The Early History of the Swaim Paternal Line from Greece to Holland and its Possible Relationship to the van Arkel Line
Introduction and Summary
This post presents my investigation into the question of the origin of the Swaim Y-DNA line and attempts to determine two related but separate questions: (1) what country or regions the Swaim line originated in within the last couple thousand years, and to determine when the Swaim Y-DNA line migrated into the Rhine region from that country of origin (by “Rhine region” I mean generally the Netherlands, Belgium, western Germany, and northeastern France); (2) whether the Swaim line descends from (is a continuation of) the line that became for a few hundred years the Lords of Arkel located in southern Holland
We should be able to answer the first question by examining extended matches of Swaim Y-DNA STRs. By “extended matches” I mean matches that fall outside of FTDNA's “Genetic Distance” (GD) criteria by having a GD greater than what FTDNA believes represents the earliest genealogically relevant “Most Recent Common Ancestor” (MRCA). For most people these extended matches might be unimportant because for most people there are few useful records from a time beyond the 1500's. However, there are records for some people, generally nobles, royalty, and other notable people, about whom there are records going back beyond the 1500's. When one of these people is in your family tree, it is possible that Y-DNA matches can provide you with useful genealogical information. It is possible that the Swaim line did come from such ancestors, the Lords of Arkel, and therefore it is possible that extended Y-DNA matches might prove to be of some genealogical use to Swaim genealogists.
I'm not aware of anyone else who has used extended Y-DNA matches to try to precisely locate specific geographical locations of their ancestors beyond the genealogical time frame, so my method is experimental, but I can't see any theoretical reason why it cannot be done. In fact, I expect that it will eventually be done regularly, and will be used by historians to supplement documentary evidence as a tool to reconstruct history.
Swaim Y-DNA is Haplogroup E-V13, which originated in the Balkans, or is at least today found at the greatest concentration in the Balkans, with a clinal radiation out through the rest of Europe. We know from documentary evidence that the Swaim line lived in Holland since at least about 1400 AD, and much longer if it is an extension of the Arkel line, but there is no documentation to indicate where it had come from before it had migrated to Holland. Since Swaim Y-DNA is E-V13, it is almost certain that the Swaim line had at some point lived in the Balkans, but up to now it appears that no one had any idea when it was that the Swaim line had left the Balkans to live in Holland, or where in the Balkans they had lived, or whether they had lived anywhere else before settling in the Land of Arkel in southern Holland.
I realized that the use of use of extended matching Y-DNA data could potentially answer all of those questions. It could do so by examining the geographical locations of the earliest known ancestors, and by determining the approximate time of the most common ancestor (MRCA) of those matches and myself. The geographical information would not be perfect, since it relies on uncertain data and also because we cannot conclude that because the earliest known ancestor of a match lived in a particular place, that the MRCA also had lived in that same place at the time of the branching apart of the two lines. However, it is true that many or most lineages do tend to live in the same location for several generations, so the odds are good that the ancestors of an ancestor who lived in, say, western Germany in 1600 AD had lived in western Germany for many generations before him. The TMRCA of any given match cannot be calculated with perfect accuracy for a number of reasons, but it should at least provide a rough approximation of the correct year, and should generally show the temporal relationships between the various matches.
I also thought that the match data might be able to indicate the approximate time of the Swaim line's migration from the Balkans to the Rhine region. It would show this by the existence of a "break-point" in the MRCAs of the matches, after which there should be an absence of matches from the Balkans. This would be true because once the line had left the Balkans, any descendants of a branch of the line that remained in the Balkans must necessarily have an MRCA at or earlier than the time of emigration, while any descendants of the branch that emigrated must necessarily have an MRCA at or later than the time of emigration. The only exception to this could be through the existence of any "back-migration" to the Balkans by one or more members of the branch that had previously emigrated to the Rhine region. In general, however, migration from western Europe to the Balkans seemed to have been rare, with the notable exception of Jews to Greece and other places after their expulsion from Iberia beginning in 1492.
The converse of such a "break-point" would be that there should be no matches from western Europe with MRCAs more distant in the past than the migration event. This, however, would occur only in the event of the migration of a single individual, or of a single individual, because if he was accompanied by other migrants of any degree of relationship, then the descendants of those other migrants would show as matches with MRCAs earlier than the migration date. Since most migrations occur as group events rather than single events, it would be unlikely that we would see a "break-point" in this direction. For example, if the Swaim line migrant from the Balkans was part of the dispersal of Roman soldiers from the Balkans into western Europe, then there would be millions of potential matches in Europe and America from with MRCAs earlier than the migration date because thousands or tens of thousands of Roman soldiers from the Balkans ended up in western Europe during the hundreds of years of Roman occupation there. Thus, there would be no clean "break-point" to indicate when the migration event took place. Such matches may have some value for other purposes, but for our immediate purposes these matches are just "noise" that we will ignore.
The primary problem with analyzing Swaim extended Y-DNA match data is finding that data in the first place. FTDNA could easily make that data available, but they choose not to do so, probably for reasons of customer privacy. FTDNA Y-DNA project administrators do have access to this extended data (up to a GD of 40), but only for the projects that a customer has joined, and probably only for the projects for which they are administrators, meaning that obtaining this data would be a very complex process that would likely yield only fragmentary data. Therefore, I decided to gather the data myself, from FTDNA's various Y-DNA “project” pages. But in doing this, I had to come up with my own simplified method of counting differences between sets of STRs, which is to say that I had to come up with a method of determining Genetic Distance.
The second question I wanted to answer is whether the Swaim line descends from the Arkel line. First, why would I think this was a possibility? I think is is a possibility because the Swaim line is closely related to the den Hartog/den Hertog lines of the old Land of Arkel, and several of those lines have genealogies that indicate that they descended from Otto van Arkel, the illegitimate son of Jan V van Arkel, the last lord of Arkel. However, there is some doubt that this is truly the case, although the circumstantial evidence is strong. The only way to truly prove the connection is through Y-DNA comparison with a definite Arkel ancestor or with the DNA from the remains of a deceased Arkel.
However, once I discovered that there existed a somewhat detailed history of the Arkel line (by a man named Dirck Pauw), starting with a migrant to the Rhine region from Hungary and/or the Balkans, I thought to compare Swaim Y-DNA match data with the Arkel history to see how well they compared both chronologically and geographically. The closer they two sets of data compared, the more likely it is that the Swaim line is an extension of the Arkel line.
I thought that it was likely that I would be able to answer the question of where the Swaim line originated and when it migrated to the Rhine region, but I didn't really expect to answer the second question at all, given the probable unreliability of Pauw's 500 year-old history of the Arkel line, much of which might be "fantasy." That at least some of it was "fantasy" was immediately obvious to me when I saw that Pauw's history opened with the claim that the first Arkel was a nobleman of Troy who had fled that city after the Trojans had lost the Trojan War. This is an impossibility, since the Trojan war, if had occurred at all rather than being only a myth, had occurred about a thousand years before the first Arkel was born. But as I continued translating the opening pages of the history into English (from 15th century Dutch) I discovered that its fictional or mythical elements appeared to be limited mostly to the origin of the first ancestor, and was peripheral to the actual Arkel history. The rest of the history appeared that it might be based on actual facts that had been recorded somewhere. Still, there are many reasons that such ancient histories might be inaccurate, so I was not confident that Pauw's Arkel history would align to any significant degree to whatever Swaim extended match data I could find, even if the Swaim line did descend from the Arkel line. There are other sources than Pauw for the early history of the Arkels, but I chose to primary use Pauw as my source because I didn't have the time to chase down multiple sources and Pauw's history seemed coherent and Pauw lived in Gorinchem and was a contemporary of Jan V the last Lord of Arkel, or at least of his children, and so possibly had access to written and oral information on the Arkels that other writers might not have had.
An interesting aspect about Pauw's history of the Arkels is that if the Arkels could be proven to be of the Y-chromosome haplotype E-V13, this would be a documented example of what might be called the Roman Legionnaire Hypothesis. This hypothesis, apparently first proposed by Stephen Oppenheimer and popularized by Steven C. Bird, proposes that most or all of the E-V13 in England was originally spread throughout Europe by Roman Legionnaires from the Balkans. The Arkel line ended up in the Netherlands rather than England, but the general hypothesis could also be applied to the Rhine region as well as to England. With the Arkel line we have Pauw's history, which is documentary evidence that the Arkels migrated with the Roman army to western Europe from Greece (through Hungary), but we do not yet know if the Arkels were of the E-V13 haplotype. However, we do know that the Swaim line is E-V13, but we do not know how that E-V13 came to western Europe. But if we can link the Swaim line to the Arkel line, we would then have an example of the Roman Legionnaire Hypothesis that is backed by documentary evidence. This might very well then be the only example of E-V13 moving with the Roman army from the Balkans to western Europe that is actually backed by documentary evidence.
I am not certain of the quality of Pauw's history as actual history. Bruch believed that Pauw's history of the early Arkel line was "fantasy," which also appears to be the opinion of most historians today. However, for me it remains an open question as to how much of Pauw's history was based on documentary or oral evidence rather than was simply fabricated. For example, when Pauw says that Jan I went from Troy to Hungary and remained in Hungary until the year 346 AD, at which time he went to Frankfurt to fight for Emperor Constans, how are we to account for the specific year that Pauw provides? Do we assume he just made up that date from thin air, as well as the detail about living in Hungary for some time? We know today that Jan I could not have been a Trojan from the famed Trojan War, but does that necessarily mean that Pauw was wrong in every other detail as well? How do we know that he didn't have a written or oral source for these details? Do we assume that because we don't have such a source today, that Pauw couldn't have had such a source when he wrote the history? To prove that Pauw was wrong, it would be necessary to prove he couldn't have been right, and I haven't seen such evidence. In the lack of such evidence, the claim that Pauw was necessarily wrong is simply an opinion rather than a fact. Note that I'm not claiming that Pauw was necessarily right, or that he didn't have some motivation other than the impartial pursuit of historical accuracy, but I'm keeping an open mind about the potential accuracy of his statements. Pauw lived in the 1400's and Bruch wrote his thesis more than 400 years later--years that included many destructive wars in which much documentation could have been lost.
Furthermore, if it can be proved that the Arkel line was E-V13, as is the Swaim line, then surely that is some evidence supporting Pauw's claim that the Arkel line originated in Troy/Greece/the Balkans. and that it migrated to the Rhine Region via the Roman army. Neither Pauw in 1483 nor Bruch in 1931 could have had any knowledge of the existence of Y-chromosome DNA or of the Roman Legionnaire Hypothesis, so to a certain degree the accuracy of Pauw's history would tend to be confirmed simply by the fact that the Arkel line was E-V13. We do not have the proof that the Arkel line was E-V13, although it is clear that most Dutch genealogies show that the paternal den Hartog line descends from the paternal Arkel line through Otto, the illegitimate son of Jan V van Arkel, and that Y-DNA matching shows that the den Hartog and Swaim lines are tightly related. If this genealogical connection of the Arkel line to the den Hartog and Swaim lines is valid, then the Arkel line would necessarily be E-V13.
After gathering Swaim extended match DNA, calculating the Genetic Distances of those matches from the me (as a representative of the Swaim line), and translating the relevant parts of Pauw's history, I found that there was in fact a remarkable agreement between this available Swaim Y-DNA match data and Pauw's Arkel history. Although this agreement between the two sets of data cannot prove that the Swaims are descended from the Arkels, it definitely supports that proposition. It also supports the general validity of Pauw's history as well as the general validity of my methods of determining Genetic Distance (GD) and Time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor (TMRCA), because if my methods weren't relatively accurate I couldn't have gotten such good results, which are unlikely to be due to mere coincidence.
Summary of Method Used to Investigate the Probability that the Swaim line is Descended from the Arkel line
1: Use Pauw's history of the Arkels, Identify the date range we are interested in investigating. This range was determined to be from 346 AD, when Pauw states the first Arkel (Jan I) immigrated to the Rhine region, through about 1000 AD, after which the Arkels were definitely settled in the Land of Arkel.
2: Identify the average time (for the Swaim line) between Y-DNA STR mutations for FTDNA's set of 111 STRs. Reliable genealogical data was available for a 482-year period of time, and the average time between STR mutations for 111 STRs was determined to be 80.33 years. This figure could be termed the “STR Mutation Factor.”
3: Identify Y-DNA “extended” matches with a Genetic Distance of between 11-20, which correspond to the time period of about 990 AD to 350 AD. I used information culled from FTDNA's “projects” pages and determined the Genetic Distances by my own simplified version of the “infinite allele method.” I found a total of 7 extended matches who fell within the within the Genetic Distance range of 11-20. Because the method of determining Genetic Distance is not exact and is I wanted to err on the side on inclusion rather than exclusion, I added another 3 matches who fell outside of the range (2 with a GD of 21; 1 with a GD of 23).
4: Determine the date of the MRCA of each extended match and myself. I calculated the MRCA date by multiplying the Genetic Distance of the match by 80.33 (the STR Mutation Factor) and then subtracting that number from the number 1,957, which is the date of my birth. The resulting figure is the estimated MRCA between myself and the extended match.
5: Determine the geographical location of the earliest known ancestor of each extended match to determine the presumed geographical location of each of MRCA of each of the matches. This information, when available, was provided by the extended match and was shown on an FTDNA “project” page. This FTDNA information was supplemented by other genealogical information available on the internet, and also in one case by email contact with a match. Such information was available for 6 of the 10 matches (1 of which was only the name of the country of the earliest known ancestor of the match, which was Greece).
6: Compare the estimated MRCA date and presumed geographical location of the MRCA to the dates and geographical locations of the Arkel line provided in Pauw's history of the Arkel line.
7: When available, compare "terminal SNP" of an identified match as a check to determine if the match is likely to be valid or if the matching STRs were due to random chance.
Results
There were no matches from the Balkans with an MRCA later than 350 AD. Based on this data, we may tentatively conclude that the Swaim line probably migrated from the Balkans at about 350 AD. Also, the only matches from the Balkans with MRCAs between 350 AD and 375 BC were from Greece, from which we can tentatively conclude that the Swaim line lived in Greece at the time of its migration to western Europe, and had probably lived there for 700 or more years.
I identified 7 matches with estimated MRCAs of 350 AD or later, plus 3 matches with MRCAs somewhat before 350 AD because of the uncertainty of estimating MRCA dates. All of the matches except 2 had some genealogical data available for the earliest known ancestor of the match,
if only the geographical location of that ancestor.
Name/Country of Match Ancestor 37 STR 67 STR 111 STR MRCA
Shurtz (Germany) 6 13 23 110 AD
Johanes Heilmann (Geiselbach?, Germany) 6 13 21 270 AD
Johann Altmeyer (Saarbrücken, Germany) 7 14 21 270 AD
Demetrius Antoniou (Greece) 5 10 20 350 AD
Thomas Sparr (Switzerland – Biel-Benken) 6 10 19 430 AD
Snell (Germany?) 6 11 18 510 AD
Jan Pennebaker (Gorinchem, Holland) 5 9 15 750 AD
Tudhope (Scotland?) 4 7 12 990 AD
Schmid 4 7 12 990 AD
Sulc/solc (Czech/Slovak for “Schultz”) 4 7 12 990 AD
From this data we can tentatively conclude that the Swaim line had migrated from Greece to northwestern Switzerland (on the Rhine), from Switzerland to the Middle Rhine region in what is today Germany (for about 300 years), and from there to the Land of Arkel in Holland in about 750 AD. Since we know that the Swaim line immigrated to America from the Land of Arkel in 1661, we can tentatively conclude that the line had lived in Holland for about 900 years.
I translated relevant sections of Pauw's Arkel history the best I could, using Google Translate and spending a lot of time puzzling out some of the more difficult passages. Pauw claimed that the Arkel line were Trojans who immigrated to Pannonia (western Hungary) for less than a generation and then left Pannonia in 350 AD, traveling through the "Tyrol" and then down the Rhine to Frankfurt in the Rhine region. The claim that the line began as Trojan refugees living in Pannonia is a major theme in the Frankish origination myth, and once I realized this I realized that this part of Pauws history might not literally true, but might rather be rather Pauw's attempt to place the Arkel line within the framework of Frankish mythology, perhaps genuinely believing that it must be true, since if the early Arkels were Franks, then their ancestry must have been Trojan.
But there is another possible explanation, which is that Pauw actually had a source that stated that Jan I in particular had been a "Trojan." We know today that the Trojans were not actually Greeks, but both Pauw and Bruch appear to be using the word Trojan to mean Greek, and as the names of the earliest Arkel members appear to be Greek, it is probable that the Arkel line was in fact Greek. Pauw does not state that the migrant Arkel was a Roman soldier, but but we can imply that, and we can also imply that their route to Frankfurt must have taken them through the Roman military camp Castrum Rauracense, which is located near today's Augst, Switzerland, which is also not far from today's Biel-Benken, Switzerland.
According to Pauw, in 388 AD the Arkel line moved to Pierrepont in what is today Lorraine, France, located near the borders of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, including today's Saarbrücken, Germany. The Arkel line lived in Pierrepont until 689 or 694 AD, when it relocated to the Land of Arkel in Holland. However, some of the line may have remained in Pierrepont, and various members of the line through the end of the 900's fought for various Frankish kings and lived in places in today's Germany such as Mainz, Manderscheid, and also in Bohemia (Czechia/Slovakia). After about 1000 AD the line appears to have been settled in Holland.
Here's a chart placing the Swaim Y-DNA/MRCA data in the framework of Pauw's history of the Arkel line:
Pauw's History Swaim Y-DNA MRCA
Greece <346 Greece <350
Pannonia/Hungary 346 Hungary 350
Switzerland (Augst) 346 Switzerland (Beil-Benken/Augst) 350
Frankfurt, Germany 346-388 Geiselbach (near Frankfurt) 350
Pierrepont, Lorraine 388-694 Saarbrücken (near Lorraine) 350
Arkel, Holland 694+ Arkel, Holland (Gorinchem) 750
Bohemia/Czechia 950-960 Bohemia/Czechia 990
I've made minor adjustment to a few on the MRCA dates, as I'll explain later, but as the chart indicates, the dates and geographical locations of the data for the Swaim line do coincide quite well with Pauw's history of the Arkels, indicating that it was possible that the Swaim line did descend from the Arkel line if my methods are generally reliable and if Pauw's history is generally accurate. The exercise also provides probable framework for the history of the Swaim line going back to the year 350 AD and beyond, regardless of whether or not the Swaim line is descended from the Arkel line.
Structure of this Post
This post is divided into four parts. The first part discusses the Swaim Y-chromosome DNA haplotype, which is E-V13 with the "terminal SNP" being E-FGC11450. The second part contains my translations of sections from a book writte in in 1483 by a Dutch man from Gorinchem in Holland named Dirck Pauw, who wrote a history of the van Arkel family. The third part contains a list of Swaim extended Y-DNA matches (based on STR matching) that I culled from the FTDNA website. The fourth part compares the Swaim matches with Pauw's history to determine how well they support each other and thus how likely it is that the Swaim Y-DNA line is a continuation of the Arkel Y-DNA line.
Part I
History of the E-V13 Y-Chromosome DNA Haplogroup
Since Y-chromosome DNA for the most part doesn't recombine at each meiosis event (generation) but does mutate, Y-DNA can be used to develop a "tree" in which the various branches indicate relatedness. Such a tree, when combined with geographical and historical data, can be used to recreate the evolution of the various branches and probable locations of the branches at various times in the past. This Y-DNA tree will continue to grow and be refined as more data is available through Y-DNA testing, but is already useful for determining an individual's paternal ancestry in the deep past. The nomenclature used to describe the various branches (also called "clades" or "subclades") is a bit confusing because it was developed piecemeal and with data from various sources, and also because it is continually changing as new data is acquired through DNA testing. For example, on FTDNA's "Swaim Project" page, one Swaim is listed as being in the clade E-L117, whereas most other are listed as being M-35. Apparently this is simply a problem of nomenclature, with E-L117 being an older name for what is now called M-35. One Swaim is listed as being CTS5856, which is a "downstream" subclade of M-35; this Swaim shows this subclade because he must have had that SNP tested by FTDNA, although he did not take FTDNA's "Big Y 700" test.
I did take the "Big Y 700" test and received my results in October 2020 (after completing this Pauw/extended match study). The Big Y 700 test identified tens of thousands of SNPs that I am positive for, and also determined my STR pattern for about 700 STRs (including the 111 STRs that had previously been tested). The Big Y 700 test is relatively expensive and isn't of much genealogical value for most people, so few men choose to take it. I'm the first Swaim that has taken it, although it is possible that other Swaims have taken Y-DNA tests with some other company that have identified the Swaim terminal SNP. My results will be generally the same for all other Swaims who descended from Thys Barentsen (1621), and also for the den Hartogs/Hertogs: all will be positive for the SNP FGC11450. However, since the last common ancestor of the Swaims lived about 10-12 generations ago, and a few generations longer for the common ancestor of Swaims and den Hartogs, there will likely be some SNP variations that some but not all Swaims and den Hartogs have. However, it is likely that all Swaims and den Hartogs will have the same "terminal SNP," E-FGC11450, as I do. The terminal SNP is "the defining SNP of the latest subclade known by current research" (https://isogg.org/wiki/Y-DNA_project_help). In other words, it's the tip of the branch of the Y-DNA tree on which the Swaims are located. Ultimately FGC11450 might not be the Swaim terminal SNP if enough Swaims are tested and one of the "private" SNPs I have downstream of FGC11450 is determined a new branch on the tree.
(February 2022 note: The Swaim terminal SNP did in fact recently change as another testee was found to share with me the formerly “private” SNP E-FT388654. Therefore, the Swaim and den Hartog “terminal SNP” is now E-FT388654. Of course Swaims and den Hartogs still have the SNP E-FGC11450 as well. Using the metaphor of a tree, E-FT388654 is a smaller branch stemming off from the larger branch E-FGC11450. Unfortunately, neither the surname nor the country of origin of this new match was displayed, nor did anyone new show up as a STR match or a SNP match. This might mean that the terminal SNP E-FT388654 is broad enough that it includes more families than just Swaims/den Hartogs, in which case the terminal SNP in the future will probably be refined even further to another of the private SNPs that I show.)
The primary "upstream" branches of Swaim DNA, starting with the major clade of E-M35 are:
E-M35 --> E-V13 -->E-CTS5856-->E-BY3380-->E-Z5018-->
E-S2979-->E-FGC11457-->E-FGC11451-->E-FGC11450-->
FT388654
Thus, E-FGC11450 is a twig on the E-V13 branch that sprouted out from the preceding branches about 3,200 years ago, and all E-FGC11450s descended from a common ancestor who lived 3,200 years ago (or about 1,180 BC).
Knowing that the Swaim line's terminal haplogroup is FGC11450 has the important practical purpose of serving as a quality check on the matches that we've identified through STR testing. Many of the identified matches will in fact be convergence matches rather than true matches, and there may be no way to determine which it is other than through SNP testing. If a match identified through STR testing is also identified as FCC11450 through SNP testing, then this match is almost certain a true match. However, since SNP testing is more expensive than STR testing, there will be many more matches whoe have not been SNP tested than who have been. STR testing remains a valuable tool nonetheless, but it is always better when STR matching can be confirmed through SNP testing.
The major clade E-V13 was formed about 7,800 years ago. However, the MRCA of all E-V13's lived about 4,800 years ago, so there must have been a bottleneck at that later time. A Wikipedia article states that "According to some authors E-V13 appears to have originated in Greece or the southern Balkans and its presence in the rest of the Mediterranean is likely a consequence of Greek colonization...." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_E-V68#E-V13).
Another hypothesis is that E-V13 had been spread throughout Europe even earlier than this, by Anatolian farmers about 6,000 years ago.
Another hypothesis, however, promoted by Steven Bird, is that much of E-V13 was spread throughout Europe from the Balkans at a later date, by the Roman army:
“The invasion of Britain by the Roman military in CE 43, and the subsequent occupation of Britain for nearly four centuries, brought thousands of soldiers from the Balkan peninsula to Britain as part of auxiliary units and as regular legionnaires...E3b1a2 is found to be at its highest frequency worldwide in the geographic region corresponding closely to the ancient Roman province of Moesia Superior, a region that today encompasses Kosovo, southern Serbia, northern Macedonia and extreme northwestern Bulgaria. The Balkan studies also provide evidence to support the use of E3b1a as a close proxy for the presence of...E-V13 (representing 85% of the parent E3b1a-M78 clade) in both the Balkans and in Britain.” (https://www.jogg.info/pages/32/bird.pdf )
Bird also argues that the “virtual absence” of E-V13 from Ireland but its presence in England is evidence that E-V13 had not been spread throughout Europe by early Neolithic farmers as some believe, but had been spread by Roman soldiers from the Balkans. Rome had occupied England but not Ireland.
Raf Ceustermans, in his paper "Argonauts of the West Balkans?." wrote that "While some V13 might have another source...a Roman source for the majority of North-Western V13 seems likely." He then explains why the Northwestern V13 appears to be Greek in origin rather than from further north in the Balkans, but remarks that "there are no sources showing Greek migration towards North-Western Europe in Roman times (or before)." He says that source of this Greek V13 is probably through "populations from Southern Italy and Sicily" that originated in Greek colonization of southern Italy in the 8th-6th centuries BC.
This may be true generally, but the few extended matches from Italy don't indicate that the Swaim line had ever lived there. There were two Italian matches with a GD of 30 (MRCA 455 BC), and two with a GD of 27 (MRCA 210 BC). The two GD 27's only tested at the STR 37 level and are thus not very convincing, especially as their STR pattern appears to be related to that of the GD 30 Garibaldi match, whose mismatches were "backloaded" in the last 37 STRs. Also, there are five Greek matches with MRCAs later than the two GD 27 Italian matches and three Greek matches that are GD 27, so it is almost certain the Swaim match migrated to the Rhine region directly from Greece rather than from Greece through Italy.
I don't have a strong opinion on how E-V13 was spread throughout Europe or why it is concentrated in the Balkans. I'm not arguing that all E-V13 was spread through Europe by Roman soldiers, but it is clear that a great number of Roman soldiers from the Balkans were spread throughout much of Europe for about four centuries, and that the Roman army was a vector for the spread of much E-V13. I also think it should be easy to determine in any individual case whether or not the E-V13 was spread in this manner, by examining that individual's extended Y-DNA matches. If the E-V13 individual has matches who live in the Balkans today with a Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) dating between 43 AD and 450 AD, but no later, then it is likely that the E-V13 came from a Roman soldier from the Balkans.
We will look at Swaim extended matches later, but first we'll take a look at the history of the van Arkel family beginning at 346 AD through 1000 AD, as described by a Dutch writer surnamed Pauw, who wrote that history in 1483 AD.
Part II
Translation and Discussion of Passages from Pauw's Chronicle of the Lands of Arkel Covering the History of the First Twelve Generations of Arkels
In 1483 Dirck Franckensz Pauw (also known by the Latinzed name Theodoricus Pauli) wrote Kronijcke des Lants van Arckel ende der Stede van Gorcum”(Chronicle of the Lands of Arkel and the City of Gorinchem), which was a history of the van Arkel lineage. The Chronicle was reprinted in 1931 by Hettel Bruch as part of his doctoral thesis. Bruch's work is available online in reproduction (https://www.archeologiegorinchem.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Kronijcke-des-Lants-van-Arkel-ende-der-Stede-van-Gorcum.pdf) but is of course in Dutch. There doesn't seem to be an English translation of it available, so I translated portions of it myself, with the help of Google Translate since I don't read Dutch. Some sections were difficult to translate, probably due as much to Pauw's sometimes vague style as to my poor translation skills, but in general I think my translation is adequate. I have not yet read the entire history because translation is very time-consuming, but for my purposes I was only interested in the earliest generations of the Arkel line, up to the time they were definitely established in the Land of Arkel in Holland. Also, I have left out some passages of these sections (mostly religious in nature) that are irrelevant for this investigation.
When I first found Pauw's Chronicle online I was astonished because it quickly became obvious that the earliest history of the van Arkel line is an actual example of Steven Bird's Roman Legionary hypothesis! However, this would only be true if the Arkel paternal line is E-V13. Of course the Arkel line would be E-V13 if the Swaim line is a branch of the Arkel line. This gave me the idea to use the Chronicle to locate the places and times where Pauw claims the Arkels had lived, and to compare those to a list of Swaim extended Y-DNA matches to see how closely they conform to each other. The closer they conform, the more likely it should be that Swaims descend from the Arkels. A major problem was that Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) doesn't allow its users to view an extended list of matches, although such a list is in fact available for use by project moderators, apparently up to a Genetic Distance (GD) of 40. I worked around this problem by making my own ist of extended matches from data available in the various FTDNA “geographical projects” and “surname projects.” It was tedious work copying hundreds of strings of STRs by hand and then comparing them to mine, especially since there was so few matches with an Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) that I estimated to be within the last 1,600 years, but in the end I think that it was worth the time because it did show some intriguing results. It didn't (and couldn't) prove that the Swaim line descends from the Arkel line, but it definitely indicated that it could have, and also tends to support much of what Pauw claimed to be the Arkel history.
Below I will post relevant selections from Pauw, adding my own heading for each section based on which van Arkel is prominent in that section. Since the names “Jan” and “Heyman” are used so often, I've numbered them based on the order in which they appear in Pauw's document. This doesn't correspond to the usual numbering system for the van Arkels, so it isn't applicable outside of this post. After each section I'll analyze what Pauw has written as it applies to our purposes. I'll cover only the generations from the first Jan in 346 AD to the Heyman who in 973 AD took possession of Land of Arkel from the Count of Holland in fief (although the Arkels may have already lived in and controlled that land since 694 AD). From this point the Arkels definitely lived in the Land of Arkel as its lords for the next 400+ years, and most likely some of the paternal line lives there even today.
