Carpi (people) - Territory

Territory

During the period when they are documented in classical sources (c. AD 140-300), the Carpi are believed by many scholars, on the basis of Ptolemy, to have occupied a region between the river Hierasus (Siret) and the river Porata (Prut) (i.e. in the eastern part of the former principality of Moldavia). This was just outside "Dacia proper", as defined by Ptolemy, whose eastern border was the Hierasus. Ptolemy does not include the Carpi in his list of tribes resident in Dacia proper, even though this region, according to his own definition, comprised the whole Carpathian range. East of this river lay Sarmatia Europaea, a vast region stretching as far as the Crimea, predominantly, but by no means exclusively, populated by Sarmatian tribes.

According to ancient sources, the Carpi's neighbours were:

• to the North, the Costoboci
• to the South, in the Wallachian plain, the Roxolani Sarmatians
• to the East of the Prut, the Bastarnae (a Celto-Germanic or possibly Sarmatian group) and other Sarmatian tribes.

To the West, the Carpathian mountains between the Siret and the border of the Roman province were probably populated by the "Free Dacians" i.e. those Dacians residing outside Roman Dacia. However, it is not possible to reliably define the territories of these groups due to the imprecision of the ancient geographical sources. Also, it is likely that in many areas, ethnic groups overlapped and the ethnic map was a patchwork of dispersed sub-groups. The Sarmatians and Bastarnae are known, from both literature and archaeology, to have lived all over Moldavia and Bessarabia.

Also, there is no certainty that the Carpi continued to be centred on Moldavia when they clashed with Rome from the 240's onwards, a century after Ptolemy completed his Geographia: given the Carpi's repeated raids South of the Danube and clashes with the Romans during the 3rd century, it is possible that the Carpi had by this time moved into Wallachia.