page_title: Vistula Veneti
section_title: Byzantine historical sources
hierarchical_section_title: Vistula Veneti / Byzantine historical sources
caption_attribution_description: English: Eastern Hemisphere in 400 AD
context_page_description: The Vistula Veneti were Indo-European peoples that inhabited the region of central Europe east of the Vistula River and the coastal areas around the Bay of Gdańsk. The name first appears in the 1st century AD in the writings of ancient Roman geographers to differentiate a group of peoples whose manner and language differed from those of the Germanic and Sarmatian tribes around them. Later, in the 6th century AD, Byzantine historians described the Veneti as the ancestors of the Early Slavs of the 6th to 8th centuries: Vends, Sclavens and Antes, who, during the second phase of the Migration Period, crossed the frontiers of the Byzantine Empire.
context_section_description: Among the Byzantine authors, the Gothic author Jordanes in his work Getica (written in 550 or 551 AD) describes the Veneti as a "populous nation" whose dwellings begin at the sources of the Vistula and occupy "a great expanse of land". He describes them as the ancestors of the Sclaveni (a people who appeared on the Byzantine frontier in the early 6th century and who were the early South Slavs) and of the Antes (East Slavs). Specifically, he states that the Sclaveni and the Antes used to be called the Veneti, but are now "chiefly" (though, by implication, not exclusively) called Sclaveni and Antes. He places the Sclaveni north of a line from the Dniestr to Lake Musianus, the location of which is unclear, but which has been variously identified with Lake Constance, the Tisa–Danube marshes or the Danube delta. He also places the Antes to the east of the Sclaveni.
  Later, in Getica he returns to the Veneti stating, that though "off-shoots of one stock [these people] have now three names, that is Veneti, Antes and Sclaveni" and noting that they, at one time, had been conquered by the Goths under Ermanaric. Consistent with the view that the Veneti were an umbrella term for these three peoples, he later also recalls the defeat of the Antes at the hands of a Gothic chieftain named Vinitharius, i.e., conqueror of the Veneti.
  Though Jordanes is the only author to explicitly associate the Veneti with what appear to have been Sclaveni and Antes, the Tabula Peutingeriana, originating from the 3rd–4th century AD, separately mentions the Venedi on the northern bank of the Danube somewhat upstream of its mouth, and the Venadi Sarmatae along the Baltic coast.
  Henry of Livonia in his Latin chronicle of c. 1200 described a tribe of the Vindi (German Winden, English Wends) that lived in Courland and Livonia in what is now Latvia. The tribe’s name is preserved in the river Windau (Latvian Venta), with the town of Windau (Latvian Ventspils) at its mouth, and in Wenden, the old name of the town of Cēsis in Livonia. The fact that 12th century Germans from Saxony referred to these people as 'Winden' suggests that they were Slavs. (See Vends).
caption: Map of the Western and Eastern Roman empire in the 5th century AD, identifying the location of the Venedae (Veneti) in central and eastern Europe.
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