In his introduction to Pauw's history, Bruch quotes from a historian named S. de Wind who in the early 1830's wrote about Pauw's history, “This is the origin of the Arkel lords of Greece and, as the author says, mainly from Troy.” Bruch does not dispute de Wind's statement that the Arkel line originated in Greece, or that Troy was Greek. By Troy de Wind meant the Troy of Homer; the Troy of the Trojan War. In fact Troy was not located in Greece, but rather on the coast of Anatolia in what is today Turkey, and at the time of the Trojan War, assuming that it was a historical event, the Trojans were not Greek but probably had origins in the region of Dardania in the Balkans. Regardless, obviously both de Wind and Bruch considered the Trojans to be Greek, and believed that the Arkels were originally Greek. Pauw probably believed that also, so when Pauw says that someone was “Trojan” or descended from the Trojans, he, like Bruch, probably means not only that they were specifically Trojan, but also that generally they were Greek.
Jan I, Jan II and Heyman I
The noble lords of Arkel were fierce Trojans the the noble lords of Troy, and after the Greeks who had conquered the city of Troy at great expense, all of the noble Trojans fled from Troy and traveled to various countries in many lands. Some went with Aeneas in Italy and founded the Roman Empire.
Others went into the land of Panooyen and Ungarijen, including Heyman, Prince of Dardanien; Joincus, that is Johan, lord of Arkel; and others, along with Franchion and Authonore. In this land they came to the city of Sycambria, in which they all lived and had many children, and continued to live there until 346 A.D.
At which time, because they didn't submit to the emperor and pay tribute to him, came the Emperor Constans, son of Constantine the Great, and first fought his relative. And they [Heyman and Jan] went to there and came to the Tyrol and then up the Rhine, taking control of the city of Frankfurt and region around it, which is now called Franckelandt [Germany].
In the year 388 they [Heyman and Jan] went together across the Rhine and came ashore in Gallia [Gaul], which is now called France, and they won their battles in that country. And they named the lands France, after their first prince Franchioen, Hector of Troy's son. And the men ordained there their chief Prince, called Priam, son of Hector and Francion, the first duke in France, from whom was born the first noble king of France.
Lord Priam, the great prince of France, divided up the country and gave to Heymen van Dordanen a part of the country that is now called Lotrinck, and gave to Johan, lord of Arkel, a part of the country that is now called the land of Baer.
Johan made a strong residence there, called Pierpont, and made it his home. And they were still all heathens at that time. In the year 418 Saint Urbicius, the 15th Bishop of Metz, came there and there were many miracles and sweet sermons, and the bishop converted them into good Christians.
In the meantime this Jan, Lord of Arkel, had a son, also named Jan, and a daughter named Andronia. Lord Heyman van Dardanen also a son, named Agatumber, and a daughter named Cassandra, and because Cassandra had been storming and fighting all the time, Heyman gave his her to Jan, the young lord of Arkel. Agatumber, Heyman's son, took Androniam, the daughter of the lord of Arkel.
And the young Jan van Arkel and Cassandra had a son named Heyman van Dardanyen, after his grandfather, and also had other children.
The main thing to know is that they lived in France, and that some of the Arkel lineage lived in France and some in Hungary, and that the coat of arms for the lineage was the same in both countries.
Commentary
[September 2021 Update: As I re-read this section, I realized that it clearly stated that Joincus and the others with him were non-Christians until the visit of visit of Saint Urbicius in 418 AD. Pauw doesn't say what variety of "heathen" Joincus was, but it's likely that he prayed to the Greek or Romans gods, if if to any god at all.]
Pauw gives us a brief summary of the background for the events that are about to transpire, and introduces four people who will be involved in those events. These men are Joincus, Lord of Arkel (also called Johan or Jan), Heyman van Dardanyen, Franchion, and Anthonore). These four were noblemen of Troy who had fled to Pannonia/Hungary (“Panooyen ende Ungarije”) after they had lost the Trojan War to the Greeks. In Pannonia they had built the city of Sycambria, where they had lived and raised children until the year 346 AD, when the story begins. In that year the four men begin their travel to Frankfurt in Franckelandt (Germany) to fight rebellious subjects of the Emperor Constans, the son of Emperor Constantine the Great. This journey is not described other than to say that they went through the Tyrol (“Tyrolus”) and “up the Rhine.” We don't know how long the journey took or its exact route. They might not have arrived in Frankfurt until the next year, or even later. The next event Pauw mentions occurs in the year 388 AD, with no mention of what had transpired during the intervening 42 years. The four men then crossed the Rhine together into France and fought an unidentified enemy to conquer the country. Franchion, who was the son of Hector of Troy, who was the son of King Priam of Troy, had a son named Priam. Franchion became thee first Duke of France, which country was named after him, and Priam was a prince who divided up the country of France, giving Heyman a part of the country called Lotrinck, and Johan a part of the country known in Pauw's time as the land of Baer. Johan conquered the are called Pierpont and made it his home. In the year 418 AD the Bishop of Metz, named Urbicius, visited Pierpont. Also at some point after occupying Pierpont, Johan had a son named Jan and a daughter named Andronia (also spelled Androniam), by a woman or women not mentioned. Heyman had a son named Agatumber and a daughter named Cassandra, also by an unnamed woman or women. Jan married Cassandra and Agatumber married Andronia. Jan and Cassandra had a son they named Heyman after Cassandra's father, and they also had other unnamed children. They lived in France and they had the same coat of arms that they'd had in Hungary (Pannonia), so that the same coat of arms was used in both France and Hungary.
These few paragraphs give us a lot of information that needs to be analyzed. The first thing that I'll mention is that Pauw is not consistent in how he spells the names of people and places. For example, he spells Heyman's “van” name variously as “Dardanyen,” “Dordanen,” and “Dardanien.” This isn't very important, but it's something to be noted.
Although Pauw begins his story with four characters, his primary focus is on Johan (Jan I) and Johan's male lineage. This is because this is the paternal lineage that leads to the later Lords of Arkel. Heyman van Dardanyen (Heyman I) contributes to that lineage through his daughter Cassandra, but Johan is the paternal progenitor of the line. After these introductory sections, Pauw is no longer concerned with Heyman I's line or the lines of Franchion or Anthonore. This dovetails perfectly with our purposes, since Y-chromosome DNA is also concerned only with paternal line descent. Heyman I's lineage would only be of importance to us if Heyman was closely related to Johan as a paternal-line cousin or uncle or brother, because then his descendants would have Y-DNA that is essentially the same as Johan's Y-DNA, which would make it impossible to determine whether or not an extended Y-DNA match today came from Heyman I's line of Jan I's line. However, Pauw does not tell us whether or not Jan I and Heyman I were related, so this is impossible to determine.
The major problem with Pauw's narrative is Jan I's and Heyman I's supposed origin as noblemen of Troy who fled that city after it was destroyed by the Greeks during the Trojan War. Even if the Trojan War was something more than the hallucination of the Greek poet Homer, it would have occurred about 1,500 years before the year 346 AD, meaning that the war would have occurred about 45 generations before the time of Jan I and Heyman I. What Pauw was doing here was placing these two men within the framework of a Frankish origination myth. Briefly, the Frankish origination myth states that the Franks were the descendants of Trojan nobles who fled to Pannonia after they lost the war to the Greeks and founded the city of Sycambria. They later moved to the Rhine region, and the country of France was founded by one of the Trojan nobles named Francion or Franchion. The location of Pannonia is sometimes said to be on the Don River near the Sea of Azov and sometimes in what is today Hungary, an area called Pannonia during the later Roman Empire.
Pauw may very well have believed this myth and believed that the Arkel line must have been Trojans because the early Arkels were Franks. Although Jan I and Heyman I were themselves not Franks, within at least a few generations after Jan I the Arkel line was would definitely have been considered Franks by both themselves and others. Pauw may have had a source that claimed that Jan I had been a noble Trojan, or he may have arrived at that conclusion through logic only, but today with our better understanding of history we know that the Frankish myth is not literally true, and that it would have been impossible for Jan I to have been a Trojan.
So if Jan I was not a Trojan and we must throw out the entirety of the Frankish mythical elements, then we are left with the question of whether or not Jan I he even migrated to the Rhine region from somewhere else. The Arkel line might in fact have its deeper origins as Germans or Celts who before Roman times were indigineous to the Rhine region, or at least to western Europe. Are we able to prove this issue one way or the other?
At this point we cannot prove it for the Arkel line, but we can for the Swaim line, which means that if the Swaim line descends from the Arkel line, then it would be true for the Arkel line also. This proof of course comes from Y-DNA matching, and although my analysis of the more recent individual matches will be presented in the last section, this is a good point at which to summarize the evidence for where the Swaim line was geographically located before it migrated to the Rhine region. We already know that the Swaim line is E-V13 and that E-V13 originated in the Balkans thousands of years ago. Therefore, the Swaim line must have originated in the Balkans as it became E-V13, probably 5,000-7,000 years ago. But exactly when did they leave the Balkans and end up in the Rhine region? Was it well before the era of the Roman Empire, or is the Swaim line an example of the Roman Legionaire Hypothesis?
You can see the evidence for my conclusion in Section IV, but in summary, based on what information I have available, it appears that the Swaim line may have immigrated to the Rhine region at about 350 AD from Greece. Furthermore, it appears to have resided in Greece from about 375 BC, and before that may have resided in Bulgaria or Albania, and/or possibly Hungary). I've seen comments here and there on the internet that claim that FGC11450 is probably Albanian in origin and that this will eventually be proven when more Y-DNA evidence becomes available from Albania, and while this may be true, this isn't something the evidence yet proves.
But it does seem likely that the Swaim line migrated from Greece to the Rhine region, possibly near Frankfurt, in about 350 AD. Obviously, this conclusion is astonishingly close to Pauw's claim that the Arkels were Greek and that the Arkel line's progenitor, Jan I, began his migration to Frankfurt in the year 346 AD. This is not exactly evidence that the Swaim line and Arkel line were the same line at that time, but it is definitely consistent with that hypothesis.
(If the Swaim line came from Greece in the year 350 AD, does it mean that we can say that the Swaim paternal line is Greek? I don't think we can say that it does mean that. I think what we can say is that the line was Greek in 350 AD, both culturally and probably autosomally genetically. That is, if the Swaim line had resided in Greece for about 725 years (from 375 BC to 350 AD), then by 350 AD the Swaim line would certainly be culturally Greek, and almost certainly autosomally genetically Greek, through generations of intermarriage with Greeks (the only exception to this would be if the Swaim line had belonged to some ethnic group that, although they resided in Greece, remained genetically and to some degree culturally isolated from the Greek population at large). But we cannot say that the Swaim line was Greek in, e.g., the year 1000 AD, because if by this time the line had resided in the Rhine region for 650 years, it would have been definitely culturally and autosomally genetically Frankish. That is, a member of the Swaim paternal line in 349 AD would have spoken Greek and looked like a typical Greek, but in 1000 AD would have spoken Frankish and looked like a typical Germanic Frank. But throughout all this time, the Y-DNA of the Swaim line would have remained relatively the same—however, that Y-DNA cannot be said to have been Greek or Frankish or American or Albanian, because although those are labels that might be applicable to autosomal DNA, it would not be appropriate to apply them to Y-DNA because Y-DNA doesn't appear to code for physical features that are different (or obviously different) in various human populations. It is somewhat logical to say that E-V13 is “Balkan” because it the line's Y-DNA diverged into an identifiable, separate branch while its carriers were living in the Balkans. However, the Swaim Y-DNA line extends far back into time when its carriers lived elsewhere, going back into Africa along with every other Y-DNA line. And the Swaim Y-DNA line has branches in Europe and in the Americas, as well older branches in possibly every geographical regions where the line ever lived.)
Since it is likely the the Swaim paternal line migrated to the Rhine region from Greece (possibly passing briefly through Pannonia), then we also want to see if we can find specific clues from Pauw that the Arkel line had also come from Greece. As we go through Pauw's history, I'll point out any evidence that the Arkel line might have been Greek in origin.
There is no Y-DNA evidence that the Swaim line in 346 AD lived in Pannonia/Hungary or had recently come from Turkey, in which Troy is located. This is not inconsistent with Pauw's history once we remove the Frankish mythical elements. For the purposes of this post we will assume that the rest of Pauw's history is generally accurate, because otherwise there is no point in comparing Pauw's history with whatever information we can glean from the Swaim Y-DNA extended matches.
Bruch did not believe that the Pauw's history was accurate for the early generations of the Arkel line. He stated that “In the first chapters of the Kronijcke [history] Pauli [Pauw] uses information from his Chronicon Universale [a general history], in which the lords of Arkel may not be mentioned, but where Pauli could easily insert them in the adaptation of his Kronijcke. The generations of the lords of Arkel before the time of Heiman [VI] and Gella [Gilla] is fantasy, but he borrows the events in which they occur from other sources. He added the story of the Trojans for completeness, and with relatively few tools he still manages to make a plausible story. The Anonymous [a history of the Arkels written by an unknown source] only knows of the Arkel pedigree that goes through Hungary and Germany and leads to Holland, whereas Pauw adds a journey through France [Pierrepont]. Relationships with branches of the family from Aquitaine and Hungary are postulated mostly with evidence from a similarity in coats of arms. Finally Pauw takes us from France via Lorraine to Germany, leading us to the point where Anonymous began....” (my translation using Google Translate).
Thus, Bruch is saying that all of Pauw's early history of the Arkels was simply made up by Pauw and is not based on credible sources. But how could Bruch have known this to be true, when he lived about 450 years after Pauw wrote the history, and couldn't be certain he knew all of Pauw's sources? Pauw was probably a contemporary of the last Lord of Arkel, Jan V, and definitely a contemporary of Jan V's sons and daughters, so how can Bruch be certain that Pauw didn't have “inside information” that was unavailable to later researchers?
And why did Bruch apparently believe that the Arkel origins were Greek, if he believed that Pauw's early history was merely a fantasy? The supposed Trojan history of the Arkel line is definitely a fantasy, but this doesn't necessarily invalidate the rest of the history, any more than does Pauw's belief in the various Christian miracles he mentions in his narrative. Thus, we will proceed as if Pauw's history is based on something more than fantasy, and see if the Y-DNA evidence tends to support or disprove that history.
Although the people identified as “Trojans” in the myth couldn't have actually been the Trojans of Homer's myth, it is possible that they were Greeks. The ancient Trojans weren't ethnically Greek, but rather probably Thracians or Illyrians who had migrated from the Balkan Peninsula north of Greece, probably in what later became known as Dardania. However, the myth of the Trojan War was Greek in origin, and it is likely that most people in the Roman era and later did consider the Trojans to be Greeks. Thus, if we substitute “Greek” for “Trojan” in the Frankish origination myth, their “Trojan” ancestry is at least possible, if not proven.
We can speculate that the Frankish origination myth came about through the Frankish assimilation of ethnically Greek soldiers from the Roman army into the Frankish tribes. These Greek soldiers would have been stationed in the Rhine region and remained there, being absorbed into the Frankish nation as it grew into power after the Romans withdrew from the Rhine region as the western Roman Empire collapsed. These Greek soldiers, Christian or not, would have brought with them tales from Greek mythology and from Homer, and their descendants, partly Greek and partly Frankish, may have identified as being Greek, as such identify may have conferred high social status, and that identify was in fact partially correct. They would have been wrong that they were “Trojan,” but not that they were in part Greek. Also, the Greek soldiers in the Roman army may very well have been stationed in Pannonia, giving rise to that part of the Frankish origination myth that stated that they went from “Troy” (Greece) to Pannonia before resettling in the Rhine region.
There was even a war in Greece that Jan I might have been involved in on the losing side, after which he and others might have either been stationed in Pannonia as rehabilitated soldiers or fled to Pannonia after losing the war, fearing for their lives. This war might very well have later been conflated with the mythical Trojan War, either through misunderstanding or purposeful deception for aggrandizement. This war was the Roman civil war between the Emperors Constantine and Licinius, which culminated in the Battle of Adrianople and the Battle of Chrysopolis, both occurring in the year 324 AD, which was 22 years before Jan I migrated to the Rhine region. The Battle of Adrianople was one of the largest in the 4th century, and took the lives of 34,000 men in Licinius' army alone. After losing the battle, Licinius and his army fled to the city of Byzantium where they were besieged by Constantine. Licinius retreated to Chalcedon in Bithnyia, to the east, where Licinius' forces lost again to Constantine in the Battle of Chrysopolis, in which another 25,000-30,000 of Licinius' forces were killed. Thousands of his troops fled the battle, but Licinius gathered about 30,000 of them in Nicomedia, where he surrendered to and was killed by Constantine, leaving Constantine the sole emperor of Rome. After this, Constantine renamed the city of Byzantium after himself (Constantinopolis) and made it the capitol of the entire Roman Empire. (Battle of Adrianople (324) - Wikipedia ; Battle of Chrysopolis - Wikipedia)
What happened to the surviving forces of Licinius appears to be lost to history, but they may have been made to swear loyalty to Constantine and then redistributed to other parts of the empire. If so, some or all of them may have ended up stationed in Pannonia or to more remote provinces of the Empire such as Germania Superior. Thus, although Ceustermans in his “Argonauts of the West Balkans?” says that “there are no sources showing Greek migration towards North-Western Europe in Roman times (or before),” it is possible that some Greek soldiers fighting in this Roman civil war did end up in the Rhine region.
Of course I am not saying this is what happened; I'm only saying that it provides a rational explanation for the major elements in the Frankish origination myth, and for Pauw's history of the Arkels.
Joincus/Johan/Jan
Pauw
first names the Arkel progenitor as “Joincus, that is Johan, lord
van Arckel.” Later he calls him “Joincus ofte Johan,” probably
meaning “Joincus, also called John,” and also simply both “Johan”
and “Jan.” Johan and Jan are both shortened forms of “Johannes,”
which is a Dutch/German form of the Hebrew name “John.” “Joincus”
appears to be Jan I's birth name, although Pauw doesn't actually say
this is true.
Joincus may be a Greek name. The Greek form of John/Johannes is Giannes, Yiannes, or Ioannes, and it is possible that Joincus is a form of these, perhaps mangled in the translation. An internet search on “Joincus” turned up nothing relevant, but a search on “Joncas” turned up someone with that given name in a book written in 1828 by John Lee Comstock partially entitled, History of the Greek Revolution.... This book is about the fight for Greek independence from the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and mentions a Greek by the name of “Joncas of Agrapha” (Agrapha, now spelled Agrafa, is a mountainous region of Greece that was never conquered by the Ottomans). A search in the Ancestry.com database on records for “Joncas” turned up a “Joncas Constantinov” born in Greece in 1896, but also people with the name Joncas from France, Russia, Mexico, and probably Hungary (surname Sziberka). It isn't a common name but it isn't specifically Greek, so we can't conclude anything from it about Jan I's ethnic origin, except that it doesn't definitely exclude that he came from Greece. But it doesn't exclude that he came from Hungary, either.
However, if the name is a form of the Hebrew “John,” this may indicate that he did come frm Greece, because that name in any of its forms may not have been used in most of Europe at this early time. The name derives from the Hebrew name Yohanen, the inital sound being a form of the word “Yah,” meaning “God.” Hellenized Jews brought the name into Greece probably well before 350 AD, where it apparently became popular among non-Jews also, but it took hundreds of years for the name to become popular throughout the rest of Europe.
Pauw's use of the term “lord of Arkel” is an anachronism because the Land of Arkel did not yet exist. But whether the future Lords of Arkel were named after the town of Arkel or whether that town was named after the Arkel line is uncertain. If Jan I was Greek he would only have the one given name “Joincus,” but it is possible that he would have been called “Joincus of Arkel” if Arkel was a place that he had come from. I could find no place by that name in Greece, but there is a region in the Peloponnese called “Argolis,” which might be shortened to “Argol,” which would sound quite similar to “Arkel.” There was also a Saint Archelides who was a contemporary of Jan I and who may hve been born in Constantinople. None of the Arkels would have used Archelides as a surname, but if the story of Saint Archelides was popular throughout the generations of Arkels, a shortened version of that name could have been used to name the flagship town of the Land of Arkel two or three hundred years later. This, however, is obviously speculation.
Heyman van Dardanyen
The origin of the name Heyman is uncertain but deserves some discussion since it is a recurring name in the early Arkel line. Pauw calls him “Heyman, Prince van Dardanien,” “Heyman van Dordanen,” and “Heyman van Dardanyen.” Dardania was in fact not only a real place, but two real places that were probably historically and ethnically connected. Dardania was a city near Troy and was also a region in the Balkans north of Greece. The Wikipeda entry on “Dardanians (Trojan)” says that the “The Dardanoi [of Troy] were linked by ancient Greek and Roman writers with a people of the same name who lived in the Balkans (i.e., the Dardani), a notion supported by a number of parallel ethnic names found in Balkans and Anatolia that are too great to be a mere coincidence....” The article then also states that archealogical evidence also supports the concept that the Anatolian Dardanians (i.e., Trojans) were the essentially the same people as the Balkans Dardanians. Dardania in the Balkans was a kingdom in 400 BC and a province of Rome from 284 AD. Today's countries that are located in what was once Dardania are Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, and Macedonia. Ethnically, the Balkans Dardanians were Illyrian and Thracian, and thus to Trojans must also have been that. Since Dardania was located in the Balkans, Dardanians undoubtedly had a large percentage of E-V13 Y-DNA, as the Trojan Dardanians would also have had if the Trojan Dardanians came from the Balkans Dardania. Although Heyman I was not the Arkel paternal ancestor, he might very well have been paternally related to Jan I as a cousin. It is unlikely he was a brother, as Heyman I's children married Jan I's children, but a marriage between children of cousins of any degree was probably acceptable anywhere. The consequences for us of this is that if Heyman I was closely related paternally to Jan I, Heyman I's descendants today would be extended Y-DNA matches for Arkel descendants today, and depending on the degree of relatedness, there might be no way to determine which was the MRCA. After the first generation of Heyman I's children, Heyman's line completely drops out of Pauw's history.
"Heyman" in most Arkel genealogies is spelled "Heijman;" apparently the "ij" is essentially the same as the older "y" in Dutch. This is not a common name in the Netherlands today: the Meerten Institute's "Dutch First Name Bank" claims that in 2014 this first name was used by only less than 25 people in the Netherlands (including the 4 variant spellings Heyman, Heijman, Heiman, Heman).
In view of the fact that "Heyman" in any of its forms is not popular in the Netherlands today (or probably ever), and was probably never popular, it is interesting to note that the den Hartog line that immigrated to Pella, Iowa in the mid-1800's had a member named variously "Hijman," "Heimen" or "Heijme" (1780 Boiecop - 1851). Was this man purposely named after the earlier Arkels of that name?
It therefore seems likely that this is not a traditional Dutch, Frisian or Frankish given name. Nor would it be, this was Heyman I's true first name when he left Greece. Yet the names is apparently not a Greek name, either. It is possible that it is a Frankish version of a Greek name. One possibility is the Greek given name "Homer," which could have been altered in the Frankish lands to the more familiar "Heimeric" (from "haima," meaning "home" and "ric" meaning "ruler" or perhaps "rich"), or to "Heim-man," meaning "Home-man." One source does state that "Heimann" came from the pre-7th century German "Heim-ric," and that "Henry" is a form of it (this same source also states that "Aimeric" is a French-Provencal form of the name "Heimann/Heimric/Henry," which is something we will revisit when discussing a later Heyman). (https://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Heimann)
However, there is another possible source of the name. "Heyman" in its various spellings is also Jewish, derived from the Hebrew word “Hayyim” or “Chaim,” meaning “life.” One source, under the entry “Heijman,” says that a variation, “Heyem, derived from Hayyim, was adopted as a surname of the Jewish community of Metz, north eastern France, where Jews lived since the 9th century, and also as a Jewish family name” (https://dbs.bh.org.il/familyname/heijman). I included this quote partly because it mentions Metz, which is located only about 40 miles from Pierrepont, although this would be relevant to us only if the Swaim-Arkel line was originally Jewish, which is possible but unproven, and also if the line had remained Jewish (perhaps as crypto-Jews) into the 9th century, which seems unlikely.
The name Heman is used 17 times in the Bible. Here is a quote from the English Revised Bible of 1 Kings 4:31: “For he was wiser than all men; than...Heman, Kalkol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol....” So this quote not only has Heman, but Darda! That a name similar to Dardania is included in a list with Heman is probably a coincidence, but it is clear that the name Heman was probably relatively common among the early Jews. https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Lexicon.show/ID/H1968/Heyman.htm. It is also apparently common today in Jewish Argentinian families. https://www.hebrewsurnames.com/HEIMAN.
However, merely because the origin of a name is Jewish is no indication that a person of that name is Jewish. Many names in Europe and America are derived from the Old Testament of the Bible, which was written by Jews, and yet are used by non-Jews. So the name in itself doesn't necessarily signify anything, but in fact it is almost certain that at least one branch of the Swaim line Jewish. There are about a half dozen extended Swaim STR matches with a GD of between 26 and 32 who are of Jewish origin, most of whom seem to be specifically Iberian Jewish, and even more specifically Jews from the island of Majorca. Also, recall from my earlier post that at the STR12 level there were several matches with obviously Spanish names, and two other matches who were definitely Jewish. I don't think too much should be made about the number of these matches, since that could be due to selection bias, but there is no doubt that extended Swaim matches do include Jewish and Spanish and Jewish-Spanish matches. Clearly, one branch of the Swaim line that went to Spain was Jewish. YFull.com shows 7 men from "Balears," meaning the Balearic Islands, which includes Majorca, with the terminal SNP E-Y33577, which is a branch of E-BY4914, which is the next branch above E-FGC11450; both are sub-branches of E-FGC11457. The earliest definite Majorcan Jewish match with the Swaim line has an estimated MRCA of 290 BC, or about 640 years before Jan I migrated to the Rhine region; however, the match Mizruchi has an estimated MRCA of 130 BC, or 476 years before Jan I migrated to the Rhine region. This is not a particularly close relationship but it's not particularly distant, either, in terms of Y-DNA. The most interesting question regarding the Majorca line is not so much when the split from the Swaim line occurred, but whether that line was Jewish before the split occurred or after. If before, then the Swaim line at that time was also Jewish. However, Pauw gives us no indication that the Arkels were anything other than Christians: the Arkels built several churches in the Land of Arkel, fought against the pagan Saxons in the name of Christianity, and at least three Arkels fought Muslims in the "Holy Land" in the name of Christianity.
Franchion and Anthonore
I won't discuss Franchion and Anthonore at all because it is unlikely they were real people and because they play no further role in Pauw's history.
The Journey to Frankfurt
Pauw is vague when explaining why Jan I and Heyman I traveled to Frankfurt. He implies they went there to help “Constans de kaiser” subjugate unnamed people who refused to be subservient to and pay tribute to Constans. In 346 AD Constans, son of Constantine, was in fact a co-emperor of the Roman Empire, and the one responsible for administration of the Balkans and Pannonia. But if Pauw is implying that Jan I and Heyman I actually personally knew Emperor Constans, that would be very unlikely. It is much more likely that Jan I and Heyman I were common soldiers in one of the Roman legions. Apparently Greeks legionnaires were relatively uncommon, probably because Greece was relatively wealthy compared to other regions within the Roman Empire, there could be many reasons why a particular individual would join the army, including a simple love for fighting. It is likely that Jan I and Heyman I were cavalrymen rather than foot soldiers, since fighting from horseback was the profession of the Arkel line for the next thousand years, and Jan I's tenure in the Roman legion may have been the genesis of that profession. Pauw, however, is silent on all of this.
In 346 AD Constans was co-emperor with his brother Constantius, Constans having previously had his other brother, Constantine II, killed. This fratricide explains Pauw's mention of Constans having fought with a relative. Constans wasn't a popular leader, and in 350 General Magnentius, of Frankish birth, declared himself emperor. Magnentius killed Constans, leaving Constantius sole legitimate emperor, and for about four years Constantius' forces fought with Magnentius' forces until in 353 Magnentius, facing defeat, committed suicide.
During these four years of fighting large numbers of Roman soldiers and their German auxiliaries were removed from the Rhine border and other parts of Germania, and the German tribes took advantage of this weakness by capturing Roman forts and overrunning Gaul, pillaging and gathering some 20,000 Romanized Gauls to use as slaves in their fields. This was likely the uprising that sent Jan I and Heyman I to Frankfurt. If so, Pauw's date of 346 AD was off by a few years (they would probably have left in 350 rather than 346), although it is possible that Jan I and Heyman I had left the east in 346 and remained elsewhere along the way for a few years being sent to Frankfurt to deal with the rebellious Germans.
After the Roman civil war had been concluded, Constantius placed his cousin Julian in charge of the forces in Gaul and Julian spent several years crushing the rebellious German tribes, freeing their Gaulish slaves, and restoring peace in Gaul. It's quite possible that Jan I and Heyman I served under Julian in these actions.
Because, as we will see, the earliest known ancestor one of the extended matches is from a town within a few miles of the Roman town on the map below labeled as "Augusta Rauricorum," it is important to try to determine the exact route taken by Jan I and Heyman I in their migration journey to the Rhine region.
Pauw's “Tyrolus” is today's Tyrol, which is a historical region in the Alps of northern Italy and western Austria. However, this region didn't exist during the time of the Roman Empire, when this region was divided among the provinces of Raetia, Noricum and Venetia.
Pauw's phrase “up the Rhine” is confusing, because it is almost certain that he actually meant “down the Rhine.” Which direction he meant matters, because to “up the Rhine” is to go south, whereas to go “down the Rhine is to go north.” Going down a river means to go with its flow, away from it source, whereas to go up a river means to go against its flow, toward its source. This makes sense because water flows downhill, and the source of a river is always higher in elevation than its mouth. However, Pauw's mistake is easy to understand since the Rhine flows northward for most of its length, and when looking at a map there is a tendency to consider north to be “up” and south to be “down.” Thus, when looking at a map and planning a driving route from Basel to Frankfurt, one would tend to consider that drive to be going up from Basel to Frankfurt. However, if you were referring to that route in terms of the Rhine River, you would say that you traveling down the Rhine, since you are following the flow of the river.
