the Bavarian Geographer's list there are several names that fulfil this pattern at least in part. The Wikipedia articles on the subject name Zeriuani, Zuireani, Serauici, Sebbirozi and Neriuani as formally similar entries. That does not mean any of them is the one meant. It only shows where a reader who had heard the name somewhere, or noted it wrongly, might have found it.
Especially close in sound is the name Zeriuani, in other readings also Zeruiani. Replace the e with an a and the u with a w, and you arrive without much effort at “Zarwani” or “Sarowani”. This is, mind you, a consideration about sound, not proof of a borrowing. Something similar applies to the Zuireani, who appear in the Latin version with 325 civitates, and the Serauici are a name that scholarship has never been able to locate.
One should be aware of how many of these names are unresolved. The Bavarian Geographer lists groups whose homes nobody knows, and this is not carelessness on the part of researchers but the state of the source. Anyone in the nineteenth or twentieth century who wanted to “normalise” a hard-to-read name in such a list could easily produce a form that never existed in the manuscript. Whether that happened with the Sarowani cannot be documented. It is one possible explanation among several.
Since the Zeriuani are the most obvious candidate for a mix-up, a closer look is worthwhile. They are the only entry in the Bavarian Geographer with no figure attached, but with a grand claim: all Slavic peoples are said to have sprung from their realm. It is the oldest Latin text that ascribes a common origin to the Slavs. At the same time, it is unclear whom it means.
Research has made several proposals, some of which contradict one another. Lubor Niederle and Kazimierz Tymieniecki saw in the name a corruption of “Sarmatians” or “Severians”. Henryk Łowmiański argued for the Severians, pointing out that the name of the Serbs never took the Slavic ending -jane, whereas the Severians' name did. Gerard Labuda linked the Severians to Lesser Poland and western Ukraine; Ryszard Kiersnowski thought of a relic of a large group on the Oder, without any tribe of that name being attested there. Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński and others connect the name with the Cherven Towns (the “Czerwień towns”) and the hydronym Czerwia, which is also disputed. A further possibility is that the name is a distorted form of the Drevlians, to whom our article on the Drevlians is devoted.
What matters for our question is how these interpretations hang together. Sarmatians and Severians are exactly the two directions in which the brief pointed when it spoke of the sought tribe's Sarmatian or East Slavic background. It looks like an echo: the problems of attribution that scholarship works through with the name Zeriuani reappear, in miniature, with the Sarowani. Whether that is chance or whether someone mistook the Zeriuani debate for a tribe of its own, we do not know.
According to research, the Sarmatians were a large group of Iranian-speaking mounted nomads who dominated the steppes north of the Black Sea from the fifth century BC to the fourth century AD. Their core territory lay between the Urals and the Don; at their greatest extent, around 100 BC, they reached the Danube. The name Greek and Roman authors used for the land was Sarmatia. Pliny placed them, according to the Wikipedia summary, between the Vistula and the Danube. After them came the Huns. They are not a tribe one would have to look for on the upper Elbe or Saale, and they are not Slavs.
Why do they nevertheless turn up in this context? Because the name Sarmatians took on a life of its own in the modern period. Sarmatism was an idea in Poland-Lithuania according to which the Polish nobility descended from the Sarmatians. From the Renaissance into the eighteenth century this notion shaped the self-image of the szlachta. That it is historically untenable plays no part in its effect. At the same time, scholarship assumes that individual Sarmatian groups were absorbed by the early Slavic population of Eastern Europe in the early Middle Ages. That is something different from descent, and it explains no tribal names in the Elbe-Saale region.
To German ears, a name like “Sarowani” sounds Sarmatian. The syllable “Sar” and the ending “-ani” are enough to push it in that direction. But any derivation from that would be mere word play, and we deliberately leave it out.
Anyone looking for a tribe beginning with S on the upper Elbe or the Saale cannot get around the Sorbs, and so the suspicion that the Sarowani are merely a wrong form of this name is an obvious one. The Sorbs, by contrast, are very well attested, though not without dispute. Our article on the Sorbs goes into more detail; here only the key points of the tradition, as the scholarly overview summarises them.
