Vidivarii Erotic

The Vidivarii were a mixed people of the sixth century who lived at the mouth of the Vistula on the Baltic coast of what is now northern Poland, a community assembled from the remnants of several migrating nations and later absorbed into the West Baltic tribes that became the Old Prussians. Everything written about them comes from one author. Jordanes, compiling his history of the Goths in Constantinople around 551, places them on the shore of the Ocean where the Vistula empties through three mouths, and says they had been gathered out of various peoples into a single refuge and so made a nation. He adds that they held Gepedoios, the delta island the Gepids had left behind when they moved south toward better land. Beyond them along the coast lived the Aesti.

That short notice is unusually candid. Ancient writers liked their peoples to have founders and pedigrees. Jordanes gives the Vidivarii neither, and describes instead what probably happened on many frontiers of the Migration Period: people who stayed behind, people who drifted back, and their neighbors, combining under a new name. The name itself is Germanic in form. The ending -varii, meaning dwellers or inhabitants, also turns up in the Baiuvarii, the early Bavarians. The first element is disputed, and some scholars connect it with Witland, the district east of the Vistula mouth named by the traveler Wulfstan in the late ninth century. Manuscripts also spell the name Vividarii.

Archaeology gives the notice some ground to stand on. The Wielbark culture, linked with Goths and Gepids, thinned out on the lower Vistula as its people moved toward the Black Sea and the Danube. In the late fifth and sixth centuries a new grouping appears around the Elbląg Upland, usually called the Elbląg group, and many archaeologists read it as the Vidivarii. Its cemeteries follow West Baltic custom, with cremations and horse burials, while the brooches and belt fittings show Germanic and Scandinavian taste. Finds of late Roman gold solidi from the same decades suggest that some of the newcomers were returning north after the Hun empire broke up in the 450s. Amber was the coast's old currency: in the 520s the neighboring Aesti sent a gift of it to Theodoric in Italy.

No one claims descent from the Vidivarii today. Their people folded into the Old Prussians, who were themselves conquered by the Teutonic Order in the thirteenth century. What lasts is the pattern Jordanes caught: the same shore later held the trading port of Truso, and it stayed a meeting ground of Balts, Scandinavians, Slavs and Germans for centuries.