However, it is pretty clear that Pauw meant that went down the Rhine, since doesn't mention that they'd entered Gaul, and to get to a point on the Rhine north of Frankfurt (from which they went down the Rhine), they would have had to have traveled deep into Gaul and then turned north to Germania Inferior in what is now Belgium, before turning east to the Rhine. This would have brought them to Cologne, from which they could then have gone down the Rhine. However, Pauw doesn't say that they'd gone into Gaul, nor that they'd been to Cologne. And there is no road from which they could have approached the Rhine north of Frankfurt from the east, and it is unlikely that they would have traveled off-road and outside the boundary of the Roman Empire (which at that time was probably “enemy territory,” since Pauw seems to be saying that the reason Jand I and Heyman I went to the Rhine region was to quell a rebellion, presumably of German tribes). Therefore, it is likely that they had actually traveled down the Rhine, and probably from Augusta Raurica (Augusta Rauricorum)/Castrum Rauracense.
If we assume that Pauw's “Sycambri” was Aquincum, then the most direct route would have been the road that parallels the Danube for a few hundred miles, and then taking the road that cuts off to Mongontiacum (Mainz) from a point northwest of August Vindelicorum (Augsburg). However, this route has two problems. First, it does not actually go through “Tyrolus,” but skirts north of it, and also it does not travel “up the Rhine.” Therefore, if Pauw is correct (which we are assuming), they could not have taken this route.
The only relatively direct route that fits Pauw's description is one of the routes south and west from Aquincum that passes through Aquileia and Verona. The only Roman road shown on this map that actually goes through the Tyrol region is the road from Verona north to Augusta Vindelicorum, so we must assume they took that road. From Augusta Vindelicorum they could have gone a bit north and then southwest to Augusta Raurica, which lies on the Rhine River. From there they would have travelled north, down the Rhine, to Frankfurt.
However, it is possible that Pauw's definition of “Tyrolus” was more expansive than the generally accepted definition, perhaps encompassing most of the Alps, including the Swiss Alps. If this is the case, then a route from Pannonia along the Danube and overland to the Rhine could have possibly been considered as going through the Tyrol. If they had taken the most direct route from Aquincum to Augusta Rauricum to Frankfurt, the journey would have been about 1,400 miles and would have taken about 47 days in good weather. (ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World )
The most important thing to note is that whatever route they took, to go “op den Rijn” they would have had to pass through Augusta Raurica (Augusta Raricorum). There are two possible exceptions to this. At least one other map shows a Roman road north of this route that connects with Rhine south of Mainz, and if they took this route they would not have gone through Augusta Raurica. It is possible they took this route, although it is less likely because it was closer to the border of the empire and would have exposed them to attack by marauding German tribes. Also, this route would not have taken through or near the Tyrol. Or they could have gone “up the Rhine” by taking a long excursion through southern Gaul, through Lugdunum (Lyon) and through Vesontio (Besancon); but as Pauw doesn't mention that they'd done this, it is more likely that they took the more direct route through Augusta Raurica.
In any case, it is at least possible that they had passed through Augusta Raurica, if not proved by Pauw's history.
If they did pass through Augusta Raurica, they probably would not have actually stayed at Augusta Raurica, but rather at nearby Castrum Rauracense. This is because although Augusta Raurica was a thriving city in the 1st through 3rd centuries, it was heavily damaged by an earthquake in 250 AD and then in 260 AD was destroyed by Alemanni tribes or rogue Roman troops. The Romans built a fortress nearby called Castrum Rauracense, and this is probably where traveling Roman troops would have stayed. Augusta Raurica was eventually repopulated, but with many fewer residents. Today August Raurica is the city of Augst, Switzerland, and Castrum Rauracense is Kaiseraugst, Switzerland. These are located about 12 miles east of today's Basel and about the same distance from today's town of Biel-Benken, Switzerland.
Pauw doesn't say how long the journey of Jan I and Heyman I took, or how long Jan I remained at any location he passed along the way, but it is possible that his legion had remained at Castrum Rauracense for days or even longer if the army had business there. Of course, a child could result from even a one-night stay there.
Jauary 5, 2022 Note:
In an interesting recent discovery, archaeologists monitoring a construction site in Kaiseraugst in Switzerand discovered that the site had once been used as a Roman gladiatorial arena, and a coin found at the site was dated from the 4th Century AD—in other words, from around the time that the Swaim immigrant ancestor may have passed through Castrum Rauracense/Kaiseraugst. Of course, even assuming that the Swaim immigrant ancestor did pass through Augusta Rauracense, we have no reason to believe that he had anything to do with this gladiatorial arena, but it does raise the interesting possibility that he was actually there as a captive forced into gladiatorial role rather than as a Roman soldier. If he had been part of an army or other group involved on the losing side in a battle with Roman troops, he might have been send along with others from his group to fight in that arena. Of course this is sheer speculation, but at the very least, even if he was a soldier, the existence of this arena would possibly have given the legion he was with more reason to stay for some time in Castrum Rauracense when passing through the region.
Frankfurt
In my first version of this post I probably translated Pauw incorrectly regarding the entry of Jan I and Heyman I into Frankfurt. Pauw actually wrote that they “maecten die stadt Franckefoort ende begrepen dat landt daer entrent, dat noch heyt Franckelandt.” I translated this line with th meaning that they passively entered Frankfurt and the surrounding region, which is called Germany.” In fact, I now believe that Pauw meant more than this by his use of the verbs “maecten” and “begrepen.” Pauw's “Maecten” is probably today's Dutch word “Machten,” which means “power,” “force,” “might,” “grip,” “hold,” “potentcy,” “mightiness,” etc. “Begrepen” today means “understood” in the sense of “Okay!” or “Okeydokey!”, but Pauw no doubt used it as the past tense of the verb “greep,” which means “grip,” “hold,” “grasp,” “catch,” “clutch,” “grapple.” Therefore, Pauw is saying not merely that they entered Frankfurt, but that they came in and asserted control over both Frankfurt and the surrounding region of Roman Germania. This doesn't necessary mean that they had fought any battles at that time, but it does seem to mean that they came into the region with a show of force and made it known that they now had complete control of it.
In 346 Frankfurt was a small border town the Romans called “Nida.” The major legionary camp in the vicinity was actually in the nearby town of Mogontiacum (Mainz), and it is likely that Jan and Heyman were stationed in Mogontiacum than in Nida.
During the Roman Empire, Frankfurt and Mainz were located in the province of Germania Superior. This ultimately became a part of today's Germany, which in today's Dutch is “Duitsland.” Pauw called it “Frankland,” which shouldn't be confused with today's “Frankreich,” which is the Germans name for France. France and Frankfurt is named after the Franks, who inhabited large parts of the countries known today as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The Franks were a Germanic tribe that spoke Old Frankish, the parent language of the Franconian languages Dutch, Afrikaans, and the less widely-spoken Central Franconian languages of Moselle Franconian, Luxembourgish, Lorraine Franconian, and so on. Pauw's use of the term “Frankland” seems to have meant specifically the Rhineland region of Germany, since he defined that a area around Frankfurt as "Frankland."
Although there is no way of knowing which legion or legions Heyman and Jan served in, one possibility is the Legio XXII Primigenia. This legion was in existence in the early 300's and probably later, and was often stationed at a camp near today's Butzbach, about 25 miles north of Frankfurt. Legio XXII Primigenia's symbols were Capricorn and Hercules. There is a claim that the name "Arkel" derived from the name "Hercules" etched onto a Roman temple that an Arkel converted into a Catholic church, but if the name "Hercules" was associated with Jan I's legion, it is also conceivable that he became associated with that name through his servie in that legion. Alternatively, there was also a Roman camp called Castra Herculis located near today's Arnhem. “Castra Herculis” means “Fort (or Camp) Hercules, and this could have been the connection between the Arkels and Hercules if the Arkels had been stationed there. The truth is, however, that there is no solid evidence which proves the origin of the name "Arkel," and it is likely that there never will be such proof.
Age Issue
If Jan I and Heyman I were 20 years of age when they went to the Rhine region in 346 AD, they would have been 62 years of age when they crossed the Rhine in 388 AD and engaged in battles. Considering the extremely physical nature of battles battles at that time, 62 years of age is pushing the limits of plausibility. Pauw probably has the correct year, since there was in fact a large battle that year that involved in which the Romans repulsed the invading Franks, but it seems likely that the battle was fought not by Jan I, but by one of his sons or grandsons, perhaps also named Jan, or who would have been much younger than Jan I. This is particularly true since Pauw seems to imply that it was Jan I who was visited by the Bishop of Metz in 418 AD, at which time Jan I would have been 92 years old (at a minimum)--certainly possible, but probably unusual for that time and place.
The incursion of the Franks into Gaul in 388 AD was described by Gregory of Tours his his book History of the Franks, written in or before 594 AD. Citing a lost work by a Roman, he wrote that "the Franks invaded the Roman province of Germania under their leaders Genobaud, Marcomer and Sunno. As these Franks crossed the frontier, many of the inhabitants were slaughtered and they ravaged the most fertile areas. The townsfolk of Cologne were terrified: and, when this news reached Trier, Nannius and Quintinus, who commanded the Roman armies and to whom Maximus had entrusted his infant son and the defense of Gaul, collected their troops together and marched to that city. The enemy, who were heavily laden with booty, for they had pillaged the richest parts of the province, crossed back over the Rhine, but left many of their men behind in Roman territory, where they were planning to continue their ravaging. The Romans found it easy to deal with these, and a great number of Franks were cut down in the forest of Charbonniere.”
This was probably the event in 388 AD that Pauw refers to. The "forest of Charbonniere" is also known as the "Kohlenwald" in German the "Silva Carbonaria" in Latin. It is located north and west of of Pierrepont (Pierpont), which is itself located about 40 miles northwest of Metz.
If Jan I did fight in these battles, he must have been serving under Nanninus rather than Quintinus, because after their successful rout of the Franks in Gaul, "the Roman leaders held a meeting to decide whether or not they should cross into Frankish territory [east of the Rhine]. Nanninus refused to do so, for he knew that the Franks were waiting for them and that on their own soil they would undoubtedly be much the stronger. This did not meet with the approval of Quintinus and the other military leaders and so Nanninus retreated to Mainz." Quintinus crossed the Rhine and his soldiers were slaughtered by the Franks, who had "few survivors."
The problem with Pauw's story is that Gaul in 388 AD was still part of the Roman Empire, and the Romans did not divide up conquered lands and parcel them out to the soldiers who had fought to defend the land for the empire. However, the Roman empire was losing control of Germania and Gaul by this time. The Wikipedia article "Fall of the Western Roman Empire” says, “In Gaul, which did not really recover from the invasion of the third century, there was widespread insecurity and economic decline in the 300's...[Roman troops] proved ineffective in action and dangerous to civilians...Frontier troops were often given land rather than pay; as they farmed for themselves, their direct costs diminished, but so did their effectiveness....” Essentially, Roman control was falling apart on the frontier at this time and local Frankish warlords, most with Roman military experience, were taking control.
The Roman Army's practice of giving land to retired solders in lieu of cash was not only cheap for the empire, but possibly also a good tactic to keep the land pacified, because retired soldiers would of course fight for their land if threatened. Thus, giving land to Jan I in Pierrepont would provide a buffer for the town of Metz against the Franks who lived north of Pierrepont, an area over which the Romans had probably lost effective control by this time. But on the other hand, the retired soldiers would likely come to identify more with the Franks they lived among than the Romans, whose power in the region was waning. Thus, over time, former Roman soldiers, especially those who married Franks, would come to think of themselves as Franks, and this would be especially true with the succeeding generations. The Roman army itself was mostly Frankish by this time, being "nearly completely in the hands of Frankish mercenaries" (wikipedia.com, "Sunno").
Lotrinck, Baer and Pierpont
Heyman I was awarded land in some unspecified location in “Lotrinck,” and Jan I was awarded land in “Baer,” where he built his house "Pierpont." “Lotrinck” was Pauw's spelling for “Lotharingia,” which didn't actually exist until 855, and which in any case was a very large area of land that stretched from what is now northern Netherlands down to Burgundy. The name "Baer" may not have yet existed either, but Pierrepont is definitely located in what became the Duchy of Bar, which was also at times considered to be within Lorraine. At that time, Pierrepont was located in the Roman province of Gallia Belgica. Today it is in the northeastern part of France.
Location of Pierrepont in the Lorraine area of France. Note its proximity to Germany.
There is little information available online about the history of Pierrepont. Pierrepont is located on the La Crusnes river, and today has a population of 870 people. It is located only about 12 miles southwest of the Luxembourg border, about the same distance southeast of the Belgian border, and about 50 miles west of the German border. Of course, those borders did not exist in 388 AD. The important city of Metz did exist at that time, and was located about 43 miles southeast of Pierrepont.
There is little information available online about the history of Pierrepont. The French Wikipedia entry “Pierrepont (Meurthe-et-Moselle)” gives a list of the names of Pierrepont throughout the last thousand years:
920 AD Pons Petrus
1401 AD Perpons
1501 AD Perpont
1674 AD Perpont or Pierrepont
1749 AD Pierre-Pont
1776 AD Pierrepont-sur-Crusnes or Petra Pons
1790 AD Pierrepont
Pauw,
writing in the late 1400's, named this place “Pierpont.” The name
appears to mean either “Stone Bridge” or “Peter's Bridge.”
Pons or Pont is Latin for bridge,
and Petrus is Latin for rock,
but also for the name Peter.
Pierre in French also
means either Peter or
rock. In Dutch Pier
is Peter, although
Saint Peter is Petrus.
In Greek, petros is
Peter, from the
Aramaic word Kepa,
meaning rock, a name that Jesus is supposed to have given him. Pierrepont may have been named after
Saint Peter, either simply to honor him or with the meaning that
Pierrepont was the bridge to the gates of heaven. It could have been
named that in a nod to the High Cathedral of Saint Peter in Trier,
which is the oldest surviving church in Germany and was being built
or already built when Jan I had moved to Frankfurt sometime after
346. The construction of the Trier cathedral was coordinated by
Bishop Maximin, the 6th bishop of Trier (died 346 AD), and
when it was built was “the grandest ensemble of ecclesiastical
structures in the West outside Rome.” (Trier
Cathedral - Wikipedia ).
Or the name could have simply meant “Stone Bridge,” likely named for a bridge over the La Crusnes river that runs through Pierrepont.
If Pauw's history is correct, the name was that given by Jan I to his residence, which likely would have been a large estate, or farm, probably then called a villa. Having been in the Roman legion, it is likely that he spoke at least some Latin, probably some type of Vulgar Latin (colloquial Latin). Also, while many or most of the Gauls of this time still probably spoke their Celtic language, Gaulish was slowly phasing out in favor of Latin. Latin eventually morphed into Old French in about the 800's, but in the late 300's and early 400's would still have been recognizably Latin. Thus, once Jan I was living in Pierrepont in Baer, he may have spoken to the locals in Latin. Therefore, it would have made sense that he would have named his estate a Latin name, either after bridge that he had built (or which had already existed), or after Saint Peter, if he was a Christian at that time (Pauw is silent as to whether Jan I was a Christian when he entered the Rhine region, but it was likely that he was a Christian at least by 418 AD, or otherwise it is questionable that the Bishop of Metz, Saint Urbicius, would have visited him there.
According the French Wikipedia article on Pierrepont, there is a Roman-era ruin at Pierrepont, apparently part of a well. This would probably pre-date Jan I's appearance there, which means that the place may have already had a name before Jan I took possession of the land, and thus that the name Pons Petrus might also pre-date Jan I's arrive there. A castle was built in Pierrepont in the 1100's and was destroyed in the 1600's. The building of the casele was possibly after the Arkels had left the area permanently (assuming they did in fact leave the area permanently; it is possible that some of the family had always remained there). Before the (presumably stone) castle was built in the 1100's, Jan IV in the 600's had built a wood castle at Pierrepont.
Jan I's Family
Pauw doesn't say who Jan I or Heyman I married, but we can assume they were locals since it is unlikely that women were allowed to travel with the Roman army. Thus, they would either have been from a Germanic tribe or they would have been Romanized Gauls. In either case, it is unlikely that their children would have grown up speaking Greek, although the wives and children undoubtedly would have learned some Greek words.
Jan I and Heyman I both had at least one son and one daughter, and this was the second generation of the known Arkel line and the first generation born in western Europe. Jan I's son Jan II married Heyman I's daughter Cassandra, and Heyman I's son Agatumber married Jan I's daughter Andronia/Androniam. Cassandra is a Greek name, and Andronia is probably Greek also, although it's an odd name for a girl since the root Andro- means “masculine.” Agatumber must also be Greek, since the only reference to an Agatumber I could find in an internet search is a man named Agatumber (AKA Agatimber, Agatumbrus, Agatthander, Agathymber) who was the 22nd Bishop of Metz and who was born in Greece and died in either 525, 530 or 531 (Agatumbrus, S. - Zeno.org)
Pauw states that there were Arkels in France and Arkels in Hungary, and that they shared the same coat of arms. This implies that this coat of arms existed before Jan I and Heyman I had left Pannonia, or, if Jan I and Heyman I had been accompanied in the Roman army by kinsmen, by the time the kinsmen returned to Hungary. This implies that coats of arms were in use during the 4th century. However, it appears that coats of arms were not generally used until the 12th century, and by nobility only. Also, a 13th century source (probably Beke) stated that the Arkels had obtained their coat of arms in the year 1219, as a reward by the Count William I for Jan VI's participation in the Siege of Damietta, Egypt, during the 5th Crusade. If this is true, then the other stories must be false, since both occurred well before 1219. Thus, it is unlikely that the Arkels at this time would have had a coat of arms at all.
Metz and Bishop Urbisius
Because Pierrepont is located only about 40 miles from the city of Metz, the early Arkel line would have had continuing economic and social ties with Metz. As the Roman city Divodurum Mediomatricum, which later was shortened to Mediomatrix, Metz had a population of 40,000 and one of the principal cities of Gaul. In the 400's, a century in which the Arkels lived continuously Pierrepont, the name of the city evolved into Mettis and finally into Metz. However, the 5th century was a very unsettled time in the region as political power shifted from the Romans to the Franks, and Metz suffered “barbarian depredations” that reduced its population. By the end of the 5th century Metz was controlled by the Franks.
Pauw said that in 418 AD Urbicius, the 15th Bishop of Metz, visited Pierrepont in the year 418. Urbicius was also known as Urbitius and Urbice, and not much seems to be known about him. Pauw called him “Saint Urbicius,” but he may possibly have been confusing him with the much later Saint Urbicius who was captured by Saracens (Arab Muslims), escaped, and became a hermit in Aragon. There was another Urbicius who lived in the 5th century who was a Greek eunuch who served as imperial chamberlain to various Byzantine emperors; he was not the Bishop of Metz and was never in western Europe, but I mention him because he is Greek with the name Urbicius (Ourbikios in Latin), so it is possible that “Urbicius” is specifically a Greek name, giving us another Greek connection to the early Arkels.
It is likely that once the Arkels had settled into Pierrepont they lived much like well-to-do Gallo-Romans at least through 450 AD, when Lorraine was probably still controlled by the Romans. In 451 AD Attila the Hun and his troops crossed the Rhine and sacked Metz and "burned the town to the ground, slaughtered the populace with the sharp edge of their swords and killed the priests of the Lord in front of their holy altars" (Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, II.6). Attila then "marched forward from Metz and ravaged a great number of other cities in Gaul." Attila was sent fleeing from Gaul a few months later when he lost the faced in battle against the Roman general Flavius Aetius and Theodoric, king of the Visigoths. This was probably the last major military operation in Gaul by the Roman army. Pauw did not mention the invasion of the Huns, but I mentioned it for two reasons. First, since Pierrepont was located only 40 miles from Metz, it is possible that one or more of the Arkels would have had to defend Pierrepont against marauding Huns; also, if an Arkel was employed by the Roman army (and even if not), it is likely that he would have fought against the Huns at some point. Second, since Pauw did not mention this incident, even though he certainly had access to Gregory of Tours' account of it, this argues against Pauw having simply made up the early Arkel history by plugging in an Arkel into various historical incidents; if that was what he was doing, then why would he have passed up this opportunity to glorify the Arkels in a historical event that occurred practically in their own back yard?
During the 500's, 600's and much of the 700's, Metz was the residence of the Merovingian kings of Austrasia. During this time the Arkels, by virtue of the geographical proximity of Pierrepont to Metz, were located very close to the power center of the Merovingian Franks. In 768 Metz became part of the Carolingian Empire, the successor to the Merovingian. The power center of the Carolingians shifted to Aachen, although Metz remained an important city.
Heyman II and Ritzaert
At that time Angisius ruled the Rhine below the Netherlands and was the king of Agrippen, which is now called Cologne. He was a Christian king and by his queen had a son named Karel—not Karel, king of France, but the king of Cologne. This King of Cologne and had a young daughter named Verana. And Heyman, lord Jan's son, like Heyman van Dardanen, grew up in all greatness and was great giant, magnanimous, strong of limb, and a very handsome youngster. Jan sent Heyman to court in king Angisius' house and while he was there Verana, king Angisius' daughter, fell in love with Heyman and sailed with with him to France where they married. Heyman had four sons by Verana: Ritzaert, Olivier, Alaert, and Sinte Reynalt. This is the Sinte Reynalt that was martyred in Cologne and was miraculously conducted to Dortmond, 90 miles from Cologne. These four sons are named the Heemskinderen, and they had many struggles with their uncle King Karel, according to ballads and histories.
In the year 542 Ritzaert, Heyman's son, had a son named Jan...
Heyman II was supposedly the 3rd generation of the Arkel line, although in fact he would probably have been the 5th generation based on a 32-year paternal generational pattern. If he was the 3rd generation, then autosomally he would have been about half Greek, since each of his parents was half Greek. If he was 5th generation, then autosomally he would have been about 12.5% Greek. However, it seems unlikely that he would have known more than a few words of Greek, if that, since by then the family had lived in the Rhine region for about a hundred years. But what language did he speak? Pierrepont today is in France, but is very near to the language border across which Franconian dialects are spoken. The Romanized Gauls were transitioning from speaking their Celtic Gaulish language to a colloquial version of Latin that later turned into French. So the local farmers in the Pierrepont area spoke either Gaulish, a form of colloquial Latin, or Franconian. The profession of the Arkel line was soldiery as mounted knights, at first for the Romans and then for the Franks, and if Heyman II in fact had married the daughter of the King of Cologne, it indicates that they were connected to the Frankish upper classes and would thus have spoken Franconian. However, they would also have needed to speak the language that the Pierrepont locals spoke, which if it was not Franconian, was either colloquial Latin or Gaulish.
Cologne was the capital of the Roman province of Germania Inferior until it fell to the Franks in 456 AD. The city was named after the first word in its Roman name, Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, and Pauw's name for it, Agrippen, obviously comes from the last word in its name. Most of the Germanic tribes were Arian Christians by this time, due largely to the efforts of the missionary Ulfilas. Most of the Gaulish Romans were Nicene (Catholic) Christians, and at the time there was a battle for dominance between thee two forms of Christianity. At the beginning of the 6th century Clovis I, king of the Franks, converted to Catholic Christianity, and the rest of the Franks followed. Over the next couple hundred years the rest of the German tribes converted also.
In the 400's, Roman rule gave way to rule by various Germanic tribes and confederacies, and it is impossible to say exactly when this change would have occurred in Pierrepont, and to what degree it affected life there. During the early 400's society in Pierrepont was probably essentially that of Romanized Gauls, and even when Pierrepont was no longer ruled by Rome, life there may not have changed much because the power of the Germanic tribes couldn't reach into every corner of the land they claimed as their own, and also because the Germanic tribes by this time were relatively Romanized themselves.
During the early- to mid-400's, power in the larger area around Pierrepont was divided between the Salian Franks, the Ripuarian Franks, the Alemanni, and the last surviving rule of the Romans in the form of what is called the Kingdom of Soissons, the Domain of Soissons, the Kingdom of the Romans, or the Realm of Syagrius. This map from Wikipedia shows the general configuration of these powers in 476 AD:
Just before this time, the Franks had been divided into two allied groups: the Salian Franks and Ripuarian Franks. The Salian Franks were ruled by Clovis I from 481-509. The Ripuarian Franks were centered around Cologne, which they had taken from the Romans in 462 AD. By 476 AD Clovis I had united the two groups of Franks.
The Kingdom of Soissons/Syagrius had been formed in 457 AD when the Roman Emperor Majorian appointed Aegidius as commander of all the military forces in Gaul. The Kingdom of Soissons is the land in Gaul that remained under Roman rule after the rest of the Romans had lost control of the rest of Gaul and Germania. Soissons was run by Aegidius until his death in 464 or 465 AD, and then by his son Syagrius. The people of Soissons considered themselves to be subjects of the Roman Empire rather than subjects of some separate kingdom or realm. But in 486 AD Clovis I defeated Syagrius in the Battle of Soissons and incorporated Soissons into the Kingdom of the Franks.
Some maps imply that Pierrepont was part of the Kingdom of Soissons:
Although Pierrepont isn't labeled on this map, it would be located within the northeastern part of the area of the “Dominio di Siagrio,” or Domain of Syagrius. However, in the previous map Pierrepont would be located somewhere near the letter “b” in the word “Tolbiac” and thus on the border of the land claimed by the Alamanni and the Franks.
In this map, Pierrepont would definitely be within the Alemanni kingdom, as Pierrepont lies between Metz and the Meuse river to the west:
However, no map depicting the domains of the various powers at this early time is exactly accurate, and borders were likely to have been much less well-defined than these maps depict them, except when a particular border was defined by a natural geographic feature such as a river. It therefore remains an open question as to which of these three powers actually ruled the area of Pierrepont in the 400's. It is also an open question to whether this made any difference to the Arkels, because if they had enough fighting men to repel a local invasion, they may very well have been left alone by any force lesser than an army. It is also possible that Heyman I's family still lived in the area, and that they, the Arkels, and their neighbors would have banded together for mutual defense. But in any event, Clovis I defeated the Alemanni in 496 AD in the Battle of Tolbiac, and so from this time Pierrepont was definitely part of the Frankish kingdom and remained so for many generations. And, clearly, the Arkels did fight for the Frankish kings at an early time and would have viewed themselves by this time as Franks.
Angisius
Pauw says that Angisius, the king of Cologne, ruled the Rhine below the Netherlands. He did not rule the Rhine above the Netherlands because that land was controlled by the Frisians, as can be seen in the second map above. I couldn't determine who Pauw meant by Angisius, the king of Agrippen/Cologne. There was an Ansegisel who was a Merovinginan Duke, the son of Arnulf of Metz and the grandfather of Charles Martel, who was the grandfather of Charlemagne, but this Ansegisel was born in about 602 and died in the 660's or 670's. This Ansegisel was called “Angises” by Ólafur Halldorsson in his Icelandic saga “Danish Kings and the Jomsvikings in the Greatest Saga of Olafr Tryggvason,” so we know that Ansegisel is probably the same name as Pauw's Angisius, which would be the Latinized form of the name Angises. But Pauw states that Angisius was the king of Cologne “op desen tijt,” or “at that time,” meaning at the same time as the events he had just mentioned. Those events were the visit to Pierrepont of Bishop Urbicius and the birth of Jan III, both of which apparently occurred in the year 418 AD, and also that Jan II married Heyman I's daughter Cassandra, and that they had a son named Heyman. Unfortunately, Pauw's dates and generations of the early Arkels cannot be perfectly reconciled with each other. However, Heyman may have been born in about 446 AD, so Pauw may be generally speaking about the mid-to-late 5th century. Since Cologne was Roman until the Ripuarian Franks conquered it in 462 AD, it would not have had a king until sometime after that date. so this seems generally correct. But this was a century and a halfbefore Ansegisel the ancestor of Charlemagne existed, so it seems that Pauw could not have meant that particular Ansegisel.
It is possible that Pauw meant some other Ansegisel that is otherwise lost to history. However, there is another possibility, which is that Pauw meant Aegidius, but confused his name with the later Ansegisel. This Aegidius is the Roman military leader who ruled the Kingdom of Soissons. But why would Aegidius be called the “king of Cologne?” Oddly enough, according to Gregory of Tours Aegidius did in fact ruled the Franks for about 8 years. The Wikipedia article “Aegidius” states that modern historians consider his rule of the Franks to be fictional, but unless this modern historical view is based on solid documentary evidence rather than merely opinion, I see no reason to doubt the statements of Gregory of Tours, who wrote his history in the mid-to-late 500's and was thus much closer than any modern historian to the events he describes.
Gregory of Tours relates that Aegidius came to rule the Franks because the Franks were angry about their king Childeric's adultery with the daughters of his subjects. Childeric fled the country and “the Franks unanimously chose as their king that same Aegidius who...had been sent from Rome as the Commander of the armies.” Aegidius ruled the Franks for eight years, from 457 to his death in 465. After that, Childeric returned and again resumed kingship of the Franks. Since Cologne fell to the Ripuarian Franks in 462, it is possible that he was considered to be the king of Cologne for the last few years of his reign of the Franks. The term “king of Cologne” in any case appears to actually mean “king of the Franks” rather than merely the king of the one city of Cologne.
If we accept Pauw's statement that Jan, son of Ritzaert, was born in 542 AD, then Ritzert must have been born in about 510 AD, and the events related by Pauw must have occurred at some time after 530 AD. The Merovingian Frankish king at this time was Theuderic I, who was "the king of Metz, Reims, or Austrasia--as it is variously called--from 511 to 533 or 534" (Wikipedia "Theuderic I"). However, this cannot be Karel, the king Cologne, so Pauw was probably wrong that Ritzaert was the father of Jan III.
