>>511157282>>511157612Because Jacob Frank lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, converted to Catholicism and persecuted Orthodox/non-Frankist Jews, he received a noble title (baron) and a pension from the Royal Treasury. The Szlachta (Polish nobility) followed an ideology called Sarmatism. Essentially, they claimed to be descendants of the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) Sarmatians/Avars who conquered these lands, but adopted local Slavic languages in place of Iranian. Thus, the Polish nobles felt no common ties with a peasant, but were quite open to accepting Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Germans, Hungarians, and Jews like Frank into the ranks of the nobility. The irony of this is that Poles are the European people with the most R1a (Aryan haplogroup).
>The 15th-century Polish historian Jan Długosz was the first to introduce the term, which was quickly adopted by other historians and chroniclers such as Marcin Bielski, Marcin Kromer, and Maciej Miechowita. Other Europeans borrowed it from Miechowita's Tractatus de Duabus Sarmatiis, a work that in Western Europe was considered the primary source of information on the territories and people of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The name derives from the alleged ancestors of the szlachta, the Sarmatians, a confederation of mostly Iranian tribes north of the Black Sea, displaced by the Goths in the 2nd century BC, described by Herodotus of Halicarnassus in the 5th century BC as the descendants of the Scythians and Amazons. After many permutations, this gave rise to the legend that the Poles were descendants of the ancient Sarmatians, a warrior tribe originating in Asia and later reorganizing in northeastern Europe>In its initial, idealized form, Sarmatism seemed like a good cultural movement: it encouraged religious belief, honesty, national pride, courage, equality, and freedom. However, like any doctrine that places one social class above others, it eventually changed over time