Around 631, the Chronicle of Fredegar names a Dervanus, “dux gente Surbiorum”, a duke of the tribe of the Surbi, who joined the realm of Samo. In the Frankish Royal Annals for 806 it is said that Charles the Younger marched into the land of the Slavs “qui dicuntur Sorabi”. The Bavarian Geographer lists the Surbi with fifty civitates. The Annals of Fulda report, between 849 and 895, a Sorbian March, its dux Thachulf, Sorbian raids in 851 and 869, and oaths sworn to Arnulf. Thietmar of Merseburg describes the Sorbs in the early eleventh century as pagans. Arabic authors mention them in forms such as “Sarbin”. We report all this after the Wikipedia overview; we have not read the primary texts ourselves.
What matters for our question is the list of spelling variants given in the Wikipedia article: Surbi, Suurbi, Sorabi, Sorabos, Surpe, Sorabici, Sarbin, Servians, Zribia. A form “Sarbi” is not among them, and a “Sarowan” certainly is not. The Sorbs thus appear in a broad range of spellings with S and r, but always with a b or p at the core, never with a w. If someone made a “Sarowani” out of Surbi or Sorabi, it was a distortion with no basis in the sources.
The brief's second direction leads east, to the Severians, also spelled Siverians. They were an East Slavic tribe in the middle Dnieper region. The sources that speak of them are the Bavarian Geographer, Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, a letter from the Khazar ruler Joseph, and the Primary Chronicle, the “Tale of Bygone Years”. A separate article deals with the Severians.
The usual reconstruction places their land on the lower Desna and the upper Seim and Sula, with Chernihiv as the centre. The localisation is considered inferred, not proven. Archaeologists have found rural settlements and cremation burials under mounds from the eighth to tenth centuries, whose attribution to a tribe is again an interpretation. The origin of the name is also unresolved: it has been linked to the Slavic word for “north”, to a Sarmatian tribal name, and to Hebrew or Hungarian forms. Among the historical landmarks is the incorporation into Oleg's rule, usually dated to 884 but placed later by some scholars. The link to the Kievan realm is treated in our article on Kievan Rus.
It is notable that the Severians count as candidates in the Zeriuani debate: Łowmiański regarded them as the Slavic “mother tribe” from which all the other groups were supposed to derive. That, too, is a hypothesis. For a tribe called Sarowani the Severians are useful only insofar as they show how a similar-sounding name could lean on them.
A quite different trail leads to the Baltic coast. The Zarow is a lowland river in Western Pomerania, about 16 kilometres long according to Wikipedia. It flows north from Ferdinandshof through the Ueckermünde Heath and enters the Szczecin Lagoon at Grambin. Its lower course is fed by two ditches, the Landgraben and the Weißer Graben, which come from the Galenbecker See. The river is also regarded as an old cultural boundary between Western and Central Pomerania.
The name Zarow is there derived from the Zarowbach near the Zarowberg. The article does not say that a tribe is named here, and we do not claim it either. We mention the Zarow because it shows that a name form Zarow- does actually exist in the region, as a water and field name. If one forms a resident name formally with the well-known Slavic ending -jane, meaning “inhabitants of”, one would arrive at a form like “Zarowane”, the people on the Zarow. That is a linguistic consideration, a thought experiment, not a source. No text we know names a tribe that way. The Pomeranians of the region are the subject of our article on the Pomeranians.
Whether the Zarowane next to the Bobrzanie go back to a similar line of thought remains open. From the Kwisa to the Zarow in Western Pomerania lie hundreds of kilometres, and such a distance cannot support a connection.
In the ethnography of the early Middle Ages there are several ways by which a tribe that does not appear in the sources can enter the literature. We name them without claiming that any of them applies to the Sarowani; we simply do not know.
The first is the chain of misreadings: a scribe alters a name, an editor “corrects” it, a handbook adopts the form. The second is the map. Anyone drawing a chart of tribal boundaries has to fill gaps and occasionally enters names collected from different derivations. The third is the place-name misunderstanding: from a river or field name a people is made backwards that was never so called. The fourth is translation. Between Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Polish, Czech, Sorbian, German and English, sound forms easily arise that never existed in any language of the time.
It shows well in the fact that the very name which we listed above as “Zeriuani” also appears in the scholarly discussion as Zuierani, Zerivani, Zervingi or Tervingi. The jassa.org post on the Sorbs discusses such readings explicitly, but concedes that nobody really knows who the Zeriuani were. With so much uncertainty it is hardly surprising that yet another form has developed alongside.