I can't find any sources stating that Aegidius had a daughter name Verana, but this would not be unusual because people in histories from this far back were usually not named unless they had done something noteworthy, which few women at that time had the opportunity to do. Interestingly, the name “Aegidius” may be a Latinized form of a Greek word meaning “kid skin,” perhaps having the meaning “the protecting” (Wiktionary.org entry “Aegidius"). There is another historical Aegidius, known in French as Gilles, or Giles the Hermit. This Aegidius (650-710) was a Greek from Athens who was a hermit in Provence in France, and was canonized as a saint. If the Roman Aegidius was also of Greek origin, it might help explain why a daughter of Aegidius might be attracted to Heyman II, who was also partly of Greek extraction.
But regardless of the identity of Pauw's Angisius, he was a king of some sort, almost certain a Frank, and Heyman II married his daughter. This indicates that the Arkels at this early time were already allied with the Franks, and also with the upper social strata of the Franks.
Heemskinderen
What Pauw is claiming in this section is that Heyman and his four children were the protagonists featured in the medieval tale generally called The Four Sons of Aymon. In France the tale is called Quatre Fils Aymon, or Aymon de Dordone. In Germany it is called Histori von der vier Heymonskindern. In the Netherlands the tale is called Historie van den Vier Heemskinderen. The Dutch Wikipedia article “Vier Heemskinderen” says that the knight Aymon was also called Haymijn or Aymes, which in Dutch was corrupted to Heems. Thus, Heemskinderen means “the sons of Heymon.”
The story has been very popular in France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, particularly so in the 14th-16th centuries. It is a fantastic tale involving Charlemagne, a sorcerer, a magic horse named Bayard, and Reynault's dead body that miraculously floats itself from Cologne to Dortmund (Pauw wrote that Dortmund was located “XM” miles from Cologne, but XM means 990, whereas Dortmund is actually about 90 miles from Cologne, so Pauw should have used the Roman numeral “XC”).
There are various versions of this tale, but it generally involves the story of the four sons of Haymon/Aymon and his wife Ay or Aja. Haymon was a knight or a count, and Ay or Aja was the sister of the king Charlemagne. The four sons are named Richard, Writsaert, Adelhaert (Alaert of Allard), and Renout (Reinout/Reynault), or some variation of those. The family lives variously in the Ardennes, Pierlepont (sometimes pierlemont), or in a place called Dordone. Reynault killed his cousin, the son of Charlemagne, and Charlemagne and his men chase them into the dense woods of the Ardennes, where they hide in a castle. Various adventures occur, but in the end Charlemagne reconciles with his nephews and Richard, Writsaert, and Alaert enter Charlemagne's service, but Reynault does penance by taking a pilgrammage to Jerusalem. When Reynault returns, he retires to Cologne as a holy man, working many miracles. When the Bishop of Cologne begins to build the great church of St. Peter, Reynault worked on the church as a common laborer, unknown to the other laborers for who he truly is. He worked with such zeal that the other laborers are envious and ashamed, and they attack and kill him. They tie his body in a bag filled with stones and dumped him into the Rhine River. But miraculously the body floats rather than sinks, and comes to shore where it is recognized as Reynault, the saint and now martyr. The body is placed on a bier to be transported to Dortmund, when another miracle occurred as the body on the bier transports itself, without help from horses or people, all the way to Dortmund where a church is built to honor him.
Pauw is claiming that this tale was based on the family of the Heyman II. In Pauw's version of the story one brother is named Olivier rather than Richard, and Haymon's wife is Verana rather than Ay or Aja, and she is king Karel's daughter rather than his sister. Also, Pauw is careful to explain that king Karel was not Charlemagne, but rather a different king. In any case, since Jan III was the son of Ritzaert and was born in 542 AD, the king could not be Charlemagne since Charlemagne was born sometime in the mid-700's.
What are we supposed to make of Pauw's claim that the story is based on the Arkels? Did he have any evidence for its validity, or did he simply graft the tale into the Arkel history without any evidence that it was correct? The basic events that occur this story are possibly based on events that actually occurred but which were later exaggerated and magical elements added. And the various versions of the story do contain elements that point to the Arkel line. As discussed earlier, Haymon/Aymon was not a particularly common name. In one version Haymon and his sons live in Pierlepont, which is remarkably close in sound and spelling to Pierrepont, which Pauw usually spells “Pierpont” (Actually, Aerndt Kemp, another Arkel biographer, does spell it at least once as "Pierlepont," so we can assume that Pierlepont is equivalent to Pierpont or Pierrepont).
In other versions Haymon and his sons live in the Ardennes, which is a region is Belgium and France, and is located about 60 miles from Pierrepont (and, as we will see later, Pauw states that the lord Jan V, a descendant of Heyman II, was “Godschaelcus grave van Ardennen” (Godschalck, count of the Ardennes). Other versions state that Haymon and his sons lived in a place called Dordone or Dordon. The English Wikipeda article calls Dordone a “fictional location in the Ardennes, though the name seems to be related to Dordogne near Montaubon.” However, this claim that Dordone is derived from Dordogne is not referenced and is probably just a guess based on the similarity of the two names; furthermore, Dordogne is located hundreds of miles southwest of the Ardennes. An alternative etymology of the name could be that it derives from the name “Dardanyan,” which in fact Pauw gave not only to Heyman I, but also to his grandson Heyman II, possibly indicating that the surname-like "Dardanyan" survived for some generations in the Arkel line. Pauw variously spelled “Dardanyan” as “Dardanien” and “Dordanen;” the latter version of the name being especially close to the name “Dordone.”
All of Heyman II's four sons would of course have had E-V13 Y-DNA if the Swaims are descended from the Arkels, and any living descendants today would be an extended match with a Genetic Distance of about 18 of 111 STRs. Reynault supposedly had a son named Emmerich, but tracking an ancestor back this far in the past would be nearly impossible, and probably a waste of time given the likelihood that Reynault and Emmerich never actually existed.
An alternative hypothesis to the similarity in names and placenames between the Arkel line and the Four Sons of Haymon tale is that Pauw took the names from the tale to give to the early Arkels as he fabricated its history. This would probably be the generally accepted hypothesis of historians, but in this blog we are assuming the basic truth of Pauw's history for our exploratory purposes.
Jan III
In the year 542 Ritzaert, Heyman's son, had a son named Jan..
Jan, the first lord of Arkel, had churches built in Arkel, Hoornaer, and Hagestein. In the year 618 the Christian king of France, Dagobert, son of the great Lotharius, fought and defeated the Saxons and Westphalians, and he gave a lot of hope to the Christians of Wiltenborch, now called Utrecht. Jan van Arkel was a captain of many Christian folk who were subjects of king Dagobert, and he fought for the king so gloriously and chivalrously that for his services the king gave to Jan a gift of the land north of the river Lek with everything it held...and so Jan first came into Arkel and built a church in the town of Arkel and also in Hoornaer, Hagestein, Woudrichem (now Worcum), and many other churches....
But then the Frisians came and ravaged Utrecht, burning churches. And so Jan left the Land of Arkel and returned to France, living near Pierrepont, where his ancestors had lived.
Dagobert I (603-639) was king of Austrasia, which included both Pierrepont and the Land of Arkel, and later king of all Franks. However, he was not king in 618 AD, but rather his father Clothar II. I can't find any reference to either Dagobert or Clothar fighting the Saxons and Westphalians, but undoubtedly they did. However, it appears the Dagobert I conquered the Frisians sometime between 628 and 638 rather than 618, so the year that Jan III received hte Land of Arkel was probably 628 or 638 rather than 618. Also, Dagobert I was not even a king until 623, when he became the king of Austraisia. Possibly the correct year was 638 AD, since it was in 639 AD that Dagobert I built a chapel in Utrecht on the site of an abandoned Roman fortress (Wikipedia article "Timeline of Utrecht"). Like Jan III's church in Arkel, Dagobert's Utrecht chapel was later destroyed by the Frisians.
Pauw doesn't say how long Jan III lived in the Land of Arkel until he was forced out by the Frisians, but the Wikipeda article "Frisian-Frankish wars" says that "After Dagobert died the Franks could not hold their position there, and around 650 the central river area, including Dorestad, became Frisian again." Thus, it was probably around 650 that Jan III returned to Pierrepont after about 12 years in the Land of Arkel.
Dagobert's primary interest in Utrecht and the Land of Arkel to the south of Utrecht was undoubtedly to take control of trade along the two or three major branches of the Rhine through its delta in the south of the Netherlands. The Wikipedia article on Dagobert says that “took steps to secure trade across his empire by protecting important markets along the mouth of the Rhine at Duurstede and Utrecht....”
Looking at the map of the Netherlands today, Dagobert's strategy in focussing on Duurstede and Utrecht seems a bit confusing, because neither are near the Waal, which is the primary arm of the Rhine in its delta. Shortly after beginning its westward turn into the Netherlands from Germany, the Rhine splits into two main branches: the Waal, which is the main branch and carries by far the grestest volume of water, and the Nederrijn (which is called the Lek further to the west). Duurstede is located on the Lek, but Utrecht is located about 8-10 miles north of the Lek, and neither are near the Waal, the main branch of the Rhine in the delta. So why would Dagobert be more interested in Utrecht and Duurstede than in some place along the Waal?
The answer is that in Roman times and throughout much of the medieval times, the major branch of the Rhine was not the Waal, but what is now called the Oude Rijn, upon which Utrecht was located. Apparently the Lek also existed, but was probably of much lesser importance. Duurstede appears to have been located close to the where the Oude Rijn and the Lek branched off from each other. The Waal apparently had much less volume of both water and traffic than it does today, and was apparently of secondary importance. Eventually the Oude Rijn silted up and lost its economic importance, while the Waal gained in economic importance. According to the Wikipedia article on the Oude Rijn, that branch of the Rhine “had lost all of its importance by the 17th century.”
Therefore, Dagobert's strategy did in fact make sense. In fact, I think Dagobert probably gave the Land of Arkel to Jan III in furtherance of his strategy to control traffic along all the branches of the Rijn. The city of Arkel itself is located within a couple miles of the Waal, and in Jan III's time may have been located directly on the Waal, or as close to it as feasible in the days before effective flood control and containment engineering projects were available (southern Holland is mostly located in the Rhine delta and is prone to constant flooding and water control problems). Thus, Dagobert's plan in giving Jan III the Land of Arkel was probably to create a city on the Waal to control traffic on the river, as well as to populate the rest of the Land of Arkel to provide a buffer to Utrecht from enemies approaching from the south.
Centuries later in the 1200's, the Arkels built Gorinchem, which does lie directly on the banks of the Waal (which at about this point is known as the Merwede). Gorinchem became a large city, fortified with walls and a castle, and tolls from traffic on the Waal gave the Arkels great wealth. It is likely that already by this time the Oude Rijn was declining in economic importance while the Waal was rising in importance. This may also have contributed to the ultimate end of the Arkel line as the Lords of Arkel, who were ousted by the Count of Holland in the 1400's (who were an entirely different family from the Counts of Holland who were allies of the Arkels for many generations). Although histories seem to imply that the primary reason for the Count of Holland's destruction of the Arkel's power had to do with politics and the "Hook and Cod Wars," the deeper reason may be that the Count of Holland wanted to take more direct control of the profits from traffic on the increasingly important Waal; naturally the Arkels would oppose this, and the Arkels lost the resulting war.
Possible Origin of the Name Arkel
The origin of the name Arkel is unknown. Abraham Kemp, in his 1656 book on the Arkels, seems to say that Arkel is derived from the name Herculorum (“Herculorum, nu Arkelle”), but without explaining the origin of the name Herculorum. Kemp also seems to be saying that it isn't known if the name Arkel was first used for the lineage (and thus the Land of Arkel was named for the lineage) or whether it was first used for the geographical location (and thus the lineage was named after the town of Arkel).
In 1915 Edwin Jaquett Sellers wrote: “Jan van Arkel built a church upon the site where the Romans formerly had their camp and built a temple in honor of Hercules, from which it is supposed that this district received the name of Erkel or Arkel, the H being omitted or being aspirate.” (AlliedAncestryoftheVanCulemborgFamily_10310451.pdf )
Neither of these sources cites a plausible source for their information on the origin of the Arkel name, which probably means that the truth of the matter is that it was unknown even in ancient times. However, it is interesting to note that both of these unverified sources claim the name is a corrupted form of the Roman demi-god Hercules, who was taken from the Greek Herakles or Heracles. That the name begins with an “H” is not necessarily problematic, since in French the “H” is essentially silent, and this was probably true also in the ancient Greek (“H” being the letter “Eta”). Also, it would not be surprising if the early members of the Arkel line identified with Hercules, not only because the mythical figure was Greek, which they beleived themselves to be, but also because Hercules was the epitome of the physically powerful male in an age where physical power in warefare mattered a great deal.
My own current hypothesis on the origin of the name Arkel is also that it derives from the name Hercules or Herakles, although in a second-hand manner. My hypothesis is not based on a text, but rather on logic and on an understanding of the political events that transpired in the time frame that the name likely originated.
Greeks in the Roman period did not generally have surnames. Therefore, it is unlikely that the Arkel name was a surname or a quasi-surname that came from Greece or Troy, or wherever else the Arkel line orginially came from in 346 AD. The Germanic tribes likewise didn't use surnames in these early times, so it is also likely that the lineage didn't take its name at a very early time. Rather, I think that the name of the lineage probably derived from the name of the town that it founded in or after 328 AD, after Dagobert I gave the land to Jan III. As the lineage became associated with the name, it essentially took on the name as a kind of family name.
If Pauw's story is true that the Arkels first occupied the Land of Arkel after Dagobert gave it Jan III, then the questions becomes that of how the settlement that Jan III came to be named Arkel. Pauw doesn't provide any details on whether or not there was the ruins of a Roman temple on the site that Jan III chose to build a homestead, but whether or not there was, Jan III probably didn't know what the Roman name for the place would have been. Since the land was uninhabited, there would also not have been any natives to tell him what the name of the location might have been called. So Jan III would have needed to call it something—but what?
This land was a gift from his king, and Jan III probably had big dreams for this place, so he would have wanted to name it something special, perhaps to honor both his king and, because his Christian religion was very important to him, his god. And to honor both his king and his god, there was one name that would have been perfect, and that name was Heraclius, the then-current emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire). To understand why this is so, we have to know a bit about what Heraclius did during his reign up to the year 628 or a bit beyond.
Heraclius was essentially a superstar to the Christians of the west at that time. And not only was he a superstar, he was on friendly terms with Dagobert I, who apparently felt fondly about Herclius and also considered him a superstar. When Heraclius took control of the Eastern Roman Empire, the empire was locked in a long war with the aggressive Sasanian Empire of Iran (Persian Empire). This war had been going on intermittently for 400 years, and had a religious aspect, as the Persians were Zoroastrians, who were undoubtedly considered by the early Christians to be little more than devil worshippers. During the early 600's the Persians invaded and conqured huge swaths of the Byzantine Empire: in 610 the Persians conquered Mesopotamia, in 611 they overran Syria and Anatolia, and in 614, with the help of the Jews, seized Jerusalem, damaged the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and captured the True Cross. A few years later they also conqured Egypt. The loss of Jerusalem and of the True Cross to the pagans was a great shock to all of Christendom (the True Cross was supposedly fragments of the cross on which Jesus was supposedly crucified).
But Heraclius eventually turned the tide of the war with Persia, and in 628 he decisively defeated the the Persians and returned all of the conquered territories back to the Byzantine Empire, including Jerusalem. Heraclius also demanded and recieved the return of the True Cross, which personally returned to Jerusalem in 629 or 630. “For Chrisitans of Western Europe, Heraclius was the “first crusader.”” (Heraclius - Wikipedia )
Thus, Heraclius was not only the emperor of the empire that was then the only true successor of the Roman Empire, he was also a religious hero who epitomized the triumph of Christianity over paganism.
Heraclius's successes ocurred at the same time that Dagobert I had given Jan III the land that was to become the Land of Arkel, and when Jan III was attempting to settle that land. By naming his homestead and future town after Heraclius, Jan III would at once be honoring his king (who was a friend of Heraclius), the emperor of the Roman Empire, his religion (through Heraclius's “crusade”), and his Greek heritage (Heraclius had changed the official language of his empire to Greek from Latin, and his name derived from “Hercules.”).
Although it will never be able to be proved, this hypothesis has two great advantages over the other hypotheses: first, it is based on actual well-known events that occurred at the time that the town was first (supposedly) establish; and second, it was a name that had a strong Chrisitan connection. One reason I was never convinced of the correctness of the story that Arkel was named after Hercules was that Pauw consistently potrays the Arkels as being very devout Christians, which is unlikely to simply be a reflection of Pauw's own religiousity, since at least three of the Arkels were supposed to have been Crusaders, and one supposedly had pilgrammaged to the Holy Land before the First Crusade. Christianity seems to have been infused into everyday life for these early Christians in a way that is for the most part no longer true. There was no strong separation between the secular world and the religious world.
Thus, Jan III may have named his new villa after Heraclius, perhaps calling it Heraclium (which sounds something like Kemp's Herculorum), or Heraclia. This may have pronounced something like “Eraclia,” and then perhaps the second vowel was elided and the word came to be pronounced as “Erclia,” which finally was shortened further to “Erkel,” Arkel,” “Arkelle,” “Arckel,” “Arclo,” “Arcelo,” and other variations more suited to the Franconian ear.
Utrecht
Pauw indicates that Utrecht was called Wiltenborch at the time of Jan III. The original name appears to have been Uiltaborg, variously spelled Wiltenburg, Wiltenburch or Wiltenborch. The place was mentioned in 730 AD by the Anglo Saxon named Beda, who said it was a castle that was named after the city there named Wilten. Another source said that this castle had been built in 200 AD by a prince of the Frisians. The Romans later controlled this area and built the castles Fectio and Traiectum in the vicinity. After the Romans abandoned the area in 270 AD, little was known about it until the 600's when Dagobert fought the Frisians for control of it. The Franks conquered the Frisians in 734 AD and converted them to Christianity. The city was called Utrecht after the Roman name for the place, Trajectum ad Rhenum ("Rhine Crossing), to which "U" was added for the word "uut," meaning "downriver." According to the English article "Utrecht," this was meant to differentiate Utrecht from Maastricht (Roman Trajectum ad Mosam or Mosa Trajectum ["Meuse Crossing"]), but if so, then "uut" should not mean "downriver," since Utrecht is not downriver from Maastricht because the two cities lie on entirely different rivers, as the Roman names indicate. Although today the Afgedamde Maas, an arm of the Maas, does join the Waal at Gorinchem, that connection between the two rivers only occurred hundreds of years after the naming of Utrecht; and, anyway, Utrecht was never on the arm of the Rhine called the "Waal," but rather on a more northerly arm now called the "Oude Rijn."
Map from Dutch cartographer Joan Blaue (1596-1673) showing Utrecht and Wiltenburch, as well as location of the Rhine (Ryn) (from Wikipedi.nl "Wiltenburg (Utrecht)")
Heyman III and Jan IV
In Pierrepont Jan III had by his wife a son named Heyman, and Heyman had a son named Jan, lord of Arkel. Jan, Heyman's son, was a rich, strong lord. He had a strong castle made of wood in Pierrepont, and because Brancio, the lord of Baer, took control of the castle, lord Jan recklessly beat this Brancio to death at the instigation of enemies. And because Brancio was kin to Dirckden the Third, King of France, Jan could not remain in France. Jan thought to move to the uninhabited land of Arkel near Wiltenborch, which he often heard his father talk about. With the advice of his friends, he took his wife and his children and all his household to that land.
And as he came up the Almen, now in the lordship of Altena, he sailed in boats to the land of Arkel. As he and his people and household and goods were all in the boats and sailing with the grace of God because he knew that country, as he was in the water off that country, a beautiful swan, acting unusually, first flying over Jan's boat, then flying in front of it, that first flew over Jan's boat, and then Jan swam in front of the boat following the swan, a sight which filled everyone who saw it with wonder. And the lord of Arkel, considering this, proposed that his people should always honor that swan, which had in such an exceptional manner brought them to that place in Arkel where the Regularisse convent now stands, at the dam on the bank of the river Linge. And there he set up his tents and pavilion and and chose to live there for all time. And from that time, lord of Arkel took for his helmets and coat of arms two white swans, and all his descendants have retained those symbols.
And by his wife Esbeen, Jan had a son named Heyman, and Jan rebuilt the church in Arkel. That was in the year 694, at which time, Pepin, Charles Martel's son and now the king of France, fought against and overcame Rabbodus, the king of Friesland, and confirmed Saint Willebroert as Bishop of Utrecht....
Jan IV had to flee Pierrepont because he'd murdered Brancio, who was kin to "Dircken den Derden" (Theuderic III), the "coninck van Vrankrijck." "Vrankrijck" means France, but at this time the core area of what we know today as france was was actually called Neustria or West Francia (and which at this time inluded Burgundy). Pierrepont was not located in Neustria but rather in Austrasia, also known as East Francia and then Germany. However, as it happened, Theuderic II was also the king of Austrasia as well as Neustria from 679 to his death in 691, meaning that he was king of all the Franks. With Neustria, Austrasia and Burgundy all controlled by Theuderic III, Jan IV probably had no kin to flee to who were outside the reach of Theuderic III. Thus, he decided his best option was to flee to the frontier region of West Frisia (later Holland), an area that he owned but was undesirable to live in due to conflict with the Frisians and because the land was swampy and difficult to farm. Its isolation, however, would serve to protect him from Theuderic's wrath (or justice).
The identity of Brancio is uncertain. Pauw alternatively spells his name “Brancyon” and “Branchion,” and says that he was the “heer van Baer,” or lord of Bar. Abraham Kemp, however, said that he was the brother of the lord of “Baar.” (Kemp Leven_der_doorluchtige_heeren_van_Arkel.pdf). Either way, this may have made Brancio Jan's liege lord.
That's all we really know about Brancio, but it's my speculation that Brancio's name may actually not be a given name but rather more of a surname, just as Jan IV might be called “Arkel” rather than “Jan.” In this case, the name might derive from the Brancion Castle in Martailly-les-Brancion in Burgundy. The lords of Brancion in the 10th and 11th centuries appear to be descedants of Theuderic II (587-613), who was the second son of Childebert II, King of Austrasia and King of Burgundy. Childebert's first son, Theudebert II, received Austrasia (capital at Metz) while Theuderic II received Burgundy (capital at Orleans). The Merovignian successions are confusing, but all of the kings were cousins, being descendants of Clovis I (466-511). Theuderic III, the king of both Neustria (West Francia and Austrasia (East Francia) when Jan IV killed Brancio, was not the son of Theuderic II but rather a cousin (and a grandson of Dagobert I).
But what we see is that at the time Jan IV killed Brancio, the “king of France” was in fact the king of West Francia, East Francia, and Burgundy. Brancion was in Burgundy, so it isn't surprising that the later lords of Brancion were descendants of Theuderic II, the king of Burgundy. It would also not be surprising if a one of the offspring of the lords of Brancion in the 600's was made lord of Bar because although Bar was in Austrasia and Neustria rather than Burgundy, which was so it would not be surprising if a descendant of Theuderic II, the three kingdoms at that time were united under Theuderic III and his son Childebert III. It would thus not be surprising if the lord of Bar in the late 600's was from the Brancion line that had descended from Theuderic II, and this Brancion would be a cousin of Theuderic III, the king of the Franks.
This identify of Pauw's “Brancio” as coming from the line of the lords of Brancion is speculation based only on the name, but it's logical although probably unprovable. Also, it is possible that Pauw is incorrect in calling Brancio a lord of Bar, as that is probably an anachronism since it is likely that Bar was not called that until much later (the Wikipedia article “Duchy of Bar” states that “The County of Bar originated in the frontier fortress of Bar (from latin barra, barrier) that Duke Frederick I of Upper Lorraine built on the bank of the river Ornain around 960.”). However, it is quite possible that Brancion was a lord somewhere in the region of Pierrepont, or even that he was simply a lord from Brancion visiting his cousins in Metz, which was the capital of Austrasia. Pierrepont is located near to Metz, and this lord of Brancion may have considered Jan IV's wooden castle to be a threat to Merovignian power and so had his men destroy it. This, again, however, is mere speculation.
(this section being revised)
," the king of France, Jan decided to relocate his family to the uninhabited land of Arkel. This relocation was an act of desperation, because it entailed leaving the ancient family homestead to pioneer a new life in a mostly uninhabited wilderness that was potentially subject to attacks from Frisians, who had ended his grandfather's attempt to occupy the land. In short, the Land of Arkel at that time was a frontier region of the Franks, and occupying it would entail clearing the land, building houses, farms, and infrastructure, and fending off attacks from hostile natives (Frisians). But because it was a frontier, it would be harder for "Dirckden the Third" to find Jan and bring him to justice.
“Dirckden the Third” was Theuderic (Theodoric) III (654-690/1). Theuderic III had inherited the throne of Neustria in 675 and in 679 had inherited the throne of Austrasia as well, thus becoming king of all the Franks. Even so, Theuderic III was a Neustrian at heart, and was seen by others as primarily being a Neustrian. But although Theuderic was in name the king of all Franks, in fact the real power behind the throne by this time was actually not the Merovingian kings, but the Mayors of the Palace (the line of which became the Carolingians). In 687, Theuderic III fought with Mayor of the Palace Pepin II in the Battle of Tetry for control of Austrasia. Theuderic lost the battle and with it effective control of Austrasia, although he was still king in title. Theuderic died in 690 or 691.
Pauw doesn't give the year in which Jan IV relocated to Arkel. He does give the year 694 as the year his son Heyman was born. However, this year might not be correct, because he also says that the year Heyman was born was also the year that Rabbodus, king of the Frisians, was defeated by Pepin, the father of Charles Martel. Rabbodus, also known as Redbad or Radbod, was defeated by Pepin in the year 689, not 694. Thus, it is possible that Jan IV's son Heyman was born in 689 rather than 694, and that Jan IV relocated to Arkel in 689 or shortly before that. This would make more sense than if Jan IV had relocated in 694, because his reason for fleeing to Arkel was to avoid the wrath (or justice) of Theuderic III for murdering Theuderic's kinsman, and Theuderic III died in 690 or 691. If Theuderic was dead before Jan IV left for Arkel, he might not have left at all, unless he believed that Theuderic's sons, Clovis IV (died 694) and Childebert III (died 711), might also want revenge for Brancio's murder. Jan may have felt he had little to fear from the Pepin line, however, which was now the true power behind the throne.
By relocating to the far northern Austrasian frontier with Frisia, Jan III probably felt that he was as safe from the King of France as he could be within Austrasia. Also, in the version of the story retold by Blöte, Jan IV goes to Arkel "insgeheim," or secretly. Jan may have believed that even if he was seen traveling north on the Meuse, his destination would likely be unknown.
Jan IV does, in fact, escape physical punishment for his crime, but he may have lost Pierrepont because Pauw doesn't mention it again until Otto van Arkel (1330-1396) married Elisabeth de Bar, daughter of Theobald de Bar-Pierrepont. However, it is possible that Pierrepont remained within the family, and that in fact Elisabeth de Bar was a descendant of one of Jan's cousins.
Route of Jan's Journey from Pierrepont to Arkel
Pauw doesn't fully explain how Jan IV and his household got from Pierrepont to Altena, which is a distance of about 230-270 miles depending on the route. Today this distance seems relatively trivial (a half-day's drive on a freeway), but during the early Middle Ages such a journey would have taken a couple weeks at least, and might have been quite dangerous. Pierrepont is located about 35 miles east of the river Meuse, which is Holland is called the Maas. It is likely that Jan IV would have traveled on the Meuse to get to the Land of Arkel, as it was faster and likely safer to travel by river rather than overland. Even if parts of the Meuse were not navigable, it is very likely that much or all of the river valley was used as a road. In his work “Die Arkelsche Schwanrittersage” (1907), J.F.D. Blöte discussed the story of Jan's flight from Gaul to Arkel and wrote: “He [Jan] comes to the Meuse, then to the Alm, in the land of Altena....” This seems to confirm that Jan did travel down the Meuse to Arkel from Pierrepont. However, Pauw says that when they came to Almen (the Alm) “he sailed in boats to the land of Arkel.” This seems to imply that they had not been previously sailing in boats. So although it appears that they probably did travel along the Meuse, it is possible that they did not actually travel on the Meuse by boat. Or it is possible that Pauw or his source simply didn't know how Jan got to Arkel from Pierrepont and assumed it had been on foot or horseback.
Pierrepont is located south and a bit east of Aarlen, about equidistant from the marked Belgian border. Arkel is located a bit north and west of 's-Hertogenbosch, north of the Maas.
The Land of Altena was a historical region and fiefdom of Holland located just south of the Land of Arkel, across the Waal. At the time Jan IV passed through the Land of Altena to the Land of Arkel, the land was probably only lightly populated and probably wasn't called Altena. The map below shows the Land of Altena in 1421 (Alm (Noord-Brabant) - Wikipedia).
(Note also on the map that divisions of the land east of where it says is the “Land v. Arkel.” These are listed as the Heerlijkheids (Lordships) van der Lede, van Asperen, and van Heukelom (the lords of which were usually, or always, Arkels). Note also that Leerdam is listed as Lederdam. Leerdam and Lede were essentially the same place, and I'm guessing that the modern name "Leerdam" evolved from "Lederdam" (a dam was placed on the Linge in the lordship of Lede and the location of the dam was called Lederdam, "the dam of Lede." Over time the first "d" in the name was no longer pronounced and the 3-syllable "Lederdam" became the 2-syllable "Leerdam").
In order to understand the path taken by Jan IV, we have to understand that some of the rivers shown on the map in 1421 took very different courses than they did when Jan IV traveled on them. This is especially true of the Maas and the Alm, the two primary rivers that Jan IV used to get to Arkel. This is due to the low-lying nature of the land in the Rhine-Maas delta, which is subject to occasional massive flooding that can compltely change the course of even large rivers. Oddly enough, the Maas today follows a course much more like the course it took in the late 600's than it took in the year 1421 when this map was drawn.
