European Sarmatia and the 19 c. category 'Balts': Restoring the Historical Vocabulary of Lithuania, Prussia, and the Eastern Baltic

Abstract This study re-examines how the lands and peoples of Lithuania, Samogitia, Prussia, and the eastern Baltic were historically described long before the modern term Balts was introduced. For many centuries—from Ptolemy’s Geography to Renaissance maps and early-modern chronicles—these regions were situated within a much larger macro-regional framework known as European Sarmatia. This geographical category did not imply a single tribe or language; it was a broad spatial name used by ancient and early-modern authors to organise the eastern part of Europe. In 1845, the Königsberg philologist Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann proposed the term Baltic languages as a convenient label for Lithuanian, Latvian, and Old Prussian. His intention was linguistic, not historical. Over time, however, the linguistic term was retroactively extended to earlier periods, and “the Balts” began to be treated as an ancient ethnonym—despite the absence of such a self-designation in pre-modern sources. This article argues for a clearer separation of categories: European Sarmatia as a geographical-historiographical framework; steppe Sarmatians as specific Iron Age mobile groups; early-modern Sarmatism as a political culture; Baltic as a modern linguistic taxon. The study’s primary-source core is a source-critical reading of Joannes Pistorius’s 1582 Polonicae historiae corpus, which republishes Alexander Guagnini’s Sarmatiae Europae descriptio and Matthias of Miechów’s distinction between European and Asian Sarmatia. These texts explicitly place Lithuania, Samogitia, Prussia, Livonia, and neighbouring regions within European Sarmatia. Additional evidence from hydronymy, archaeology, horse-burial traditions, long-distance exchange networks, and ancient DNA does not justify equating every steppe Sarmatian with a Lithuanian-speaking population. Yet taken together, these datasets support restoring European Sarmatia as a historically attested framework that shaped how northern and eastern European regions were understood for centuries. The article concludes with a terminological protocol: retain Baltic languages as a modern linguistic convention; avoid projecting ancient Balts into periods where the term did not exist; and restore European Sarmatia where appropriate in historical geography and source translation.