People
Venadi Sarmatae
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Venadi Sarmatae, the Venedi reckoned among the Sarmatians, are entered at the northern rim of the known world, where the map adds the same word Sarmatae to the Amaxobii, Lupiones and Roxolani. The Roman historian Tacitus could not decide whether this people belonged with the Germans or the Sarmatians. Pliny and the geographer Ptolemy knew them too, which dates the entry to about the second century AD. The name was a collective term for Slavic peoples on the upper Vistula, and it lives on in the word Wends. Curiously, the map names them a second time beside the Danube, perhaps an echo of later Slavic expansion, perhaps a hint at how vast their lands seemed.