The term “phantom tribe”, incidentally, is not a technical word but an auxiliary expression of this article for names that circulate in the literature without a primary source behind them. Whether the Sarowani are one, we have not been able to prove.
Anyone searching for tribes often hopes that spade and find-spot will answer where writing is silent. They do so only to a limited extent. Excavations yield pottery, graves, hillforts and timbers, but no tribal names. Whether the people who lived there called themselves Sarowani, Sorbs or something else does not follow from the finds. That holds for all groups, and especially for the regions in which one would suspect Sarowani.
For the Elbe-Saale region, the overview on the Sorbs gives a few robust insights. Joachim Herrmann's earlier assumption that the so-called Rüssen pottery proves a Sorbian immigration in the seventh century is now widely considered obsolete. Dendrochronology dates the building timber of Slavic sites mainly to the late eighth to early tenth centuries, whereas from the sixth and seventh centuries there is almost nothing. Heather argues that the wheel-turned pottery of the Leipzig, Tornow and Feldberg types belongs to the eighth and ninth centuries. In the Saale-Elbe area there are flat graves with urn burials, in Upper and parts of Lower Lusatia cremation burials in mounds. How the fortifications there relate to the hillfort complexes further north is explained in our article on castle studies.
None of these findings allows a tribe called Sarowani to be located. Where there is no name from a source, there is no name to assign to a find group. Anyone who draws a settlement area “of the Sarowani” on a map inserts information that neither archaeology nor written sources supply.
There are a few rules for dealing with such names that also apply to other articles on this website. First, ask for the passage: which source, which sentence, which edition? Anyone who cannot give it probably has only a second-hand account too. Then compare the name form. Does the source really say Sarowani, or is it a modern smoothing of Zeriuani, Surbi or Severi? Third, clarify whether the classification stands in the source or comes from research. That the Surbi were a tribe on the Saale and Elbe is an interpretation based on the sources. That they had 50 civitates is a statement of the Geographer whose meaning is disputed.
The terms this article works with are collected in our glossary, and dealing with transmitted stories and claims is the subject of the guide to legends. Both help to keep evidence, interpretation and legend apart.
Finally, source criticism includes putting up with the result. It is unsatisfying, for a name a reader may know from a book or a map, to be able to say only that it cannot be documented. But it is the honest answer, and it is worth more than a smooth story into which details are inserted that nobody can check.
Anyone wanting to get to know the area in which one would look for the Sarowani should stick to the attested groups. West of the Elbe, in the land between the Saale and the Harz, the Slavs bordered on the Saxons and Thuringians; more in the articles on the Saxons and the Thuringians. To the east lie the settlement areas of the Daleminzi, the Milceni and the Lusici, who are to be counted among the Sorbian groups. Further towards Silesia follow the Slensanie, Dziadoszanie, Opolanie and Golensizi, who are also known to the Bavarian Geographer, as well as the Bobrzanie, who appear only in a single Prague boundary description.
These groups have one thing in common: we know their names from at least one source. With the Sarowani that is not the case, and so they belong in this row only as a question, not as an entry. The connections with the larger regions, such as the White Croats in the south and the Pannonian Slavs in the south-east, can be read up in the articles on the White Croats and the Pannonian Slavs.
There is no Rhineland or North Sea link for this topic; a connection to the Baltic exists at most through the Zarow, which flows into the Szczecin Lagoon, and here too it is a river name, not a tribe.
Did the Sarowani exist? That cannot be documented. In the source lists and overviews we checked, no tribe of this name appears. Whether it turns up in a source we did not check, we do not know.
Are the Sarowani in the Bavarian Geographer? No, at least not in that form. The most similar entries are Zeriuani, Zuireani, Serauici and Surbi.
Are the Sarowani Sorbs? A connection is possible but not attested. The Sorbs appear in the sources as Surbi, Sorabi or similar, never as Sarowani.
Do the Sarowani have anything to do with the Sarmatians? There is no evidence for it. The Sarmatians were Iranian-speaking steppe nomads, not Slavs and not dwellers on the Elbe.
Is there a place called Zarow? Yes, in Western Pomerania there is a Zarow, a river about 16 kilometres long that flows into the Szczecin Lagoon. A tribe of this name is not attested from it.
What should I do if I find the name in a book? Ask for the passage. If a source with a page number is given, the name can be checked. If it is missing, caution is called for.
The Sorbs · The Severians · The Bobrzanie · The Abodrites · The Pomeranians.
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