On this map the Maas is the river colored blue that flows north to connect to the Waal in a southeast to northwest direction. Althogh not shown on the map, the Maas to the east had been flowing in a generally westerly direction from about Cuijk just south of Nijmegen. As shown, at or just before Heusden it took a sharp turn northerwestward. On the map this section of the Maas is labeled “Nieuwe” for “Nieuwe Maas,” although the word “Maas” is cut off frm this map. It was called the New Maas because this was not the course the Maas had taken in the past until sometime before the 1400's a major flood had shifted its course into the one shown on the map. Since this New Maas connected to the Waal, if it had existed in this configuration in Jan IV's day, he would simply have remained on the Maas until it flowed into the Waal at Woudrichem, and then immediately crossed to Waal to its norther bank, which was the Land of Arkel.
But in Jan IV's time, the Maas did not connect to the Waal at this point, and probably not anywhere. Instead, it followed the course shown on the map south of and parallel to the Waal. This course was not shown as blue on the map because it was not the path of the Waal at that time. It is labeled “Afgedamde Maas,” although the full word “Afgedamde” is not shown on this map. Afgedamde means dammed-up, which it was through natural action rather than by a man-made dam. But in Jan IV's day, this was the general course of the Maas, and the waterway between the Maas and Waal did not exist.
Today the Waal again flows in this same general course as it did in Jan IV's day, due to a major feat of hydraulic engineering in which the Dutch cut off the connection between the Maas and the Waal by damming up the “Nieuwe Maas” and diverting it into a new course that generally follows the path of what the map shows as the Afgedamde Maas. This new course is called the Bergse Maas, and the course of the original Maas that parallels it in places, and now only drains the adjacent fields, is called the Oude Maasje. So on the 1421 map the "Afgedamde Maas" is today the "Oude Maasje" and the 1421 "Nieuwe Maas" is the now the "Afgedamde Maas." And although when you glance at a map of the Netherlands the new Afgedamde Maas looks as if it does still connect the Maas to the Waal, on closer inspection you can see that the Maas actually no longer actually flows into it. It is still a watercourse, perhaps used to drain the surrounding fields, but it does not connect to the Maas.
This was a long explanation about the course of the Maas, but it should resolve the inevitable confusion that results from looking at old maps and trying to understand how they relate to today's maps. Essentially, the Waal in Jan IV's day flowed in the same general course as today's Maas, and there was no connection between the Maas and the Waal between Heusden and Woudrichem as there was during the Middle Ages.
Since the Maas didn't connect to the Waal, for Jan IV to get to the Land of Arkel from the Maas, he would have had to leave the Maas and cross the Land of Altena to the north to get to the Waal. Looking at the map, you might think that he could have taken the river Alm (Pauw's Almen) from the town of Almsfoet (which might not have existed then) up through Almkerk and perhaps on to the Waal, if it connected to the Waal. In fact, in Jan IV's time the Alm did connect to the Waal, but it did not connect to the Maas as shown in the map. It connected to the Waal at a point further to the east than is shown on the map, in the region called Bommelerwaard (part of which is shown on the map and labeled “Boeme--”. It then flowed generally southwest to Almkerk, where it split into two branches. One branch went generally north and reconnected with the Waal near Werkendam, while another branch continued west to a place called the “Roman-medieval Maas,” which I assume is another connection to the Maas.
We don't known which branch of the Alm Jan IV took, and this might have depended on how much he knew about the geography of the region from his grandfather or locals he met in what later became the Land of Altena. He could have taken the Alm east into the Bommelerwaard, which would have brought him to a point on the Waal upstream from where Gorinchem was later location, so that he could drift in the current from that point to his destination. However, this would have put him on the Alm for many miles longer than if he took the northerly route, and also he would have had to sail against the flow of the current for all those miles.
The northerly route on the Alm would have been more direct and would also have been with the current all the way to Werkendam on the Waal. This would have taken him to a point on the Waal about 8-10 miles downstream of what was later Gorinchem, so either route would have had its advantages and disadvantages. He could also have taken the westerly branch of the Alm, but that would have taken him either further downsteam on the Waal, so would have probably been a mistake.
Pauw says that he wen “opten Almen,” meaning “up the Alm,” which could mean that he'd taken the northerly branch of the Alm, but technically should mean that he'd taken the easterly branch since that's the only branch of the Alm went upstream. However, we already know that when Pauw said that Jan I went “up” the Rhine, he actually meant going down the Rhine, although that was going “up” (north) from a directional perspective in the standard map orientation.
(For those interested, the following is a translation made mostly with Google Translate of part of the Netherlands Wikipedia article “Alm (Noord-Brabant) that describes the ancient course of the Alm (Alm (Noord-Brabant) – Wikipedia):
“In Roman time, the Alm was fed by the Waal. Remains of habitation from Roman times have been found in the wide banks of the Almstroomrug. During the Middle Ages, the Alm came into contact with the Maas, of which it eventually became an important side branch. In the 9th century, a settlement arose north of the Alm the would grow into Woudrichem...Originally, the route of the Alm also ran through the current Bommelerwaard, but due to silting it ended before 1200. The villages of Bruchem, Kerkwijk, and Delwijnen arose on the ridge the Alm in the Bommelerwaard; Aalst is located along the former Alm loop. Around the year 1200, the Maas broke out of the old bed of the Alm near Giessen and from then on sought a way to the Waal in a northerly direction. Subsequently, the Alm was dammed at Giessen in 1275, as part of the dikes of the Grote Waard...In the Land of Heusden and Altena, the Alm ran past Veen, Andel, and Giessen to Uitwijk, Waardhuizen, and Almkerk, mentioned as Almekercke in 1277. Here the Alm split into a northern and a western branch. The northern branch (called De Werken) flowed toward the Merwede, where it [met the Merwede/Waal at Werkendam]...the western branch flowed through to Nieuwendijk and from here towards the Almonde, where the alm flowed into the Roman-Medieval Maas. The stretch to the west of the Nieuwendijk has completely disappeared since the St. Elisabeth flood....”)
Coat of Arms & the Swan
As discussed previously, the Arkels likely didn't have a coat of arms for another 500+ years. However, Jan IV may have used a swan as a symbol on other things, such as flags and so on.
The swan (spelled by Pauw both “Swaen” and “Zwaen”) appeared to Jan IV when they were near the land of Arkel. It guided them to a point which became the town of Arkel. Arkel is located on the Linge about 4 miles from the point that it empties into the Waal. However, the configuration of the water and land could have been drastically different in the late 600's than it is today, and also Pauw's description of their location is too vague to reconstruct an exact location of where the swan appeared to Jan IV and his group.
Heyman IV
And because Jan was no longer alive, about that time many robbers and thieves often came out of the forest now called the Dieffdijck, shouting and playing the lute and shouting the name of their god. And as Jan and his wife were dead, Heyman, lord of Arkel, went to France and served the great emperor Karel, Pepin's son. And so Heyman rose up in the ranks and went piously to fight the Saxons. Heyman died fighting the heathen Saxons in the year 783, with many Christian bodies floating in the Elbe River; nevertheless, the Christians won the battle.
The "Dieffdijck" was probably located at the eastern edge of today's Leerdam, as the eastern border of Leerdam is bounded by a road by that name. Dief is Dutch for thief, so possibly the area was given its name from this far back in time. Emperor Karel was Charles Martel, the Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia and the true ruler, although there three or four Merovingian kings during Charles Martel's tenure.
Pauw tells us that Heyman IV left the Land of Arkel because his mother and father were dead, but also implies that he left it also because “robbers and thieves” were mocking Christianity by shouting the name of their god and “vinge de luyde” (fingering the “luyde”). I had a lot of trouble trying to determine the meaning of this passage, particularly as the word “luyde” has in various spelling can mean “loud,” “atone,” and “lute.” “Atone” makes little sense, but I thought at first that “loud” was the correct transaltion, since the “robbers and thieves” were shouting. I thought that “vinge” might mean that they were gesticulating, perhaps obscenely (giving Heyman “the finger”--the digitus impudicus). That made sense but didn't seem correct grammatically, now I think that the correct translation for “luyde” is “lute,” which is a stringed instrument similar to a guitar. Thus, “vinge de luyde” means “fingering the lute,” or “strumming the lute.” But this didn't make a lot of sense in the context of the sentence, which is explaining why the activity of the “robbers and thieves” was offensive to Heyman. Finally I have come to believe that Pauw was using the phrase “vinge de luyde” as a euphemism for fondling their genitals, the shape of the lute genereally resembling the male genitalia, and this explanation did make sense in the context of what Pauw was describing. The “robbers and thieves” were most likely non-Chrisitan Frisians who were harassing the Frankish Arkels, possibly trying to drive them out of what they perceived as their land. This actually makes sense in terms of what was happening historically as the time. Although Radbod, the king of the Frisians, had in 689 been defeated by Pepin of Herstal of the Franks and driven out of Utrecht and the surrounding regions of West Frisia, when Pepin died in 714 Radbod sacked Utrecht, killed some monks, causing others to flee, and returning West Frisia to Frisian control.
Pauw says that Heyman was born in 694, which would have made him about twenty years onld in 714. This would have been about the correct age for him to have left home and joined the army of Charles Martel, who was the son of Pepin of Herstal. So these dates are compatible with what we know of the history of this part of Holland. The “robbers and thieves” were very possibly Frisians who were emboldened by the victory of the Frisians over the Franks at Utrecht, so that they harassed and insulted the Arkels.
Pauw says that Heyman left the Land of Arkel because his parents were dead, and he also implies that it was also because of the behavior of the “robbers and thieves.” But the larger issue is whether all of the Arkels felt threatened enough by the Frisians to have left the Land of Arkel. As we will see, the Arkel line that Pauw follows for the next several generations apparently did not live in the Land of Arkel, but rather probably Lorraine (probably Pierrepont). But this doesn't mean that all of the other Arkels living in the Land of Arkel necessarily also left. The Frisians harassed the Arkels, but the Arkels had always been mounted knights, probably wearing heavy armor, and it is very unlikey that when Jan IV had relocated from Pierrepont that he had not been armored and mounted. He would also have taught his sons to fight, as that was he family trade. Thus, it is likely that the Arkels would not have been overly intimidated by the Frisians unless they were overwhelmingly outnumbered by them. Furthermore, Jan IV had previously built a strong castle made of wood in Pierrepont, and it is likely he would have builta similar defensive structure in Arkel. It is possible that the Arkels felt secure in the Land of Arkel, and perhaps by this time were on good terms with the Frisians. Heyman IV may have left Arkel specifically to join Charles Martel's army to defeat the Frisians who were menacing their land.
In fact, Charles Martel did take back West Frisia in 719, after the death of Radbod. Thus, if all the Arkels had left the Land of Arkel in 714 because of the Frisians, they were free to return there five years later. Whether or not the Arkels were living in the Land of Arkel between about 714 and 973 when Heyman VI came to the Land of Arkel as a lord in fief of the Count of Holland is a question I'll address later.
Problem
with Dates
However,
there is a major problem with this part of Pauw's chronology, and it
is possible that by “the great emperor Karel, Pippin's son” (“den
grooten keyser Karel, Pypynis zoon”), Pauw mean Emperor Charlemagne
(748-814) rather than Charles Martel (680-741). The confusion is
compounded by the fact that both Charles Martel and Charlemagne
(Charles I) had fathers named Pippin (also spelled Pepin). However,
it is almost certain that Pauw meant Charlemagne rather than Charles
Martel, for two reasons. Frist, since Charles Martel was never the
emperor, but rather “Duke and Prince of the Franks and Mayor of the
Palace.” (Carolingian
dynasty - Wikipedia ). Charles Martel was the power in the
empire, but he was never emperor in name. Second, Pauw
says the Heyman IV died in 783 fighting Saxons for emperor Karel,
which would be correct for Charlemagne, as Charlemagne's “Saxon
Wars” did occur from 772 to 804.
But this leaves us with a problem, because the Heyman who fought for Charlemagne cannot be the same Heyman who was the son of Jan IV, as Pauw claims. This is because Heyman IV, the son of Jan IV, was born in Arkel in 694, which means that in 783 when he was fighting Saxons for Charlemagne he would have been 89 years old. Although this is not impossible, it is so improbable that it cannot be seriously considered. Instead, it is likely that Pauw conflated Heyman IV, born in 694, with a son, or more likely a grandson, of he same name. It is likely that this grandson, rather than Heyman IV himself, left the Land of Arkel to fight in Charlemagne's army and died in 783 fighting the Saxons. This granson Heyman was probably born sometime around 758 (with a 32-year paternal generation), and would have been around 25 years of age in 783, a much more reasonable age for a knight to have been fighting Saxons on horseback with swords and lances.
If this is true, then what are we to make of the issue of Heyman, whether Heyman IV or his grandson, leaving the Land of Arkel because of the deaths of Jan IV and his wife, and because of the “robbers and thieves” from the Dieffdijck? The most likely explanation is that Heyman IV did in fact leave the Land of Arkel, probably around the year 715, and that the Arkel line did not return to the Land of Arkel for several generations, probably in the meantime living in Pierrepont in Lorraine.
Jan V
After lord Heyman van Arkel had been tortured and killed by those heathens, Jan was lord of Arkel very young, and grew up to be a powerful knight. And the emperor Charlemagne ordained him the castellan of the castle and of the city of Meynde and gave him authority over many people. And because the Westfalinge [Westphalians] fell from the Christian faith and killed Christians and burned god's churches, the emperor Karel [Charlemagne] came in the year 798 with many soldiers and fought them again and commanded that all the houses and goods be destroyed and burned because the Westphalians had left the Christian faith.
Jan van Arkel went with his lord, named Godschaelcus [Gottschalk], Count of the Ardennes, and they wreaked great revenge on the heathens becausee they were fallen christians. Jan van Arkel then served the kind Emperor Ludovicus, the son of Charlemagne, and after Ludovicus the Emperor Lothair, and after him another Ludovicus, Emperor Lothair's son, who was the emperor in 856, when Jan died. Jan left a son named Heyman. Jan, lord of Arkel, is buried in Ingelheim on the Rhine, with his wife, in Saint Arnulf's church.
The Westphalians were the westernmost branch of the Saxons, so Jan V, like his father, fought in Charlemagne's long-running and bloody Saxon Wars. The Westphalians had been subdued by Charlemagne in 775 and nominally Christianized, but rose up against the Franks in 792 in opposition to being forcibly recruited to fight in Charlemagne's war against the Avars, who were based in Pannonia. Charlemagne did eventually conquer both the Saxons and the Avars, and much of Pannonia was effectively ruled by the Franks as a “client state” until the Huns swept into Pannonia in 901.
Since Jan V fought the Westphalians in 798, he would have taken part in the Battle of Bornhöved, in which 2,800-4,000 Saxons were killed. This battle was actually fought against the northernmost of the Saxons, the Nordalbingians. After this defeat, 10,000 Saxon families were forcibly relocated throughout the Frankish Empire to destroy their culture and thus break their power.
Pauw states that Gottschalk, Count of the Ardennes, was Jan V's lord. Count Gottschalk seems lost to history, although he may be the immediate predecessor to (perhaps the father of) Wigerich II, which the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy website lists as the first known Comte d'Ardenne, who was the count at least as early as 853 (and possibly earlier). The Ardennes is a forested, hilly region in Belgium, Luxemburg and France, located just to the west of Pierrepont. The map below, from the Wikipedia entry "Ardennes," shows Ardennes region in relation to Pierrepont (and to a few other places mentioned in this blog entry). Pierrepont is located just outside the southeastern edge of this region, and in the 800's may well have been considered within the county. Thus, Jan V probably was in fact living in Pierrepont if the count of the Ardennes was his lord.
Pauw says that Charlemagne had made Jan V the "castelijn" (castellan ~ governor) of the castle and city of Meynde. Meynde is Mainz, Germany. Pauw used the word "slote," which means “castle" rather than "palace," but Pauw may have meant that Jan V was the governor of the Imperial Palace at Ingelheim because the cognate German word "schloss" can mean "palace" as well as "castel," and Pauw's 15th-century Dutch is much closer to German than is modern Dutch. The Imperial Palace in Ingelheim is located about 10 miles west of Mainz and was commissioned by Charlemagne in 797. It was used extensively by Louis the Pious. The website run by the Kaiserpfalz Research Center (Kaiser)pfalz Ingelheim | Historical overview (kaiserpfalz-ingelheim.de) says that "During the reign of Louis the Pious there is an original document which names Agano as the "exactor palatii Ingilenhaim", the person responsible for administering the Pfalz [palace]." There isn't much information about this Agano, but his position of "exactor" is probably the Latin equivalent of "castelijn" or "governor." Jan V may have acted as governor before or after Agano, or may have been governor of some other castle in Mainz rather than the Imperial Palace.
In either case, the position of castellan was a position of authority and responsibility for the welfare of the castellany (castle and its curtilage), including the people associated with the castle. This position would only be given to a trusted ally and indicates that Jan V was almost certainly known personally by the emperors whom he served.
After fighting in the Saxon Wars, Jan V served under three successive Frankish emperors:
Louis the Pious (Ludovicus), who reigned from Charlemagne's death in 814 to 840, when he died at Ingelheim-on-the-Rhine and was buried in the Abbey of Saint Arnould (Arnulf) in Metz;
Lothair I, who reigned from 817-855 (co-ruled with Louis the Pious from 817-840);
Possibly Louis II, since Pauw calls Ludovicus, but since Louis II ruled Italy, it was more likely that Jan V served under Lothair II, who ruled from Aachen.
Jan V died in 856 and "leyt begraven tot Ingelheym op den Rhijn met sijnre vrauwe in sinte Arnulphus kerk etc," the most likely translation of which is that he was buried with his wife in the church of Saint Arnulphus, located at Ingelheim-on-the-Rhine. There is some uncertainty because, as I mentioned above, Louis the Pious was buried at the Abbey of Saint Arnould in Metz, and "Arnould" is simply another form of "Arnulf," of which "Arnulphus" is the latinized form. The Abbey of Saint Arnould in Metz was used by Charlemagne as his family burial place, with several of his family buried there. However, Pauw seems to be saying that there was a Saint Arnulphus church in Ingelheim, which probably means on the grounds of the Imperial Palace. This was probably meant to be an honor, but could alternatively have just meant that nobody wanted to pay the expense to have the bodies relocated elsewhere for burial.
Heyman V and Jan Manderscheid
This lord Jan, lord of Arkel, had a son before he died [named Heyman]. He brought his son to the emperor's court, who fended off the Duke of Lotharingia's [champion?] and was a stout knight. Not much is written about him except that he lived to a very old age, and with his wife had a daughter in France named Helena, and two sons in France, the oldest son named Foppo and the youngest named Jan. This Jan lays buried near Trier in Manderscheyt and died in 915 AD.
I didn't give this Jan a number because he isn't in the line of succession to the Lords of Arkel. He's the younger brother of Foppo I, who is in the line of succession. Therefore, just for this post, I've named him Jan Manderscheid, after his place of death ("Manderscheyt").
In this section Pauw clearly states that these Arkels were living in France, although he doesn't mention Pierrepont. Heyman V had a daughter named Helena, which is a Greek name rather than Frankish and was probably not common at that time in either France or Germany. This is another indication that the Arkel line was originally Greek and was still aware of that fact. Heyman V also had two sons: Foppo, who continues the Arkel line, and Jan, about whom we know only that he was buried in "Manderscheyt."
There isn't enough information to determine the identity of the emperor of the "emperor's court." It could have been Charles the Bald, who was emperor from 875-877 or Charles the Fat, who was emperor from 881-887.
Manderscheyt, now spelled "Manderscheid," is located about 40 miles northeast of Trier, 95 miles northeast of Pierrepont, and 100 miles west of Mainz, where Heyman's father had lived for some unknown length of time. Perhaps more importantly, Manderscheid is also located about 100 miles from Aachen, which was the center of power of the Carolingian Empire. Today Manderscheid is a town of 1,400 people, and in 915 probably had many fewer. It must have some strategic importance, however, because two castles were built there by the 1200's, the ruins of which remain there today. One of these is called the “Lower Castle” and was built in the 1200's. The other is the “Upper Castle,” which is older, although not much is known about its exact age or who built it. A website (https://www.castles.nl/manderscheid-upper-castle) says this about the older castle: “When exactly Manderscheid Upper Castle was built is unknown. The village of Manderscheid was first mentioned in 973. It is assumed the Upper Castle already existed then.” My guess is that the castle was probably built in response to the Hungarian invasions of western Europe that had begun in the early 900's. It may have been part of a defensive network to protect Aachen and other cities from invasions from the southeast. It was possibly ordered built by Louis the Child, who was King of Lorraine from 900-911, or by Charles the Simple, who was King of Lorraine from 911-919/923.
Pauw doesn't say why Jan VI was buried in Manderscheid. He was probably in Manderscheid because of the castle, perhaps overseeing its construction. The Arkels were warriors by profession, so it seems unlikely that Jan VI would have been engaged in the actual work of constructing the castle; more likely, he would have been garrisoned there to protect the castle, either during or after its construction. His remains are very possibly in a graveyard near the “Upper Castle” and if they could be located and some identifying marker was left to indicate which body is his, his Y-DNA haplotype could possibly be determined.
Foppo I
After Lord Heyman died, Foppo served under the Emperor Ludovicus, son of the Emperor Arnulphus, and Ludovicus was first Duke of Bavaria. After which emperor Louis Coeuraerd, duke of Saxony, by consent of some princes was named the Emperor of Rome. At that time Foppo, lord of Arkel, served under Ghijsbrecht, duke of Lotharingia, and Foppo died in a battle with many lords in Lotharingia, between Heinrich, King of Rome, and Emperor Lodewijck. They were buried in Saint Nazarius and Naborius church in Lorraine.
Foppo was Jan V's other son. The given name Foppo, which is also sometimes spelled Foppe, Foppa or Fop, is a recurring name in the Arkel line. One website claims that the name Foppe is Dutch, Frisian, and North German and it is “from a pet form of the Germanic personal name Volkbrecht, Volkbrand, or a similar name, composed with folk 'people', 'warriors' as the first element.” It is used once for a Frisian in the supposedly ancient Oera Linda Book, but most historians consider the book to be a 19th century fiction. Foppa is a common Swedish nickname for people with the surname Forsberg, but surnames weren't commonly used in Sweden until the last couple centuries, and anyway there's no hint that the Arkel line had any interactions with Scandinavians.
It is impossible to determine how common this name was in the past, but at least today it isn't very common. The Meertens Institute's “Dutch First Names Bank” says that as of 2014, there were only 8 Dutch with the first name of Foppo, and 14 with Foppo as a “Follow Name” (by which I assume they mean a middle name). The name as spelled Foppe is more common, with a total of 682 individuals having it as a first name and 418 having it as a “follow name.” This is still quite an uncommon name in a nation with a population of nearly 17 million. This is possibly explained by the fact that in both German and Dutch the verb foppen means “to fool,” “to hoax,” “to mystify,” “to spoof.” I don't know whether the name actually had such a connotation in the past.
Or Perhaps "Foppo" was used by chroniclers as a name for someone they didn't know the actual name of, similar to the American "John Doe."
Ludovicus was Louis the Child (Ludwig IV) (893-911), who was King of East Francia and King of Bavaria from the age of 6 until his death at the age of 17 or 18. During his brief reign the country was actually run by nobles and bishops, since he was too young to rule.
There does not seem to have been a Duke of Saxony named "Louis Coeuraerd" (or Louis anything), nor a Holy Roman Emperor of a similar name. I was also unable to identify an "Emperor Lodewijck."
However, "Ghijsbrecht, duke of Lotharingia" was Gilbert, Duke of Lorraine, the 3x great-grandson of Charlemagne (and the brother-in-law of Otto I, who will be mentioned below). At this time (as usual) many of the descendants of Charlemagne, and others, were contending for the thrones of the various kingdoms. Heinrich, “King of Rome,” was Henry the Fowler, who was Duke of Saxony and King of East Francia, and who is considered to be the founder of Germany, the core of which was East Francia. However, although Pauw called him an emperor, he was never considered to be a Holy Roman Emperor: his son Otto I is generally considered the first true Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Emperor was an elective post, chosen by princes who were also electors, which explains Pauw's reference to princes electing "Louis Coueraerd"—although I'm not certain who this Louis was).
In 925 Duke Gilbert of Lotharingia rebelled against Henry the Fowler, who had invaded and taken over part of Lotharingia. Henry besieged Gilbert at the town of Zülpich, captured the town, and claimed ownership of much of Duke Gilbert's lands. However, Henry allowed Gilbert to remain as Duke, and a few years later married one of his daughters to Gilbert. Since this is the only battle between Duke Gilbert and Henry the Fowler, Foppo must have died during the siege of Zülpich in 925 (although it is also possible that Foppo died in 939 in the Battle of Andernach, in which Gilbert fought Otto I again and lost, although Henry was dead by thiat time). Zülpich is located about 40 miles from Aachen and 120 miles from Pierrepont; Andernach is located about 40 miles southeast of Zülpich, on the Rhine just above Koblenz).
Saint Nazarius and Naborius Church
The identity of Pauw's "Saint Nazarius and Naborius Church" is uncertain. I will mention three possibilities below.
Lorsch Abbey, mentnioned earlier, is one possibility. Lorsch Abbey is located about 10 miles east of Worms (and about 170 miles east of Pierrepont, utilizing the old Roman road from Saarbrucken to Worms). The Wikipedia article “Lorsch Abbey” says that this abbey, also known as the Imperial Abbey of Lorsch, was “one of the most renowned monasteries of the Carolingian Empire. In 764 the first abbot of the monastery was Chrondegang, the Archbishop of Metz. “To make the abbey popular as a shrine and a place of pilgrimage, Chrondegang obtained from Pope Paul I the body of Saint Nazarius, martyred at Rome with three companions under Diocletian.” In 772 ownership of the Abbey passed to Charlemagne, and the abbey was consecrated by the Archbishop of Mainz in 774, in the presence of Charlemagne.
Lorsch became a hugely popular destination and numerous miracles were reported to have occurred there due to the intercession of Saint Nazarius. In the 9th century its library made it one of the cultural centers of Germany. “In 876...the abbey became the burial ground for the “German” king,” Louis the German. His son and grandson were also buried there. “The burial chapel...later continued to serve as a Royal burial ground, e.g., for Kunigunde (died after 915), wife of the first non-Carolingian king, Konrad I....Popes and emperors repeatedly favoured the the abbey with privileges and estates...so that in a short time it became not only immensely rich, but also a seat of political influence. It was declared a reichsabtei (a sovereign principality in its own right, subject directly and solely to the emperor). Emperor Otto I was involved in the affairs of the abbey, and “by 1090, Lorsch had been visited by kings/emperors around 20 times. In 1052, Pope Leo IX came to consecrate an altar in the burial chapel of the eastern Carolingians.”
I spent this much time describing Lorsch because, as we will see, a future Arkel (Foppo) was buried in “Saint Nazarius and Naborius church in Lorraine,” according to Pauw. This was probably in 925 AD. I'm not certain of the location of the church that Pauw mentions, but Lorsch would certainly be the most celebrated church dedicated to Saint Nazarius. However, it is unlikely that Foppo was illustrious enough to have been buried in Lorsch, although it is possible. Although Lorsch is not located in Lorraine, Lorsch is also variously called Laurisham, Loresham, Lauresheim, and other similar names. These names are similar enough to “Lorraine” that Pauw may have istaken the two, but on the whole I think that is unlikely.
A more likely candidate is the Monastery “Abbatia Sancti Naboris” in Saint Avold, which is located about 25 miles east of Metz, or about 60 miles southeast of Pierrepont. This abbey was founded in 772 by Sigisbaud, Bishop of Metz, and took the name Naboris when it received the relics of Saint Naborius from, once again, Chrodegang, the Bishop of Metz. Although this monastery/church doesn't seem to be dedicated to Saint Nazarius, it is possible that it was unofficially seen as being related to Nazarius also, through Bishop Chrodegang's connection with Nazarius in Lorsch.
Niedermunster Abbey in Saint-Nabor in Alsace, a few miles southwest of Strasbourg, is also dedicated to Saint Naborius and had its origins as a monastery in the early 700's. Since a couple later generations of Arkels (11th-12th centuries) seem to have some connecton to Strasbourg, it is possible that this was the church that Pauw meant.
Heyman VI
Heyman, Lord Foppen's (Foppo) son, was fair, strong, and magnanimous...Otto the great...had a great war against the forest tyrant Botizlauts, King of Beemen..who had martyred his brother to become king...Heyman, Lord of Arkel, fought chivalrously against the heathen, and Emperor Otto really loved him and gave him many beautiful gifts...In the year 973 Emperor Otto sent Heyman with fine people to Lower Saxony, which is now called East Frisia, to the Stateholder there [Tielman], who was a noble and powerful lord under Otto's rule. Heyman was there for awhile, and Gilla, Tielman's daughter, fell in love with Heyman and came to him with many precious jewels and a large goat to take him as her husband...Heyman didn't dare to stay in Lower Saxony, and so he sailed with Gilla to the Count of Holland, named Dirk, and broke bread with him, and all his housekeepers gladly stood firmly with Heyman and Gilla, and they were kept honestly in his court. Heyman was married to Lady Gilla and stayed with the count for about a year. And Heyman soon had twins by Gilla one called Foppo and one called Heyman. At last it was made known to him how Dagobert, King of France, had given to Heyman's forefathers that country not far from there, and that one of those forefathers was buried there beside his wife, and that land was called the Land of Arkel.
Then Heyman went and investigated, looking through his papers. He found the principal paper and brought it to the Count of Holland and showed him the letter. And the high prince Dirk, Count of Holland, confirmed to Heyman the ownership of the Land of Arkel, free from tolls, etc., but more land than that he was not allowed to have, not the land that King Dagobert had given and sealed to his ancestors, because those ancestors had not taken possession of the land, and Charles Martel and his father King Pepin had afterwards given that land to the Bishops of Utrecht, such as Saint Willebroerde, Bonifacius, and Saint Gregorius, and the other bishops.
Heyman gave praise to the noble Count of Holland, his lords, and the Countess, who loved Heyman very much, for her ancestors had also come from Troy. And Heyman sailed with all his knights and household staff to Arkel and made a knightly house of wood and other materials because it had no stone and no means to mortar the stones together. He built Arkel's church and he was received as the lord of Arkel by all the people....
When Heyman died his son Foppo decided he would be buried in Arkel in the front of the [church] choir with his wife Gilla.
Otto was Otto I, the son of Henry the Fowler, Duke of Saxony and King of East Francia (Germany) from 936 to his death in 973, King of Italy from 961, and Holy Roman Emperor from 962. Pauw is vague about Heyman's service under Otto I, but assuming that Heyman took part in Otto's war with “Botizlauts,” Heyman would have been with Otto I since at least 950, and possibly as early as 935. “Botizlauts” was Boleslaus I “the Cruel,” also known as Boleslav I, the Duke of Bohemia. The core of Bohemia is today the Czech Republic. Boleslaus became Duke in 935 by murdering his brother Wenceslaus. Wenceslaus thereupon was considered a martyr and came to be seen as the patron saint of the Czechs (“Good King Wenceslaus”). Wenceslaus had established a peace treaty with Henry the Fowler that included yearly tribute to East Francia. Upon assuming the throne, Boleslaus stopped payment of this tribute and also attacked and defeated two of Otto's armies. This started a war consisting mostly of border raids, until 950 when Otto besieged a castle owned by Boleslaus' son, and Boleslaus signed a peace treaty and resumed paying tribute to the East Franks.
In 955 the armies of East Francia, along with Czechs and other forces, cooperated to defeat the Hungarians in the Battle of Lechfield. The Hungarians had been raiding in western Europe since the early 800's, and this battle finally put an end to those invasions. That same year, both armies crushed an uprising of Slavic tribes. Neither the Hungarians nor Slavs were Christians, so these battles are undoubtedly what Pauw meant when he said that Heyman VI fought against the heathens.
Pauw says that Otto I sent Heyman to Lower Saxony/East Frisia in 973. In 972 Otto I returned to Germany after a years of campaigning in the east and after marrying his son to Theophanu, the niece of the Bysantine Emperor John I Tzimiskes. In Spring of 973 Otto I held a Reichstag (Imperial Convention) in Quedlinburg, located in the Harz district in Saxony. A castle had been built in Quedlinburg by Otto I's father Henry the Fowler and served as an imperial pfalz (secondary seat of power) by the Saxon emperors. Nobles from as far away as Poland, Bohemia, Bulgaria and Byzantium were at this Reichstag, at which Theophanu was introduced to German society.
It's likely that Heyman had been with Otto I to this Reichstag and that from there Otto I had sent Heyman to visit Tielman as his agent, perhaps to reassert Otto's authority over East Frisia after a long absence. Otto I died shortly after the Reichstag, possibly while Heyman was in East Frisia, and Otto's death may have precipitated Heyman's rash kidnapping of Gilla (it was kidnapping because it was done without Tielman's approval, regardless of Gilla's own wishes).
Some genealogies claim that Heyman was born in Hungary and was supposedly called “Heijman van Hongarije.” However, Pauw mentions nothing at all about Hungary in reference to Heyman VI. The Wikipedia article on Otto I states that after the Frankish army under Otto defeated the Hungarians, he was “not able to chase the fleeing [Hungarian] army into Hungarian lands.” Thus, it is likely that Heyman had never actually been to Hungary. However, he did likely fight the Hungarians, and he may have known and told people that his paternal ancestors had come from Hungary (after leaving "Troy"), and these two connections may have given rise to his surname “van Hungarije” (assuming that he was ever called that).
This issue of being born in Hungary is important for our purposes, because if Heyman VI had been born in Hungary, we would have to question his parentage and whether he was paternally an Arkel at all. If there is truly evidence that he was born in Hungary, then we would need to know how his parents came to be there, and who they were. Since 900 or 901 Hungary had been controlled by the Huns, who were hostile to the western European countries and who for decades raided and pillaged in those countries. Alliances were sometimes made between the Hungarians and these western European countries and it is conceivable that an Arkel was in Hungary on a diplomatic mission and that while there Heyman VI was born, but this seems unlikely. It is much more likely that Heyman VI was born somewhere in the Frankish empire and that his only connections to Hungary, if any, was that he fought Hungarians for Otto I and that his ancestors had once briefly lived in Pannonia.
However, Heyman VI's supposed connection to Hungary come from sources other than Pauw, who does not mention Hungary in connection with Heyman VI. And since in this post I am using Pauw as the primary source for the history of the Arkel line, I will ignore the possibility that Heyman VI had any connection with Hungary.
Furthermore, I will throw in a spoiler here from the next section, which is that the Y-DNA extended match data for the Swaim line does not support the proposition that the Swaim line came from Hungary from a late date such as 900 AD. There are distant matches from Hungary, but the match from Hungary with the most recent estimated MRCA dates to 375 BC, which is 1,275 years prior to 900 AD. It is possible that more recent matches will eventually be confirmed, but as of now it seems unlikely that the Swaim line lived in Hungary/Pannonia duirng the last few thousand years, if ever. Of course, this still leaves open the possibility the the Arkel line did come from Hungary in 900 AD, and that the Swaim line did not descend from the Arkel line.
Aside from the issue of his origin, there are 18 years of Heyman VI's life unaccounted for, between the 955 fight with the Hungarians and Slavs and his 973 visit to East Frisia where he found his wife Gilla. If he was in the service of Otto I this entire time, he may have taken part in Otto's military campaigns in Italy in 961, 964, and 966. Otto remained in Italy for some years, and returned to Saxony in 973, where he died in early May. Heyman VI likely accompanied Otto I on this ;ast trip, since this is the year that Heyman VI went to Lower Saxony to visit Tielman.
Elopement of Heyman VI and Gilla
According to Pauw, Heyman VI's elopement with Gilla was her decision. However, in that place and time the decision of who she was to marry was not hers to make, but was that of her father. Thus, the elopement was wrongful and was probably considered to be kidnapping or theft, and Tielman likely had to right to pursue and perhaps kill Heyman VI for taking his daughter. When Pauw says that Dirk's household stood firmly behind Heyman and Gilla, he is probably saying that the household was willing to risk attack by Tielman, who had the legal right to punish Heyman VI for stealing his daughter.
Dirk would have been Dirk II, Count of Holland (920? - 988). Dirk II was married to Hildegarde of Flanders, who is thought to be a daughter of Count Arnulf of Flanders. Hildegarde claimed, like Heyman VI, to be of Trojan blood. As previously discussed, this most likely meant that she'd had an ancestor who was a Roman soldier from the Balkans in general, or from Greece in particular.
Grant of Land of Arkel to Heyman VI in Fief
Pauw is saying that when Heyman VI went to Count Dirk for refuge with Tielman's stolen daughter, that at that time Heyman VI had no idea that that an ancestor had been given land by King Dagobert in the very land now owned by Count Dirk. And he'd had no idea of that land grant even though he was carrying with him what must have been essentially the deed to that land! This isn't really believable. It's much more likely that Heyman VI had gone to Count Dirk intending to assert his ownership to the Land of Arkel, and possibly using his status as a knight with connections to Emperor Otto as leverage to back his legal assertions. Heyman VI may also have been accompanied by other knights, whose presence would have been additional leverage for Heyman VI. Otto's argument is essentially one of adverse possession and the doctrine of laches: Yes, the paper Heyman VI had was a grant of the land from King Dagobert, but the Arkel line had not taken possession of that land 400+ years since Dagobert's grant, and in the meantime two other kings had given possession of some of that land to the Bishops of Utrecht (including 3 who were saints, and you surely aren't saying your claim is stronger than the claim of 3 holy saints?). To avoid conflict, Count Dirk and Heyman VI agree that Heyman VI can have possession of the Land of Arkel, but in fief rather than as the actual owner, meaning that Heyman VI gets the right to use the land and take its profits, and that the right is inheritable, but that in return Heyman VI owes the duty of loyalty to Count Dirk, and is obligated to serve him in war when called upon to do so. This was the essence of the feudal system, and such arrangements were the norm. It benefitted Heymann VI, who took control of his land (albeit with restrictions), and it benefitted Count Dirk, who now had a military presence to protect his interests in the land south of Utrecht, and who could control traffic on the Waal.
But in any case, for our immediate purposes, the reasons for why anything occurred aren't important. We only want to know where the Arkel/Swaim line was geographically located at any given time so that we may compare that to the claimed ancestral locations of Y-DNA matches to see how well they coincide. Therefore, what is really important to us is whether or not Arkels were still living in the Land of Arkel when Heyman VI was granted the land in fief by Count Dirk of Holland. These would be the descendants of the brothers (and sisters, but necessarily we're only interested in brothers) of Heyman IV, who left Arkel after the death of his father Jan IV and his mother Esbeen. Pauw is silent on this issue, but it is clear that someone must have been living in the Land of Arkel when Heyman VI claimed it because Pauw says that Heyman VI was “ontfangen voor eenen heer van Arckel van alle that volck” (“received as a lord of Arkel by all that people”). But by what people? Pauw must mean by the people who were already living in the Land of Arkel, because those were the only people who might challenge Heyman VI's lordship over them. If they were the descents of Jan IV, then as Heyman VI's cousins they also would have rights to the Land of Arkel, and probably rights superior to Heyman VI because they were actually in possession of the land, but also it is possible that they must have been simple farmers and craftsmen rather than knights for some lord, because otherwise it is unlikely they would have acquiesced so readily to Heyman VI becoming their new lord.
As I mentioned previously, the Heyman who was born in the Land of Arkel in 694 could not have actually been the Heyman IV who died in Frankfurt in in 783 fighting Saxons. He was likely his grandson, and Pauw conflated the two Heymans. The rest of Pauw's timeline for these Arkels through Heyman VI is credible, with an average generation of 33 years, but would put Heyman VI in his early 50's when he eloped with Gilla and went to Count Dirk in Holland. We could adjust that a a couple years for each generation and put Heyman in his mid-late 40's and in 973, and it makes sense. Heyman VI would have been old enough to bargain wisely with Count Dirk, and yet still young enough to present a potential military threat to Count Dirk and to take a young wife. It might also explain why Heyman VI and Gilla eloped, because Gilla's father Tielman might not be thrilled at the idea of his daughter marrying someone 20+ years her senior.
Heyman VI must have died in about 996, since in the next section Pauw says that his son Foppo died in the year 1008 after being lord for 12 years. He was possibly born sometime between 920-930.
Foppo II and Heyman Aquitaine
After the death of his father, Foppo fortified the kingly house of Arkel with great hewn stones and improved in wealth the lordship of Arkel. Foppo was very rich in gold and silver that his grandfather Tielman, regent of Friesland, had given to him because Gilla was his only daughter, and Tielman was at peace with the thought that Foppo [his grandson by Heymand and Gilla] was of the noble blood of Troy. On the bank of the river now called the Linge, Foppo built five beautiful villages, after the five letters of the village of Arkel. The first village and the prince-palace of his lordliness was after the first letter A Arkel, where he made his court: the other village he called Rietvelt after the letter R, the third village after the letter K Kedichem, the fourth after the letter E Eterwijck, which is now called Osterwijck; and the last village after the letter L Leerdam. And because the water continue to flood Blockland and Hoornaer in the Giessenland, causing plagues to occur in the population there, he bequeathed a church on a sand dune that was dedicated in honor of God and Saint Dyonisii and ordained there a clean village named Blockland, and built there a church to honor God and John the Evangelist.
Foppo had a wife named Mariam, daughter of the noble lord van Oyen, from whom he had a son named Jan, who became the next Lord of Arkel. And Foppo also had a brother named Lord Heyman, who wanted to leave Arkel because his brother's children screamed a lot. Therefore, lord Foppo gave Heyman money and a becoming [gysen] and Heyman traveled to France and for his pious, knightly deeds he was exalted by the king of France and made a count in the land of Aquitaine. The descendants in his branch of the family are counts and have the same van Arkel coat of arms that is used in Holland.
After Foppo had rule for many years, he died a Christian in the year 1008, after being Lord of Arkel for twelve years, and was buried with his wife near his ancestors.
Heyman VI's Trojan/Greek Ancestry
The reason Pauw gives for Tielman's acceptance of Heyman's and Gilla's elopement was that he was happy with the thought that his grandson was “of the noble blood of Troy” (van den edelen bloede van Troyen). The “Trojan” blood of course had come from Heyman VI, the descendant of the “noble Trojan” Jan I. Also, Pauw mentioned that Count Dirck of Holland's wife also "loved Heyman very much, for her ancestors had also come from Troy." Thus Pauw is saying that “Trojan” descent conferred social status. But why should this be so?
The main reason is probably that, as we have seen, the Franks believed themselves to be descendants of noble Trojans, and this was probably more true of the nobility and royalty than of the Frankish population at large, especially as the Frankish territory expanded to include many groups who were not originally Frankish. Another reason is undoubtedly that the Byzantine Empire, which was considered to be Greek by the west, was the most prestigious culture in Europe at that time. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire) was considered the true successor to the Roman Empire. This succession was challenged in 800 AD when Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Otto I became emperor in 962, and relations were strained between the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire. The two empires engaged in some battles in Italy, but at the same time both empires were seeking diplomatic means to resolve the tensions between them. To ratify the agreements the two empires made to keep peace between themselves, Otto I wanted his son, Otto II, to be married to a member of the Byzantine imperial family. Thus, in 972 AD Otto II married Theophanu, the niece or granddaughter of John I Tzimiskes, the senior Byzantine emperor at that time, and the daughter of Konstantinos Skleros, a noble. Although the Byzantines called themselves Romans and Latin was the official language of the empire, in fact the Byzantine Empire was more oriented toward the Greek culture than the Roman, Greek was widely spoken, and the people of the Holy Roman Empire considered the Byzantines to be Greek. Ethnically is is likely that Theophanu was more Armenian than Greek, but that probably wasn't widely known in the Holy Roman Empire, if it was known at all. She was in fact probably universally considered to be Greek, as indicated by an incident in which Otto I's wife, Adelaide of Italy, snidely called her “that Greek woman.” However, “Theophanu's 'Greekness' was not an overall issue [to the Franks]. Moreover, there was a grand fascination with the culture surrounding Byzantine court in the west that slighted [sic] most criticisms to her Greek origin.'” (Wikipedia.com, "Theophanu") Heyman VI's elopement with Gilla and refuge with Count Dirck of Holland occurred the year after Theophanu's wedding to Otto II, so the excitement of having a new and exotic Greek empress probably added to the social credit of those who claimed to have “Trojan” (Greek) ancestry.
An interesting question is whether or not Heyman VI would have had any physical characteristics that might have identified him as having Greek ancestry. The answer is that this is highly unlikely. Even assuming that Jan I had looked identifiably "Greek" in the 300's when he had immigrated to the Rhine region, Heyman VI was about 20 generations removed from Jan I and presumably most of the maternal ancestors of Heyman VI during those generations were ethnically mostly Germanic and Celtic. Heyman VI's autosomal DNA would likely have been all or mostly mostly Germanic, and probably none of it would have been identifiably "Greek" or "Balkan." Thus, since only autosomal DNA appears to control a person's physical appearance, Heyman VI would not have looked any different from the majority population in the Rhine region at that time. Only his Y-chromosome DNA would have indicated his Balkan paternal-line origin--as always, assuming that Jan I had in fact come from the Balkans/Greece).
Land of Arkel
From this point forward, the Land of Arkel is definitely the residence of the van Arkel lineage. Foppo was born and died there, and he improved the land by adding a string of towns. Pauw claims that these towns along the Linge were named to make them into a sort of reverse acronym for A-R-K-E-L. This is possible but seems unlikely, especially since the spelling of the word as Arkel is a later development; most earlier sources, including Pauw, usually spell it Arckel.
Foppo II was a real estate developer, as he founded a string of towns along the Linge. This development may have been part of the deal Heyman VI had struck with Dirk II, Count of Holland. The land would have made much more money for both the Arkels and the count of Holland as developed farmland than as undeveloped peat bogs and woodlands. If Foppo II developed the Land of Arkel into towns with farms and other businesses, the land owners would profit from the rents and taxes that were levied on the population. Futhermore, a populated land would provide a buffer against invasion from the south to the important city of Utrecht.
Developing and populating that land would not have been easy, as the Land of Arkel is located in the Rhine delta and was naturally swampy and prone to flooding. The primary reason that the Land of Arkel was uninhabited before Foppo II developed it was that it was useless to farmers without a means of controlling the flow of water over the land. According to the Wikipedia article on the history of the Netherlands, for this reason much of the western Netherlands was practically uninhabited from the Roman times until about 1100 AD. But finally “farmers from Flanders and Utrecht began purchasing the swampy land, draining it, and cultivating it. This process happened quickly and the uninhabited area was settled in a few generations.”
I'm not entirely confident of my translation in the section on the reason for the development of Blockland. This “Blockland” undoubtedly refers to the village known today as “Hoogblokland” (High Blokland) located just northwest of the city of Arkel, rather than to the Blokland further north near Utrecht. The coat of arms of the village of Hoogblokland is the usual Arkel double battlements. The reason for the construction of the two mentioned churches was apparently an effort to please God to put an end to floods and plagues, but the translation is uncertain. In any case, an interesting point to this is that Foppo II dedicated one of these churches to “Sinte Dyonisii.” “Sinte Dyonisii” is Dionysius the Areopagite, who lived in the 1st Century and was a Greek who was the First Bishop of Athens and is venerated as a saint in both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches (Dionysius the Areopagite - Wikipedia ). He's also the patron sainy of the Greek village of Dionysi in the prefecture of Heraklion, also spelled Iraklion because the Greek “H” is essentially silent.
Also, “Since at least the ninth century, the legends of Dionysius the Areopagite and Denis of Paris have often been confused. Around 814, Louis the Pious brought certain writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite to France, and since then it became common among the French legendary writers to argue that Denis of Paris was the same Dionysius who was a famous convert and disciple of Paul of Tarsus. The confusion of the personalities...was initiated...in 836 by Hilduin, Abbot of Saint-Denis....” (Saint Denis of Paris - Wikipedia ). Since Foppo II built and dedicated the church in the 900's, he may have also mistakenly beleived that Saint Dionysius was the same person as Denis of Paris, but he still would certainly have known that Dionysius was Greek. Whether or not that was a factor in his decision to dedicate the church to Dionysius is something we'll never know.
Heyman's Relocation to Aquitaine
This Heyman is not in the Arkel line of succession, so I'm calling him Heyman Aquitiane rather than giving him a number. Heyman Aquitiane transferred his residence to Aquitaine in France, where Pauw says that he was count. Aquitaine was a duchy, and it is possible that he was a count there.The Duke of Aquitaine at this time was probably William IV).
Pauw says that Heyman traveled to France and met the king. The king at this time would have been either Hugh Capet, who died in October of 996 or his son Robert II the Pious, who co-ruled with his father from 987, and ruled alone from the death of his father to 1031. Hugh Capet's wife and Robert II's mother was Adelaide of Aquitaine, the daughter of William III, Duke of Aquitaine. Hugh Capet's mother, Hedwig of Saxony, was the daughter of Henry the Fowler and therefore the sister of Otto I. Therefore, there was a strong connection between the family of Otto I and the family of the Hugh Capet and his son Robert II, and to the Dukes of Aquitaine. Since Heyman VI was on very good terms with Otto I, this provides a plausible series of connections that could have led to Heyman being given a position of power in Aquitaine. Also, recall that Charles the Bald had supposedly met with the Arkels in West Frisia, and had placed his kin Dirck of Aquitaine as count there, and that the counts of Holland, if they had descended from Dirck of Aquitaine, may have kept in contact with their kin in Aquitaine. Thus, it is not unreasonable to believe that Heyman might have been made a count (or viscount) in Aquitaine.
Pauw syas that Heyman retained the Arkel coat of arms. Bruch believed that Pauw had no real sources to support a claim that an Arkel went to Aquitaine, and that Pauw only made this claim based on a similarity in a coat of arms between the Arkel coat of arms and the coat of arms of some other family in Aquitaine. Thus, Bruch is saying that Pauw simply lied when he gave a specific name (Heyman) and general time (late 900's) in which a member of the Arkel line when to Aquitaine and established a house there. However, since in this blog we are assuming that Pauw did have sources and didn't simply lie, I tried to determine if there was any evidence outside of Pauw to support his story about Heyman's relocation to Aquitaine.
Finding any such supporting information would be very difficult given the age of the events. Heyman's move to Aquitaine was not in any respects a major event, and there is usually only very sketchy information available about even major events in the 900's. Few people were literate, few of the literate people wrote about anyone who wasn't a king or bishop, and probably only a fraction of what was written has survived to the present time. However, familial coats of arms often lasted many generations and depictions of them have often survived through the ages. Since Pauw says that Heyman's Aquitaine branch retained the Arkel coat of arms, the logical place to look for Heyman's branch would be to find a coat of arms from a family in Aquitaine that looks similar to the Arkel coat of arms. I did find a coat of arms from Aquitaine that resembles that of the Arkel coat of arms, and although the resemblance is not perfect, it is visually obvious. This is the coat of arms from the House of Rochecouart (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:SVG_coats_of_arms_of_families_of_France&filefrom=Z):
And here's the basic van Arkel coat of arms:
The Arkel coat of arms has two lines of double crenellations or embattlements, while the Rochechouart has two and part of a third, and the double crenellations or embattlements are stylized or abstracted rather than squared off like the actual embattlements of a castle wall. Also, the Arkel embattlements have five peaks and six troughs, while the Rochecouart stylized embattlments have six peaks and seven troughs. Any or all of these differences could possibly have originated as cadencies, which in heraldry means a way to distinguish a descendant's coat of arms from that of the holder.
Since the coat of arms of Rochechouart lineage appears to be the most similar to that of the Arkel coat of arms, we will take a look into the history of the Rochechouart line to see if it could possibly have originated with Heyman in the late 900's.
The Rochechouart name literally translates from French as “rock-cabbage,” but was supposedly derived from the Latin phrase “la roca covardi,” meaning “the rock of Covardus.” Covardus was the lord who built the castle in Rochechouart in 1100; thus, the name appears to mean that the castle is the rock built and owned by Covardus. However, this is five generations removed from the progenitor of the Rochechoart line, and “Covardus” was not the name of the line's progenitor. Rochechouart is a town located about 25 miles west of the city of Limoges.
The name of the line's progenitor was Aymeric I, who lived around 990 AD and was a viscount. He is also called Aimeric or Aimery. In various genealogies the descriptive nickname Ostfranc or Ostofrancus is sometimes added to his name.
Most genealogies claim that Aymeric was a son of Geraud, vicomte de Limoges (965-1018). Most genealogies trace the Limoges ancestry back to Bernier de Laon (688-720). Laon is located about 120 miles west of Pierrepont. Some genealogies claim that Bernier de Laon was actually Natronia ben Nehemiah David, born in Babylon, Mesopotamia, a Jewish leader exiled to France. This seems unlikely, and this attribution is most likely a false attempt to make a Biblical connection that didn't actually exist. Aymeric I obtained Rochechouart through his marriage to Ava d'Angouleme, whose dowry included the lands there. (Wikipedia article "House of Rochechouart:" https://gw.geneanet.org/ect?lang=en&p=aimeric&n=de+rochechouart; https://www.geni.com/people/Aimery-I-de-Rochechouart-vicomte-de-Rochechouart/6000000003827606434; https://gw.geneanet.org/ect?lang=en&p=aimeric&n=de+rochechouart;https://gw.geneanet.org/julienjc360?lang=en&p=aimery+ier+ostfranc&n=de+rochechouart; https://fabpedigree.com/s004/f645840.htm; https://www.genealogieonline.nl/genealogie-spaan/I527334.php: http://philippe.cayez.pagesperso-orange.fr/fiches/fiche584.htm; https://gw.geneanet.org/valleryradot?lang=fr&p=aymeric+; House of Rochechouart - Wikipedia)
If Aymeric I truly was a son of Geraud de Limoges, then obviously he could not have been Heyman, son of Foppo II van Arkel. However, there is reason to believe that Aymeric I was not actually the biological son of Geraud de Limoges, and the few facts that we have make it actually quite plausible that Aymeric I was in fact Heyman van Arkel.
First we'll see why it is unlikely that Aymeric I was the son of Geraud de Limoges, then we'll break down why it is possible that he was Heyman van Arkel.
There are two reasons that make it unlikely that Aymeric I was the son of Garaud de Limoges. First, Aymeric's coat of arms is nothing like that of the Limoges coat of arms. The Limoges coat of arms is three rampant lions on a solid background. If a true son of Geraud was sent out to be a viscount of his own, it is likely that he would have been given a coat of arms that was more similar to that of of the Limoges coat of arms. Second, Aymeric I had the descriptive nickname “Ostfranc” or “Ostofrancus,” which both mean “East Frank,” which was simply another way of saying “German.” It absolutely would have made no sense to give a son of Geraud de Limoges the nickname “East Frank” or “German,” because the Limoges line for as far back as it can be traced was West Frankish, or French.
There are three factors that make it plausible that Aymeric I was actually Heyman van Arkel. The first is that Heyman van Arkel was a West Frank or German. Both Pierrepont and the Land of Arkel were located in Germany, and for many years Heyman's father Heyman VI had fought for the German emperor Otto I. Therefore, although it would have made no sense to call a natural son of Geraud de Limoges a German when he was in fact French, it would have made a great deal of sense to call Heyman van Arkel a German because that's what he was. Thus, if it had been arranged that Heyman was to become a viscount of a bit of the territory controlled by the Limoges, it would be natural that they would call him the “Ostfranc.”
The second factor is that the name Aymeric (in any of its forms) is in fact probably the same name as Heyman (in its various forms). Surnamedb.com indicates that the name Aimeric is a “French-Provencal” form of the name Heimann. Although this website calls it a “surname,” in fact in France in the 900's there were no true surnames, most people being given one name. (Surname Database: Heimann Last Name Origin (surnamedb.com)
The third factor is that Heyman was born at about the same time as Aymeric I was supposed to have been born.
Thus, Heyman was born at the same time as Aymeric, had the same name as Aymeric, and was an East Frank living among West Franks in Aquitaine, also the same as Aymeric. Also, Heyman's family coat of arms was very similar to Aymeric's coat of arms, bot of which were very different from the Limoges coat of arms.
Of course this doesn't prove that Aymeric I was actually Heyman van Arkel, but it makes it a plausible hypothesis. As it happens, known male descendant of the Rochechouart line apparently still exist, so proving that Aymeric I was Heyman would be easy to prove by comparing the Y-DNA of one of the Rochechouarts with the Y-DNA of either a known descendant of the Arkel line or of the remains of an Arkel. Such a match would have a GD of about 12.
April 18, 2021 Note: It turns out that one of the 8th great-grandparents of Elisabeth de Bar-Pierrepont, who married Otto van Arkel (1330-1396) was Geraud I, Vicomte de Limoges and the supposed father of Aymeric “Ostfranc” de Rochechouart. This is an odd coincidence, because when I located Aymeric de Rochechouart as a potential match for Heyman van Arkel, I didn't know that this later link to Elisabeth de Bar-Pierrepont existed. This means that Otto's son Jan V van Arkel and all of Jan V's descendants (possibly including the Swaim line) were also descendants of the de Limoges family in Aquitaine, and would be cousins of Aymeric's descendants if he was truly a son of Geraud (of course theywould also be cousins of his descendants if he was Heyman van Arkel, but in this case would also share his Y-DNA). I'm not sure that this makes it any more or less likely that Aymeric de Rochecouart was actually Heyman van Arkel, but it is an interesting connection either way.
The Land of Arkel Between 700 AD – 973 AD
This section is an exploration of the question of when the van Arkel line first permanently established itself in the land between the Lek and the Waal on the “Batavian Island,” which became known for some time as the “Land of Arkel.”
What Pauw was doing in his history of the Arkel line was following the paternal line that led to Jan V van Arkel (~1363 – 1428), the last of the Lords of Arkel. This is what I've been calling the “Arkel line” or “Arkel lineage.” However, it is important to remember that at each generation of that line there was the potential for other lines to branch off from the Arkel line. Those lines would also have Y-DNA that matches “Swaim” Y-DNA and this DNA would, in fact, be indistinguishable from “Arkel” DNA of the same generation. In the early generations that Pauw discussed, he only provided information about these other Arkel three times, and one of these times involved the Heemskindern tale, which is probably spurious. One of the other two times was in regard to Jan, brother of Foppo I, and the only thing Pauw said about him is that he was buried in Manderscheid “bij Trier.” We don't know if he had any children. The other line is that of Heyman, the son of Foppo II, who was sent of to Aquitaine to be a count. We don't know if he had any children, either. In this section I'll call the line that Pauw was following the “Arkel line” and any offshots from that line “Arkel offshoot lines” (of course, however, from the perspective of thos other lines, the “Arkel line” is the offshoot of their line).
This section is about trying to determine when the Arkel line first permanently occupied the Land of Arkel in Holland, which until the early 1000's was called West Frisia or simply Frisia. The first attempt of the Arkel line to occupy the Land of Arkel occurred in about 638 when Jan III was awarded that land by King Dagobert I. Jan III took up residence in that land and possibly lived there until about 650, when the Frisians ousted him. His grandson reoccupied the land between 689-694, but then the Arkel line left the land of Arkel, either in about 715 if Heyman IV left Arkel then, or in about 778, when perhaps Heyman IV's grandson, perhaps also named Heyman, left Arkel. The line probably lived in Pierrepont or elsewhere in Lorraine or West Francia at this time, and only returned to the Land of Arkel in 973 with Heyman VI.
At least, this is more or less what we are to imply from Pauw's history. There are certainly missing generations in this section of Pauw's history, but in general the outline is coherent. However, Pauw tells us almost nothing of what happened in the Land of Arkel between between when Heyman IV was born there in 694 and when Heyman VI went there as lord in about 973. He briefly mentions “robbers and thieves” in he Land of Arkel, but after that doesn't mention Arkel again until Heyman VI arrives at the Dirk II's residence in 973.
So the question is, did the entire Arkel clan abandon the Land of Arkel in the early 700's, or did only he Arkel lineage leave the Land of Arkel, and other Arkel offshoot lineages remained there?
Pauw is silent on this issue, but other sources do provide some information to indicate that Franks and not just Frisians were living in this region during the 700's, 800's and 900's, and at least one source states that Arkels were indeed living there during this time period.
Examining the various Arkel genealogies available on the internet, it is clear that many people believe that the first of the Arkel line to live in the Land of Arkel was the same Heyman as the one that in this blog I'm calling “Heyman VI.” This Heyman/Heijman is said to have fought under Otto I and to have obtained possession if fief of the Land of Arkel through Dirk II, the count of Holland. The history of the Arkel line before this time is said to be unknown, and in many cases Heyman is said to have been born in Hungary and in consequence was known as “Heyman van Hongarije.” Pauw himself never mentions Hungary in the context of Heyman VI. Bruch, who published Pauw's history as part of his thesis, states in his introduction his opinion that Pauw's history of the Arkels before the time of Heyman VI a “fantasy” that Pauw concocted, and that his sources were limited to some information that the Arkels had come from Hungary to Germany to Holland, and he perhaps means that it came through all of these places in one generation, with Heyman VI. Bruch also says that the connection to both Hungary and to Aquitaine are derived only (and he implies incorrectly) from the fact that there are similar coats of arms from some nobles in both Hungary and Aquitaine. He also implies that the connection to Lorraine (Pierrepont) is spurious as well.
Bruch's view on Pauw's history is probably pretty much the view agreed upon by historians today. In this blog I'm taking a more liberal of Pauw's history, and I believe there are enough hints from outside sources to believe that at least of some of Pauw's history that is rejected by historians may actually have some basis in fact, perhaps coming from sources that are no longer available to historians. Pauw himself was born in Gorinchem in 1416 or 1417, while Jan V was still alive, and when he was an adult there would have been many people living who had known the last of the Arkel family, and there may have been much oral history that later died with these people. However, I'm not saying that I believe everything that Pauw wrote is correct, or even most of; rather, I'm simply keeping an open mind to see what the Y-DNA evidence might say about the subject.
It would be problematic if Heyman VI had been born in Hungary in the 900's, because such an event would be hard to explain in the context of the Arkel line having been living in the Rhine region for more than 600 years prior to that time. However, I have seen no documentary evidence that indicates that Heyman VI was in fact born in Hungary, and since I'm relying on Pauw's history and Pauw doesn't claim that Heyman VI was born in Hungary, this is not an issue I want to explore further. Pauw does say that Jan I traveled to Frankfurt from Pannonia/Hungary, but he also claims that he had gone there from Troy (possibly Greece); thus, the Arkel line would have lived in Hungary for less than a lifetime and probably less than one generation.
Pauw mentions Hungary again in relation to a great-grandson of Heyman VI who, while traveling through northern Italy on crusade, met a nobleman “who was from Hungary” who had the same coat of arms as the Arkel coat of arms. However, it isn't clear that this man is even Hungarian, since Pauw also says (immediately and in parentheses after he says that “was that he was “heere van Tirolis,” or lord of the Tyrol. If Heyman VI had been born in Hungary and was ethnically Hungarian, this should be clearly reflected in my Y-DNA matches if the Swaim line descends from the Arkel line (spoiler: it isn't, which would indicate that either the Arkel line was not Hungarian or the Swaim line did not descend from the Arkel line).
Most historians also seem not to believe that the Arkel line began with Heyman VI because the earliest documents to mention the name “Arkel” or “Arckel” is believed to come from much later. The first such document is from 1180 and says that a “Jehan de Loire” had attacked a man named “Hugues,” the oldest son of a man named Liebaz. Jehan was killed by the companions of Hugues, and on Jehan was found letters from the lord of Arkel (sire d'Arkel; sire d'Arckel), and that the lord of Arkel hated Hugues because Hugues had refused to marry his daughter to Arkel's bastard son Robert.” So fhte first recorded act of an Arkel was the attempted murder of a man who had snubbed his illegitimate son. But what is most interesting about this “fragmentum genealogicum” is that it involved people related to the “comitibus Dagsburg” (which I take to mean the “Count of Dagsburg”) and the “dominis de Bauffremont” (“lord of Beauffremont”). Dagsburg is now called Dabo and is located in Lorraine about 100 miles from Pierrepont. Bauffremont, now spelled Beauffremont, is located in the Vosges about 93 miles south of Pierrepont. The Wikipedia article on the Bauffremont family says that the family “traces itself to Liebaud, sire de Bauffremont, in 1090”; this indicates that this is indeed the same family as mentioned in the genealogical fragment, since “Liebaud” is probably an alternate spelling of “Liebaz”, which must be a recurring name in the family. Although I can't identify the Arkel who was implicated in the murder plot, it is interesting to see that at this relatively late date at least some of the Arkel line appears to have been living in Lorraine or nearby, or at least was somehow associated with the region. This is consistent with Pauw's contention that the Arkels came to Holland from Pierrepont in Lorraine. (DUTCH NOBILITY (fmg.ac) ; Alsatia Diplomatica (googleusercontent.com) (p. 274-5))
Another early entry (early 1200's) for the Arkel line says that “Thiry saingnor de Haneffe” married “alle filhe de Saingnor d'Arkle en la dukeit de Geulres.” “Thiry, saingnor de Haneffe” was Thierry de Neufchateau, lord of Haneffe.” Haneffe and Neufchateau are today in Belgium, Haneffe being about 100 miles north of Pierrepont, Neufchateau being only about 36 miles from Pierrepont. (DUTCH NOBILITY (fmg.ac) ) Again, this is consistent with the Arkels having a presence in Lorraine before moving to Holland, especially as later entries on the Arkels are all from Holland. Thus, Bruch appears to be wrong when he said that Pauw had no good reason to claim that the Arkels had ever lived in Lorraine.
But these documents don't tell us where the Arkel line was living between 700 AD and 973 AD. Pauw implies that the line was living in Lorraine rather than Arkel during those years, but unlike Pauw, we are also interested in knowing whether Arkel offshoot branches were living in Arkel during this time period, since any descendants of the offshoot branches will show as Y-DNA matches. A Y-DNA match with an MRCA from this time period won't be able to clarify the situation because we couldn't know which Arkel line the match came from, but a match with a descendant in either area (Lorraine or the Land of Arkel) would tend to confirm the accuracy of Pauw's text.
As we will see, I do in fact have a match with an MRCA of 750 who has as his earliest known ancestor a man living in Gorinchem, which is located in the Land of Arkel. However, there is some evidence that the match may have come from France in the 1300's; either way, this match is consistent with Pauw's history, but because of this evidence that the line possibly came from France (presumably Pierrepont), it can't tell us whether or not the Arkel lines were living in the Land of Arkel at that time.
Here is a brief recap of the Arkel line's attempts to occupy the Land of Arkel:
--In 618 (probably actually 638), Jan III fought under Dagobert I to conquer the West Frisian lands around Utrecht from the Frisians, and Jan III was afterward granted the Land of Arkel, possibly as allodial land. Jan III left Pierrepont and settled the Land of Arkel but in 650 was forced out when the Frisians reclaimed West Frisia on Dagobert I's death. Jan III returned to Pierrepont.
--In 689-694 Jan IV returned to the Land of Arkel, which he knew about from his father. His return there was probably possible beause in 689 Pepin of Herstal, the leader of the Austrasians, conquered the Frisians and retook control of West Frisia. Jan IV settled the land and was died and buried on it. However, either his son (Heyman IV) in about 715, or his great-grandson in about 778, left the land, possibly returning to Pierrepont.
--In 973, after leaving the Land of Arkel for about 200 years, the Arkel line returned to the Land of Arkel after taking it in fief from Dirk II, the Count of Holland.
So we see that, according to Pauw, the Arkel line did twice briefly live in the Land of Arkel prior to 973, but did not occupy the land for the 200 or more years before 973. The question that remains unanswered by Pauw is whether Arkel offshoot lines remained in the Land of Arkel after Heyman IV left it in the 700's.
It is possible that all the Arkel lines left the Land of Arkel in 715 because, as noted earlier, West Frisia was retaken by Radbod and his Frisians in 715, and remained under Frisian control until 719, when Charles Martel retook it for the Franks. However, it is not necessarily true that the Arkels were forced to leave the Land of Arkel during the time that the Frisians had retaken control of West Frisia in 715. By this time the Arkels had lived in the area for about 20 years, and may have established strong enough ties with the Frisians that they were allowed to remain, or perhaps the Arkels were militarily powerful enough that the Frisians didn't want to fight them. Or, if the Arkels did leave in 715, they may have returned in 719. The Arkel line itself may not have returned, however, but rather only the Arkel offshoot lines (e.g., Heyman IV's brothers, uncles, cousins, etc.).
Egmond Chronicles
There are hints from writers other than Pauw that there were Arkels in the land of Arkel between 715 AD and 973 AD. One author wrote that “Hoveus, Abbot of Egmont, in his chronicles, says that the Lords van Arkel, a whole century before the first Count Diderik's arrival, possessed a large part of Holland.” (Edwin Jaquett Sellers, Allied Ancestry of the van Culemborg Family of Culemborg, Holland, 1915). “Count Diderik” probably refers to Dirk I, generally considered the first Count of Holland, who lived sometime between 896-931, although it might refer instead to a person named Dirk of Aquitaine, who possibly arrived in Holland in 869, as we will soon see.
The chronicle entry of Hoveus may be the same source as the following document, although I'm not sure about this since I haven't seen Abbot Hoveus' chronicles. The source for the following document is entitled “EENE KRONYK VAN EGMOND IN HANDSCHRIFT,” which is found in the book Kerkhistorisch Archief, compiled by Kist and Moll in 1859 (Kerkhistorisch_archief (1).pdf ). According to Kist and Moll, “Eene Kronyk” was based on a manuscript that was located in the library of the Lord of the Blocquery at Haarlem and is concerned with the history of the noble van Egmond lineage. The manuscript began with the year 409 and ended with the year 1512.
The House of Egmond was “one of the principal noble families in the County of Holland during the Middle Ages. The family is said to be descendants of the Kings of Friesland....” (House of Egmond - Wikipedia) (As an aside, this source also says that "[t]hanks to a number of judicious marriages they [the Egmonds] were able to add...the semi-sovereign territory of the Lords of Arkel to their domains.” This is referring to the marriage of Maria van Arkel, the daughter of Jan V van Arkel, to John II van Egmond, in 1409; the Egmonds obtained some of the Arkel lands because the Lords of Arkel lost their power with Jan V van Arkel's defeat in 1412 by William II, Duke of Bavaria and Count of Holland. This, however, occurred after the time period we are interested in ).
The passage we are concerned with took place in the year 840, after the death of Garbrant, the second Lord of Egmond. This was 146 years after the birth of Heyman IV, according to Pauw the first of the Arkel line born in Arkel. At 32 years per paternal generation, this would have been 4-5 generations after the Arkels had first established themselves in Arkel, so if offshoot branches of the Arkel line had remained in Arkel, they would have been well-established by this time. Also by this time the Frisians had been largely Christianized and were not in open revolt against the Franks.
Vikings in West Frisia/Holland
There was another threat to the inhabitants of West
Frisia, however, this time in the form of Danish Vikings. The “Eene
Kronyk” says that Garbrant had lived during the time of Viking
raids on West Frisia (it called these raiders “Noormannen,”
meaning Northmen). This was referring to several Danish Viking raids
that occurred between 834 and 839 by Rorik of Dorestad and his
brother Harald. These Viking raids are unique in that they were
actually instigated by the Frankish king Lothair I who was using the
threat of the Danes to weaken the power of his father, Louis the
Pious, with whom he was in conflict (these were the same kings that
Pauw says that Jan V served under: “the kind Ludovicus emperor, son
of the great Kaerl” (Louis “the Pious”, son of Charlemagne) and
“emperor Lotharius” (Lothair I)). Thus, these early Viking raids
in west Frisia were actually instigated by Lothair I, and the loss of
life and property resulting from them was collateral damage in his
fight with his father. In 839 Lothair and Louis the Pious
reconciled, and the raids stopped for some time because there was no
longer any reason for them. However, Rorik and Harald were rewarded
for their service to Lothair by giving lands in fief in West Frisia
to rule over, including the trading town of Dorestad, which the Danes
had already occupied. Rorik and Harald in return agreed to protect
the coast of West Frisia from Viking raids.
Dorestad was located where the primary arm of the Rhine at that day split into what is today the Oude Rijn, which continued northwest through Utrecht to the sea, and the Lek (or Leck), which went to the sea more directly west, south of the Oude Rijn. Dorestad was “one of the most important trading towns of Northwestern Europe in the viking period.” (Luit van der Tuuk, Dorestad Engels (archive.org).
Although I have never seen the name of Dorestad mentioned in connection with the Arkel line, if some of the branches of the Arkels were in fact living in the Land of Arkel during the 800's, the town of Dorestad certainly would have been of more than a little consequence to them as it is located only 20 miles by foot from the town of Arkel. There is no doubt that the Arkels would have had ties of some kind to Dorestad; perhaps very extensive ties.
The situation in 840 in West Frisia was that the West Frisians had suffered intermittent Viking raids for about 6 years, and the Vikings had control of Dorestad and other areas, with official Frankish approval. Van der Tuuk says that these Viking raids were not totally disastrous to the inhabitants of West Frisia: “We must not have an excessive idea of the Viking raids on Dorestad. After a raid business went on as usual.” Even so, the local inhabitants could not have been pleased that the people who had terrorized their country were now in control of parts of it, and in fact later on Dorestad's importance as a trading center faded considerably due in large part to the Danish control of Dorestad; Frankish traders abandoned Dorestad and as tradto ers moved to Tiel on the Waal and Deventer on the IJssel, both of which were located outside of the territory controlled by the Danes.
Another event occurred in 840 that has a bearing on events in West Frisia. In June of that year, Louis the Pious died, leaving his surviving three sons Lothair I, Louis the German, Pepin and Charles the Bald, to fight of the division of the empire. At this point it was probably unclear exactly who among the three would be given control of West Frisia.
Egmond Chronicles
Now we come to the Egmond Kronyk. Gabrant, Lord of Egmond, was succeeded in 840 by his brother Willebrand. Sometime after this a major dispute (groot “discoort”) broke out between Willebrand on one hand and by “van Arckel” and “Wassenaer” on the other hand. The nature of this dispute was not given, but it ended in a “Paeys,” or reconciliation. As part of this reconciliation, Arckel married Willebrand van Egmond's daughter Cleta, and Wassenaer married Egmond's daughter Cecilia. Furthermore, the three lords divided the rule over Holland (West Frisia) among themselves, Egmond ruling in the north from Haarlem to Friesland, Arckel ruling in the east to Utrecht, and Wassenaer ruling in the south, to Dordrecht.
This three-way division of Holland lasted a long time in peace (langen tijd in vrede bezeten hebben) until the emperor Charles the Bald (Keizer Karel de Kale) disrupted this arrangement by giving all of Frisia to his relative Dirk (Diderik) from Aquitaine. When Dirk arrived to assert his control, the three lords--Arkel, Egmond and Wassenaer—resisted. In the ensuing battle, the lords of Arkel and Wassenaer were killed. The lord of Egmond survived, in part through the help of his father, the Duke of Sassen (Saxony). On the 3rd of May, 869, Dirk/Diderik defeated Egmond in the village of Bever (Beverwijk, northwest of Amsterdam).
In response to these battles, Charles the Bald came to Holland with a large force to straighten things out. At a reconciliation meeting in Brevervoort (Velsen, just south of Beverwijk), Charles the Bald confirmed Dirk of Aquitiane as the Count of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland. Lordship over the Land of Arkel was returned to the son of the dead Lord of Arkel, and lordship of the lands of Wassenaer Egmond to their respective lords or successors.
So this is what the Egmond Kronyk claims. But who was Charles the Bald, what was his connection to Aquitaine, and do other sources agree that he was in West Frisia in 869?
When Charlemagne died in 814, his entire empire went to Louis the Pious. Louis the Pious had four legitimate children: Lothair, Pepin, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald. Louis the Pious had to decide how to divide his empire among his sons, and none of them were happy with his decisions and therefore were constanting squabbling and fighting over who recieved what land. Pepin died in 838 before his father died, meaning that his surviving three brothers would take his share. Louis the Pious died in 840, leaving Lothair, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald. In 843 the three brothers ended their fighting by agreeing to the Treaty of Verdun, which divided the empire into three parts. Charles the Bald got West Francia and Aquitaine (France), Louis the German got East Francia (Germany), and Lothair got Lotharingia, sandwiched between the other two kingdoms.
Lothair died in 855 and Lothair II received Austrasia, Frisia, and Upper Burgundy. Lothair II died in 869 and “Charles [the Bald] tried to seize Lothair's dominions by having himself consecrated king of Lotharigia at Metz, but he was compelled to open negotiations when Louis [the German] found support among Lothair's former vassals. Lotharingia was partitioned between Charles and Louis in the resulting treaty (870).” (Charles the Bald - Wikipedia) This was the Treaty of Meerssen, under which Louis the German received most of Austrasia (including Pierrepont) and most of Frisia (including the Land of Arkel), with the dividing line in Austrasia between West Francia (France) and East Francia (Germany) being the Meuse/Maas River. Also in 870 Charles the Bald met in Nijmegen with Rorik of Dorestad and worked out a treaty with one another.
Thus, Charles the Bald was indeed in West Frisia both in 869 and 870, which is consistent with the Egmond Kronyk. Also consistent is the fact that Charles the Bald ruled Aquitaine, and thus it is plausible that he would bring a kinsman from Aquitaine (Dirk) to watch his interests in West Frisia. Although West Frisia was the territory of Lothair II, Charles the Bald was clearly operating in this region. The Treast of Meerssen occurred in August of 870, and although West Frisia was north of the Meuse/Maas, and thus should have been Louis the German's, Charles the Bald was still active in the region because in 872 Charles the Bald had two more meetings with Rorik. However, in 873 Rorik swore loyalty to Louis the German, so perhaps Louis the German had begun to take an interest in this region. After this time there doesn't seem to be any more information on what was going on in West Frisia.
(It should be noted that since the Treaty of Meerssen in 870 placed both Pierrepont and the Land of Arkel within the domaine of East Francia, the Arkel line from this time was politically East Francian, or German. Lorraine was located east of the Meuse and was never part of West Francia and only became a part of France in 1766. Thus, although there are references to the Arkels in Pierrepont being “French,” this would only be true of any who might have remained Lorraine until 1766.)
The Cokingi
But why had Charles the Bald felt the need to interfere in the region in the first place? Certainly because the region was the key to controlling traffic on the branches of the Rhine in the delta, but what specifically brought him there in 869? The answer may lie in a passage in the Annales Bertiniani. which says that in 867 Rorik of Dorestad was driven out of Frisia by a revolt of people now called the Cokingi (Cokings). It is uncertain if Rorik was driven entirely out of West Frisia or only from some part of his land, and it is also uncertain exactly who these Cokings were. In any case, in reaction to this uprising, “Lothair II “summoned up the host throughout his realm to the defense of the fatherland, as he explained, against the Norsemen, for he expected, that Hrørek, whom the local people, the new name for them is Cokings, had driven out of Frisia, would return bringing some Danes to help him.” (Rorik of Dorestad - Wikipedia ) Lothair apparently never did march on West Frisia, and perhaps Charles the Bald decided that if Lothair would not act, then he would. The situation in West Frisia was becoming chaotic with the Cokings who had the power to push out Rorik, and Charles the Bald obviously felt that he needed to take control of the area.
Thus, it is quite possible that Charles the Bald decided that he needed to place a man answerable to him in the region (Dirk of Aquitaine), perhaps both to control the Cokings and to keep an eye on Lothair's man Rorik.
So who were these Cokings? The meaning of the word Cokingi has been debated for more than a hundred years, and scholars seem to tentatively believe it derives from the word for the type of lightly-built boat that the Frisians used, that was latter known as a cog, or some variation of that word. Thus, the Cokings would be Frisians. But even if the name does derive from the type of boat these people used, how did the Frisians have the organization and military power to drive the Viking Rorik out of their land?
Given the claims of the Egmond Kronyk, I think it is possible that the Cokings were actually the local people who were organized by the three families of Arkel, Wassenaer, and Egmond, who had decided that Rorik must leave. The very name “Cokingi” or Cokings sounds very much like “co-kings,” which could be a description of the three co-powers in West Frisia. The Frisian word for king is kening, and the Dutch is koning, and it could very well be that the word Cokings is a fusion of the Latin “co-”, meaning “jointly” or “together,” and the Germanic “kening” or “koning.”
Documents from Lorsch and Prüm Abbeys
We also have information from other sources that prove that Franks were living in the Land of Arkel in 800's, although the Arkels are not mentioned in these documents. These documents are mentioned in an article in the Historical Society of Leerdam's website (https://www.historischeverenigingleerdam.nl/). I haven't seen the documents myself, but there is no reason to believe that the History Society of Leerdam.
The website article says that “Heukelom is certainly mentioned in a certificate of 814, in which year goods are donated to the monastery Lorsch in the Duchy of Hesse, among others near Heukelum (see Sloet Charter B No.27).” Heukelum is located on the Linge five miles east of Arkel. Although the historical society website didn't explain the significance of the year 814, that was the year of Charlemagne's death; Heukelum's donations to the monastery of Lorsch were almost certainly made in honor of Charlemagne, particularly as Lorsch was an "Imperial Abbey" favored by the Carolingians.
Another entry comes from the year 893, when “Asperen is already on the list of goods of the Benedictine abbey Prüme in the Eiffel from the year 893 (see Sloot. Oork. B. No. 66).” Asperen is located just southeast of Leerdam. Prüm Abbey is located about 30 miles northwest of Manderscheid, where Jan Manderscheid (infra) was buried in 915 AD. Prüm was consecrated by Pope Leo III in 799 and was a favorite of the Carolingian Emperors. It is possible that the gift was made to Prüm Abbey in honor of the birth of Louis the Child, the son of Arnulf of Carinthia, the King of East Francia. However it is also possible that the gift was made to help restore the Abbey after it was ransacked by the Vikings, which had occurred in 892.
Thus, we have very strong evidence that Franks were living in the Land of Arkel at least by the 800's. These donations would not have been made by Frisians, but only by Franks who had a strong connection with the Frankish power structure. These donations are consistent with Pauw's claim that the Arkels were soldiers and otherwise employed in higher-level capacities by the Carolingians and the East These donations also indicate that the Arkels who lived in the Land of Arkel (if any) were very likely in communication with their relatives in Pierrepont (likely the Arkel line), and were aware of events that occurred outside of their rather isolated location.
Summation of Land of Arkel 700 AD - 973 AD
Thus,
although Pauw does not mention the Land of Arkel in relation to the
generations of the Arkel line between the early 700's and 973, there
is evidence that Arkel offshoot lines were living there during this
time span, and that even at this early time they were the primary
political power in the land. If this is true, then the Arkels would
have ruled over the Land of Arkel from about 694 until 1412, when Jan
V lost the “Arkelse Oorlogen” and William of Holland imprisoned
him and took his lands and possessions.
Origin of the Counts of Holland
The earliest ancestry of the Counts of Holland is uncertain, but stems from the 800's. The Wikipedia article “Count of Holland” says that the first count of Holland was Dirk I, “who was the son or foster-son of Gerolf, Count in Frisia,” and that he may have been the son of a sister of Gerolf. Gerolf died in about 896 and Dirk I is said to have lived from 896-931. This article also says “Note that the chronology of the first three counts is uncertain. The existence of a count between Dirk I and Dirk II was only recently suggested, since it is thought that the references to counts named Dirk between 896 and 988 refer to three, not two, different counts.” In other words, very little is actually known about the origin of the counts of Holland.
As far as I know, Dirk I of Aquitaine, kinsman to Charles the Bald, is not generally considered to be in the line of the Counts of Holland. However, if the Egmond Chronicle is accurate, it seems logical that Dirk I of Aquitaine may have in fact been the original count of Holland. If this was true, the first Count of Holland would have therefore arrived in West Frisia in 869 from Aquitaine, at the request of Charles the Bald, the King of West Francia. Gerolf, then, may have been his son. This is simply my speculation, but it provides a plausible explanation for the origin of the origian House of Holland (with whom the Arkel line interacted for many generations until the line died out in 1299 with the death of John I).
Later Arkels
Pauw's book goes on for much longer about the more recent generations of Arkels, but I chose to concentrate on the 650 years earlier than that because there is no question that the Arkels lived in the Land of Arkel in Holland from 1000 AD on, and the Swaims in the Land of Arkel from at least 1400 AD on, whereas the years before thosde dates are much less certain for the Arkel line and unknown for the Swaim line.
(Even so, some online genealogies claim that Jan III van Arkel (~1060- ~1118)(Jan VII in the numbering convention of this post) was born and died in what is today Strasbourg, France. Jan III/VII's son Folpert is also supposed to have died in Strasbourg, although he was born in the Land of Arkel. This origin of this connection to Strasbourg, if accurate, is unkonwn to me. Strasbourg is located on the Rhine about 140 miles southeast of Pierrepont and about 350 miles southeast of Arkel.)
It is probable that today there are many men living in Holland with Arkel Y-DNA, although in tracking various Arkel male lines I was surprised to see how many of them terminated in a generation that left no descendants at all, or in a generation that "daughtered-out," leaving daughters but no sons (and thus no Arkel Y-DNA). However, there were at least two lines that may have left Arkel descendants today:
English Arkell Line: Some sources claim that this line descended from Thomas Walraven van Arkel (1613-1693), who descended from Jan I van Arkel (1265-1312), son of Otto I Herbarensz van Arkel van Wickerode (1225-1283). This line seems to be concentrated in the Goucester/Wilshire area of England. However, some sources give an English origination of the name Arkell, and it isn't certain that Thomas Walraven really did emigrate to England.
Van Vuuren (Buren?) Line: This line begins with Otto van Heukelom II (1260-1344), son of Otto I Herbarensz van Arkel van Wickerode (1225-1283). One possible problem is that a South African van Vuren tested as haplotype R-M265 rather than E-V13, but it seems probable that this ancestor was simply from the town of Vuren, and was not an Arkel; one website specifically states that this is true.
Other than these, there various paternal lines from various legitimate and illegitimate children born during various generations. And, if the Swaims and den Hartogs do descend from the Arkels, there are several paternal lines for each of those branches.
Frankfurt, Germany (Nida)
388 AD Lorraine, France (Pierrepont/Barr/Metz)
400's – 500's AD Pierrepont, Metz, Cologne
Land of Arkel (briefly)
Arkel
Elbe River (eastern Germany, possibly western Czechia/Bohemia)
Westphalia, Mainz, Ingelheim (buried)
Zülpich near Aachen (implied by events)
Lorraine (buried)
East Fancia (Germany)
Land of Arkel
>1000 AD Arkel
Middle East/Egypt (Crusades)
Part III
Determining the Country of Origin of the Swaim Line and the Time of Migration from the Balkans to Western Europe by Using Swaim Extended Match Data
Now we'll examine Y-DNA STR matches that reach deeper into the past than the DNA matches that FTDNA provides as “matches.” FTDNA's matches are intended to go no further back than about 15 generations (roughtly 500 years) because that is generally as far back as most genealogical documentation will go. For 111 STRs, FTDNA's cutoff is is a GD of 10 (101/111). However, since we have documentation purporting to provide a genealogy going back more than 3 times this far, we want to see extended matches that would go back that far. I know from following conversations in FTDNA's projects that the moderators have the ability too look at extended matches that FTDNA doesn't provide to its users, but I'm not certain that they are allowed to let us view those matches.
(October 2021 note: Moderators are allowed to identify these extended matches but it appears that FTDNA only identifies extended matches as such if those extended matches have done SNP testing (Big-Y) and if that testing shows that they share the same terminal halpotype. Thus, FTDNA is being very conservative and would not identify, e.g., Pennebaker as an extended match because Pennebaker didn't SNP test. FTDNA does recognize Spahr as an extended match, and at the same GD level that I now place him (20). FTDNA also recognizes Myers an extended match at a GD of 33, which I had also placed him at. A GD of 33 is a birth year of about 700 BC, meaning that he's not a descendant of the Swaim immigrant ancestor and that the two lines branched off probably not long after migrating south to Greece. The earliest known ancestor of Myers was named Moses Myers, and there was an early American colonist by that name who was Jewish--I don't know if the extended match Myers is Jewish or if he's related to this colonist Moses Myers, but if he's Jewish that's consistent with other extended match information indicationg that at least one Swaim line was Jewish at around this time.)
However, there's another way to view those extended matches, or at least a large portion of them. This is to manually go through the FTDNA project pages for E haplotype individuals and compare those STRs to one's own STRs. This is tedious, time-consuming, and more prone to error than computer matching, but nonetheless this is what I did for a few hundred individual's STRs. I went through FTDNA's “Y-DNA Geographical Projects” trying to cover a wide variety of countries, although of course I focused on the countries that Pauw claimed the Arkels had lived in. I also went through various of the “geographical projects” that were thematic rather than geographical, and in the “Surname Projects.” Within each project I was of course looking for men within the E-M35 haplotype, but after viewing dozens of individuals' STRs, it was easy to see patterns that were similar to my own STR pattern, and I focused on those.
I was primarily looking for matches with a GD of 20 or less because the MRCA of matches at 20 should be about 350 AD, which is about when Pauw claimed that Jan I left Pannonia for Frankfurt. Thus, matches with a GD of less than 20 should be descendants of Jan I and their Most Recent Common Ancestor should have lived in western Europe rather than the Balkans or Pannonia. Most of the matches I compared STRs to had GDs in the higher 20s or lower 30s, and I've listed all of these below. I compared relatively few matches with GDs in the 40s, because I could see at a glance that they were obviously not closer matches.
In determining genetic distance I used a simplified “infinite allele” method, simply counting each individual STR difference as 1 GD, regardless of the numerical value of the match's STR. For the “palindromic” STRs I also counted any difference as only 1 GD. I'm aware that FTDNA employs a more sophisticated method in which they assign a value to each STR meant to adjust for its supposed rate of mutation, but I didn't want to turn this in a year-long project, so I just kep things simple. In any case, I doubt that the science is sophisticated enough yet to really calculate mutation rates with any great accuracy, and I'm also skeptical that mutation rates are totally random. For example, the mutation rates of Swaim Y-DNA in America seem to be much faster than den Hartog mutation rates in the Netherlands, and yet the Swaims and den Hartogs are essentially the same lineage in terms of Y-DNA. I think that there must be some environmental factor that caused a faster mutation rate in American than in the Netherlands, and this may well apply to other geographic regions as well.
A technical note on the false match Johann Joost Snyder
The first draft of this post included the extended match whose earliest known ancestor was Johann Joost Snyder, who lived in Hüttengesäß, Germany. Hüttengesäß is located only 23 miles from Frankfurt, which according to Pauw was Jan I's and Heyman I's first destination in the lower Rhine region. His GD of 22 placed his MRCA with the Swaims at 190 AD, which is probably close enough to 350 AD to consider this an error within an acceptable range. He looked like a good match, and in one way a better match than anyone else, because for STR DYS572 he had a value of 12. This STR is tested in FTDNA's STR 67 level or higher, and every Swaim who tested at that level and has their STR results posted on FTDNA has a “12” at DYS572, whereas none of the extended matches tested at that level did except for Johann Snyder. Snyder also has other STRs characteristic of the Swaim line, such as a value of 23 for DYS390 and the value of 16-18 for STR DYS385. So he looked like a true Swaim line match. His listing in the “Schneider” surname project gave a haplogroup of E-BY5465, but that was useless information until we knew what the Swaim haplogroup was. Once I learned that the Swaim haplogroup was E-FGC11450, I knew that Johann Snyder could not actually be this closely related to the Swaim line despite his STRs, because E-BY5465 is located too distantly from E-FGC11450 for the two lines to be closely related. When I discovered this I took another look at the Schneider project page and this time noticed that just underneath the Johann Snyder match was a John Snyder match who's STRs were a GD of 3 for 67 STRs, which meant that they were probably closely related. John Snyder had fortunately tested up to the 111 and when I compared the Swaim STRs to John Snyder's STRs at that level I found that John Snyder was at a GD of -30/111 STRs. This means that he was not a descendant of the Swaim migrant, and also means that Johann Snyder was also almost certainly not a descedant (which the BY5465 SNP definitely confirms). Although Johann Snyder and I did match with a GD of 14 at the 67 STR level for a projected GD of 22 at the 111 STR level, it is likely that this projection gave me a falsely close GD for Johann Snyder because the non-matching STRs were “back-loaded” in the last 37 STRs for John Snyder and thus probably also for Johann Synder.
This is why it is always best to test at the highest STR level possible, because the more STRs that are tested, the more accurate matching will be. The most accurate level for STR testing that FTDNA offers is the 600+ that will be matched through the Big-Y 700 test. Relatively few matches take this test because they feel that the expense doesn't justify the potential results, and for many matches this is probably true. However, that level of STR and SNP testing provides a high degree of accuracy, so for someone seriously interested in Y chromosome testing, the Big-Y test is essential.
Results
Y-DNA Genetic Distance Values from Stephen Swaim
(Simplified Simplified Infinite Allele Method)
(Actual Values in Black - Projected Values in Red)
Name 37 STR 67 STR 111 STR Date of MRCA
LB Swaim 1 2 3 1707 AD
L Swaim 3 4 8 1621 AD
Swaim Average E-FCG11450 3.3 5.4 8 1621 AD
Swaim Avg adj for DYS389ll/CDY) 1 4 6 1621AD
DenHartog 1 4 6 1475 AD
den Hertog 2 4 6 1475 AD
den Hartog average adj. for DYS/CDY 0 2 4
Robinson nee Bloomfield 3 5 9 1235 AD
Miller 3 5 9
Schultz 3 5 9
(August 2021 Note: Although the Genetic Distance between Miller and me is 9, I now realize that the Genetic Distance between Miller and the basic Swaim STR pattern is only 6. This means that Miller is essentially a Swaim or den Hartog/Deventer under a different surname, having either split off from the line a generation or two before or after the Swain-den Hartog split or the Swaim-Miller MRCA came about through a non-paternity event, probably in New Jersey. More on this later.)
Extended Matches (Outside of FTDNA's Match Criteria)
Tudhope (Scotland?) 4 7 12 990 AD
Schmid 4 7 12
Sulc (Czech or Slovak for “Schultz”) 4 7 12
Pennebaker (Gorinchem, Holland) 5 9 15 750 AD
Snell (Germany?) 6 11 18 510 AD
McCloskey (Scotland) E-FGC11450 7 13 18 510 AD
Sparr (Switzerland–Biel-Benken) E-FGC11450 6 10 19 430 AD
Demetrius Antoniou (Greece) E-FGC11450 predicted 5 10 20 350 AD
Johanes Heilman (Geiselbach) E-FGC11450 pred. 6 13 21 270 AD
Johann Altmeyer (Saarbrücken, Germ.) 7 14 21
Piapoutas Koliopoulos (Greece) 7 14 22 190 AD
Athanosios Kokinis (Greece) E-FGC11450 9 13 22
Shurtz (Germany) 6 13 23 110 AD
Lubbert Meijlink (Overijssel) 8 14 24 30 AD
Geissler (Germany) 8 14 24
Franz Joosten (Lippstadt, Germany) 8 16 24
Keicher (Keiser?) (Baden, Germany) 8 15 24
Dimitar Delev (Litovoy, Greece) 7 15 24
Laszczynski (Vrbna Czech) E-BY4557-converge 7 14 25 50 BC
Northrop (England?) 7 13 26 130 BC
Douglas (Reeth, Scotland) 9 16 26
Jean Perrin (France) FGC11450 8 16 26
John Katserelis (Greece) 9 16 26
Schultz (Germany) 10 16 26
Zvi Mizruchi (Ukraine Ashkenazi) 8 16 26
Evdokimov (Russia) 6 12 27 210 BC
Johann Joachim Gerds (Germany) 6 13 27
Holzinger (Miller) 8 17 27
Dinning (Scotland) 9 19 27
Hunter (Scotland) 7 14 27
Hnoudakis (Greece) 11 17 27
Constantine Mitsou (Greece) 10 18 27
Schultze (Germany?) 9 16 27
Lanier (Iber Ashknz & French proj) 8 17 27
Christos Gotsis (Greece) 9 16 27
Joyniaux (France) 9 17 27
Frank Ardito (Italy) 9 17 27
Mavente (Sicily, Italy) 9 17 27
Moquin (Angers, France) 9 15 28 290 BC
Feret (France) 8 17 28
Marques (Mallorcan Jewish proj.) 10 15 28
Haralambos Hnoudakis (Greek assume) 11 17 28
Losee (Zeeland, Netherlands) 10 17 28
McConkey (Scots-Irish) 5 15 28
Kuhn (England EIJ proj. German orig) 6 15 29 370 BC
Embert/Imberti (England EIJ proj) 7 16 29
Dzivy (Saros, Hungary) 8 15 29
Reid (Scotland) 9 16 29
Nannan (Belgium) 10 18 29
Stefanov Zavat (Bulgaria) 10 18 29
Demetrios Bavelas (Greece) 10 18 29
Pesnopoy (Bulgaria) 9 18 29
Kuci (Albanian BL proj) 8 18 29
Dimitris Iliades (Greece) 9 16 30 455 BC
GioBatta Garibaldi (Liguria, Italy) 8 16 30
Gaetano Cerro (Sicily, Italy) 8 17 30
Beghtol (Germany?) 9 18 30
Galerski (Macedonia) 11 18 30
Mohammed Chergui (Algeria) 12 19 30
Wilhelm Brandt (Germany?) 11 18 30
Stoffa (Hungary?) 10 18 30
Johann Schroeder (Iber. Ashknz proj.) 9 19 30
Johann Cordes (Iberian Ashkenaz proj)10 19 30
de Vries (Groningen) 8 16 31 535 BC
Johansson 9 16 31
Ombelet (Bierbeek,, Belgium) 10 17 31
Aloy/Bergas/Ramis (Majorca, Spain) 12 19 31
Baber (England) 12 20 31
Jursys (Lithuania) 10 19 31
Larche (French?) 11 19 31
Hasselteg/Jacobsson 11 20 31
Orlie (Orlikowski – Poland) 12 19 31
Kuhn 8 17 32 615 BC
Kempf (Giessen, Germany) 9 17 32
Brewer (Brouwer – Netherlands) 9 17 32
Mali (Albania) 11 21 32
Graf (Zurich Swiss/Mennonite proj.) 10 19 32
Sanchez (Mallorcan Jews) 11 20 32
Anastasios Georgiadis (Greece) 11 20 32
Seguin (France) 7 17 33 695 BC
Laszcynski (Ukraine) 8 16 33
Brower 10 19 33
Moses Myers (Netherlands, Probably Jewish) 10 17 33
Dershowitz Surname Project 10 22 33
Schipper (Utrecht) 11 20 33
Nannan (Belgium) 11 20 33
Francesco Gargiulo (Italy) 11 20 33
Han Graf (Zurich, Switzerland) 11 20 34 775 BC
Pinel (France) 11 23 34
Stapp (English/Cape Dutch) 12 23 34
Akay (Turkey) 10 18 35 855 BC
Doukas (Albania) 11 22 35
Brix 11 22 35
Plante 12 22 35
Bloomfield 14 21 35
Spenser 13 22 35
Sapas 9 21 35
Gallant (France) 11 21 35
Anonymous (Turkey) 9 17 36 935 BC
Vujadinvic (Serbia) 13 19 36
Toth Gyorgy (Hungary) 13 21 36
Bozovich (Serbia) 13 23 36
Wilhelm Brandt 13 22 36
Van Vogt/Rhoon (Netherlands) 12 22 37 1015 BC
Brix 11 22 37
Mustapha (Turkish or Balkan) 13 22 37
Martonfi (Hungary) 12 23 38 1095 BC
Honazjer/Honheiser (Jewish Czech) 13 23 38
Vogt 13 24 40 1255 BC
Lizatovic 16 23 41 1340 BC
Diprose 14 22 42 1420 BC
Ivanov 14 25 42
Panayotes Constantides (Greece) 15 27 45 1660 BC
_________________________________________
For the moment ignore the estimated date of TMRCA and just look at the GD numerical value for 111 STRs. We're most interested in the GD values of 20 or less because those are the matches with an MRCA within the last 1,600 years, which is about the time that Jan an Heyman migrated from Pannonia to the Rhine region. There are only 6 such extended matches. However, the matches with higher GD values also have much to say.
One point I should mention is that, of course, FTDNA's database only contains a very small percentage of Y-DNA from Europe's population. We are working with very limited data. Also, the data is not random and is probably skewed toward western Europe. There is obviously little we can do about this, although as the database grows with time, patterns will become clearer and more accurate.
Part IV
Comparison of Swaim Y-DNA Matches
with Pauw's History of the Arkel Line
So what are we looking for? We have an individual we believe is a Swaim ancestor who migrated 1,674 years ago from what today is Hungary to what today is western Germany/northern France and then to Holland. That individual or his recent ancestors had moved to Hungary from the Balkans, or possibly from coastal Anatolia, which had long been colonized by Greeks. That ancestor had migrated with the Roman army, and was probably accompanied by hundreds or thousands of other individuals from Hungary and/or the Balkans. These other migrants would have been related to the Swaim ancestors in varying degrees, from very close (brothers/uncles/close cousins) to distant. Also, importantly, there was probably very little genetic backflow from western Europe into Hungary/Balkans/Greece during the succeeding centuries. Some Germanic groups certainly did migrate to the east, possibly including a group of Franks into Hungary, but most of these were later pushed out by the Magyars (Hungarians) and others, and I suspect they left few descendants.
So what should pattern of extended matches should we see based on this history? We should definitely see a difference in matches with MRCAs before the time of migration (346 AD) and after the time of migration.
All of the matches with an MRCA dated after the time of migration should be descendants of the presumed Swaim migrant Jan, or of a close relative that accompanied him, such as possibly Heyman. This is anyone else descended from a migrant not closely related to Jan will have a GD greater than that of descendants of Jan.
If Jan was the only migrant from Pannonia/Balkans/Greece who ever migrated to the Rhine region, then there would be no matches with an MRCA from earlier than 346 AD who came from Germany, Netherlands, France or other western European countries. Assuming no “back-migration,” all of the matches with an MRCA from earlier than 346 AD would come from Pannonia, the Balkans, Greece, and, further in the past would recapitulate in reverse the march of E-V13 back to Africa. But when we look at the list, we see that there are in fact many matches from Germany and other western European countries with MRCAs from earlier than 346 AD. This is because many other men did in fact migrate to the Rhine region from Pannonia and the Balkans, and many of them had E-V13 and were related to Jan in lesser or greater degree. What we are seeing is their descendants, not Jan's descendants. Thus, for our immediate purposes, these matches with an MRCA from earlier than 346 AD who live in western Europe are simply noise. They tell us nothing about Jan's descendants.
Therefore, I've made a new list, stripped of the matches from western European countries with a GD above 20. I've also stripped the matches of their names, leaving only the locations they've listed of their earliest known ancestors. I've also included 4 more matches with MRCAs from before 346 AD with GDs of 22-24 to account for possible instances of random accelerated mutation, just to err on the side of caution. Lastly, I've excluded those matches who were SNP tested as other than FGC11450 (or immediately upstream or downsteam of FGC11450).
Here's the same list, but stripped of all western European countries:
Greece 20 350 AD
Greece 22 190 AD
Greece 22 190 AD
Greece 24 30 AD
Greece 27 210 BC
Greece 28 290 BC
Greece 29 375 BC
Here again we see that for countries outside of western Europe, Greece is the only country of origin of a match with an MRCA that is within the last 2,000 years. In fact, Greece has four matches with an MRCA within the last 2,000 years. The next closest countries are Hungary and Bulgaria, but they aren't even close, with MRCAs 720 years more distant than the latest Greek match. And not only is Greece the country with the most recent MRCA, but the MRCA of the most recent match is estimated to be 360 AD, within half a generation of Pauw's date of 346 AD for Jan's migration from Pannonia!
Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, one of the Greek matches (Kokinis) with a GD of 22 (190 AD) was SNP tested as having the terminal haplogroup FGC11450, meaning that it is almost certain this match is a true match and that we did share a common ancestor. The Greek match Antoniou (GD 20, 350 AD) did not SNP test, but the FTDNA project administrator listed this match as "FGC11450 predicted."
Based on this information, it is almost certain that the Swaim line migrated to the Rhine region from Greece. Also, because of the lack of any matches from Italy, it appears that the line came directly from Greece rather than as the descendant of a Greek colonist from southern Italy. The reason that I mention this is in response to the statement by Ceustermans in “Argonauts of the West Balkans” that “...there are no sources showing Greek migration towards North-Western Europe in Roman times (or before). A more credible source might be formed by populations from Southern Italy and Sicily. Here V13 is present in higher percentages than in other parts of Europe outside of the Balkans. The obvious source is Greek colonisation during the last millenium BC.” Since the main method by which people from the Balkans came to northwestern Europe was via the Roman army, Ceustermans is saying that there is no evidence that Greeks were in the Roman army in large numbers. However, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: if we have no written record of a substantial Greek presence in the Roman army, this is not evidence that Greeks were not in the Roman army. And even if it is true that there were no legions named as or otherwise identified as being Greek, this doesn't mean that there were no Greeks mixed into other legions.
In fact, we do know of at least one cohort of Greeks who fought for the Romans at around this time, in this case a 500-man group of Spartans who fought for the Roman emperor Caracalla from 214 AD. (Sparta - Wikipedia ) They fought for Caracalla in his Parthian War, so they Spartans would have fought in Western Asia rather than Europe, and the Wikipedia article says that “The [Spartan] unit was presumably discharged in 217 after Caracalla was assassinated.” Presumably the word "presumably" means that the actual fate of this unit is not known and that it's possible that the Spartans actually remained in the army and were sent to Gaul or Germania. Beginning in Caracalla's time the Roman army was engaged in an large campaign north and east of Frankfurt apparently culminating in the Battle at the Harzhorn in 235 AD, so why would trained soldiers be disissed i they were willing to serve in, e.g., Germania?
Is it possible that the Swaim line at this time was Spartan? Spartans were Dorians, a group which had entered Greece from the north sometime around 1000 BC in what is known as the “Dorian Invasion” or “the return of the Heraclids” (as the Dorians claimed they were descendants of Heracles and that in migrating to Greece they were merely reclaiming their rightful inheritance). Since the original homeland of E-FGC11450 was probably somewhere north of Greece, and since the timing of this fits with what little we know of the Swaim line, it is indeed possible that the Swaim line was Dorian/Spartan. This is definitely not proven, though.
But the existence of this Spartan cohort in the Roman army does prove that at least some Greeks were in the Roman army at around the time that the Swaim line presumably migrated with the army to the Rhine region.
Getting back to the extended matches, even if my estimated MRCAs turn out to be off by a GD or two, the relative dates of the countries to each other will remain valid, or at least won't be so far off that the above pattern remains. If the MRCA dates are off, it is likely in the direction of the dates being later rather than earlier, since Rome was losing control of the Rhine region by the time the Swaim ancestor migrated there, and not long after that time had withdrawn from it completely.
Here's the same list again, but including only the most recent appearance of each non-western European country:
Country GD MRCA
Greece 20 350 AD
Hungary 29 375 BC
Bulgaria 29 375 BC
Albania 29 375 BC
Macedonia 30 455 BC
Turkey 35 855 BC
Serbia 36 935 BC
This chart makes clear two important points. First, it is clear that the Swaim line lived in Greece for several centuries immediately preceding its migration to the Rhine region. Greece is the only country outside of western Europe to have matches with an MRCA for the 720 years before the Swaim migration to the Rhine region (disregarding the two isolated eastern European matches, who are irrelevant to this issue since the Swaim definitely came from neither of these countries and, as we have read, one of the Arkel line was in fact physically present in one of these countries (Bohemia/Czechia) in the late 900's).
The second point is that there is a clear breakpoint between Greece and the other Balkan countries (and Hungary), at about 375 BC. Greece is the only Balkan country with a match with an MRCA within the last 2,400 years; after 375 BC, there are no other Balkan countries represented by matches. The most likely explanation for this is that the Swaim line had lived in the Balkans north of Greece before 375 BC, and after that time migrated south to Greece. In his 2017 paper entitled “Argonauts of the West Balkan? Origins, spread and distribution of Haplogroup E-V13,” Raf Ceustermans states that “Recent finds of V13 point to the Montenegrin-Serbian-Albanian border regions as a probable candidate for the emergence of V13 and CTS 5856. Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that generally the diversity in V13-groups is larger in the Eastern Balkans (Bulgaria) and that V13 is also found in Macedonia.” Thus, it is possible that the Swaim line originated in the areas known today as Albania or Bulgaria. It should be kept in mind, however, that the Bulgaria and Albania of 375 BC was populated almost exclusively by ethnic Thracians and Illyrians, with no significant Slavic influence, as this was a thousand years before the Slavic migration into the Balkans. Culturally it was different also, since of course the Christian and Islamic religions didn't yet exist, and there were likely very few (if any) Jews living in the Balkans then, either.
Interestingly, there are historic events in the south Balkans around 375 BC that can potentially explain the Swaim migration south to Greece. Civil wars ravaged all of Greece from 431 BC to 332 BC: the Peloponnesian Wars, the Corinthian War, and the Theban-Spartan War. These wars killed many people and devastated Greece finanicially, and would have drawn in people from neighboring regions as mercenaries, speculators, and refugees. And, only couple decades after these wars ended, Alexander the Great, born in Macedonia in northern Greece, rose to power and conducted a series of external wars of conquest, which also would have attracted mercenaries from regions surrounding Greece and Macedonia. Thus, it is easy to see that the Swaim line may have moved south into Greece as a consequence of this century of turmoil and population relocation.
It appears that the Swaim line lived in Greece for more than 700 years (20 generations), and after a few generations undoubtedly the Swaims would have considered themselves to be Greek. And, in fact, autosomally they would have been largely Greek after several generations in Greece, assuming they were not part of some population that remained genetically separate (through endogamy) from the general population.
Pauw said that the Arkel line had lived in Hungary for a relatively short period of time, and that they were “Trojans.” Bruch believed that Trojans were Greek, and Pauw probably believed that also. Thus, Pauw probably believed that the Arkel line originated in Greece. Such a belief is supported by the names that Pauw gives for the family members of Jan and Heyman, which are Greek or probably Greek: Joincus (Jan), Cassandra, Agatumber, and Andronia. Based on the STR data that we currently have, it seems almost certain that the Swaim paternal line is Greek, and also that the Swaims migrated from Greece to the Rhine region at about 350 AD. Since the historical evidence that we have from Pauw indicates that the Arkel line is also Greek, and that the Arkels migrated from Greece to the Rhine region in 346 AD, it is probable that the Swaim line is in fact a branch of the Arkel line, especially since the more recent genealogical evidence also points to that conclusion. I don't consider this to be proof that the Swaim line derives from the Arkel line, but I consider it to be persuasive evidence that it does.
It is entirely possible that the Swaim/Arkel line never lived in Pannonia at all, and that this part of Pauw's history is incorrect. It is possible that Pauw was trying to fit the Arkel history into the Frankish myth and felt obligated to claim that they had lived for a short time in Sycambria. If this is the case, it is quite possible that Jan I and Heyman I did go through Pannonia with the Roman army, or were possibly stationed there, probably in Aquincum. Alternatively, they may instead have traveled up the Adriatic coast into northern Italy and from there went to the Rhine (either way, they would have had to go through Castrum Rauracense/Augusta Raurica to travel down the Rhine, a point the importance of which will be explained later). The lack of more recent matches from Hungary is explained by Pauw's explanation that the “Trojans” with Jan and Heyman had lived in Hungary for less than one generation. Pauw does say they had “many children” (veel kinderen) while there, but Pauw didn't say that these were Jan's children. The “Trojans” who had children there may have Y-DNA that was very different from Jan's. Neither Jan nor any of his ancestors was born in Hungary, and probably none of his descendants. And even if Jan (or other close male relatives) had had children in Hungary, the history of Pannonia/Hungary beginning immediately after Jan's emigration from there was one of constant invasion, war and population dislocation. Ostrogoths, Avars, Magyars, Slavs and Mongols successively ravaged Hungary, so any close relatives may have been killed or migrated south back to the Balkans. More distant ancestors certainly remained in Hungary or returned to Hungary, but the most recent MRCA of these is from 360 BC, so the Swaim line that had branched off from the Hungarian line at the time wouldn't have been very closely related to the Hungarian line in 346 AD.
It is unlikely that the Swaim line had ever lived in Turkey, despite the distant Turkish matches. The Greeks had colonized Anatolia extensively, and these matches are probably a result of one branch of the Swaim line having migrated anciently to one of these colonies and remaining there to the present day. They are cousins, but very distant ones.
I'll leave the issue of the Iberian Jewish matches for a later post, but it is unlikely that anyone from the Swaim line had ever lived in Iberia. The Iberian matches are likely to be descendants of a branch of the Swaim line that migrated to Iberia and at some point became Jewish, or possibly retained a Jewish identity that the Swaim line once had but lost at some point, either in Greece or in western Europe. At around the time of the split in the two lines, both Greece and the Levant were regions within the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, so there was undoubtedly a flow of people back and forth between the Levant and Greece.
A caveat to all of the above is that we are working with limited data, and future matches may pop up that force a revision in the above outline of the early Swaim line. However, as the evidence now stands, the best interpretation of that evidence is that the Swaim line lived in the Balkans for at least 7,000 years, probably first in a regions just north of Greece and then in Greece beginning in about 375 BC.
Altogether, these early extended matches present a probable distant past that is remarkably consistent with Pauw's history of the van Arkel family.
Now let's look at the post-migrant matches. Most of these will be descendants of the migrant himself (hypothetically Jan) or a close paternal relative who either accompanied him (possibly Heyman) or who migrated within a generation of two of Jan's migration (e.g., a father, son, uncle or nephew in the Roman army).
On the following chart I've reversed the genetic distances so that the most distant ones are at the top, and have included only the extended matches up to an MRCA of 1000 AD:
Name/Country of Match Ancestor 37 STR 67 STR 111 STR MRCA
Shurtz (Germany) 6 13 23 110 AD
Johanes Heilmann (Geiselbach?, Germany) 6 13 21 270 AD
Johann Altmeyer (Saarbrücken, Germany) 7 14 21 270 AD
Demetrius Antoniou (Greece) 5 10 20 350 AD
Thomas Sparr (Switzerland – Biel-Benken) 6 10 19 430 AD
Snell (Germany?) 6 11 18 510 AD
Jan Pennebaker (Gorinchem, Holland) 5 9 15 750 AD
Tudhope (Scotland?) 4 7 12 990 AD
Schmid 4 7 12 990 AD
Sulc/solc (Czech/Slovak for “Schultz”) 4 7 12 990 AD
If my calculated TMRCA (Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor) is reasonably accurate, then we actually only have 6 extended matches who are descendants of the Swaim ancestor who migrated from Greece, meaning they should have a GD of 20 or less. This is not many, but considering how few people have tested their Y-DNA (FDNA's Y-DNA database had 758,137 "records" as of July 2019), it isn't surprising.
The only case in which a Swaim match with an MRCA on or later than 346 AD (thus with a GD 20 or less) could come from Greece would be if a Swaim descendant had migrated back to Greece sometime after 346 AD. While this is obviously possible, it appears that historically there was little migration from western Europe to Greece, so that such a "back-migration" in any particular lineage seems unlikely.
(October 21, 2021 update: The above paragraph is inaccurate. There was migration to Greece from Germany during the Middle Ages and later; there were tens of thousands of western Europeans who passed through the Byzantine Empire during the Crusades, some of whom settled in Greece; and Jews from Iberia setted in Greece, primarily Thessalonika (Salonica) after they were expelled by the Christians after the Christian reconquest of Iberia from the Muslims in the very late 1400's. Furthermore, as I'll explain in a future post, I now believe that the Antoniou match's line does in fact represent a back-migration to Greece—in which case Koliopolis and Kokinis would be the most recent of the Greek matches, with MRCA dates of about 190-200 AD.)
This also means that any match with an MRCA earlier than 346 AD who is from western Europe should not be a descendant of the Swaim line, since the Swaim line was not yet in Europe. The only case in which a Swaim line descendant this would be because after it entered Europe. Thus, GD 23 match Shurtz and GD 22 match Johannes Jost Snyder (and GD 21 Altmeyer) should not be descendants of Jan I. However, the process of determining Genetic Distance and MRCAs is far from exact, and for any given branch off the Swaim line, random chance may cause a faster mutation rate than normal, thus causing a falsely early MRCA (or, conversely, a slower mutation rate and falsely late MRCA). The GD difference for Snyder for an MRCA of 190 AD and 350 AD is only a GD of 2/111, and for Shurtz from 110 AD to 350 AD is a GD of 3/111. Therefore, I'm also going to add Shurtz and Snyder onto the list and assume their proper GDs should be closer to 19 or 20 with MRCA's between 350 AD – 430 AD. The same holds true for Johann Altmeyer.
However, another possibility is that their GDs and MRCAs are correct, and they descend from a 1st or 2nd cousin or uncle of Jan I who left Pannonia with him in the Roman army.
Here are the these matches;
Demetrius Antoniou – 350 AD
Antoniou's MRCA of 350 AD is remarkably close to Pauw's migration date for Jan I of 346 AD. If Jan I was born in 328 AD he would have been 18 years old when he left Greece (or wherever the line lived at the time). Jan I may have been born a bit earlier than this, but in any case he would likely have been born within a generation (32 years) of 350 AD. If the Swaim line descends from the Arkel line, the MRCA of Antoniou and me was possibly Jan I's father, or perhaps his father's father, or an uncle or cousin. In Jan I's era the Greeks did not commonly use surnames, so the name "Antoniou" was likely not at use at that time.
Although the Antoniou match did not test SNPs, the administrators of FTDNA's "E-M35 Phylogeny Project" placed Antoniou in the "FGC11450 predicted" category, so this increases the likelihood that he is a good match.
Thomas Sparr – 430 AD
Sparr (Spahr) is the first match with an MRCA dated after Jan I's migration from Pannonia. According to Wikitree, the earliest known ancestor of this match was Thomas Sparr/Spahr, who in 1570 lived in Biel-Benken in Switzerland, 5 miles southwest of Basel (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Sparr-14 ). More interestingly, Biel-Benken is also located about 12 miles west of the Roman military camp of Castrum Rauracense and the city of Augusta Raurica. In other words, Thomas Sparr was born only a few miles from the Roman camp that Jan I and Heyman I had traveled traveled through almost 1,200 years before. It is entirely possible that Jan I and Heyman I were actually stationed in Augusta Rauracense for months or even years; Pauw is silent on the years between 347 and 388.
Jan I would have first entered Castrum Rauracense in 346 or 347, which is a little more than one generation earlier than the MRCA for Sparr. That is only 1 GD difference, which is well within any range of error for any MRCA prediction.
The Wikitree.com entry for “Thomas Sparr (1570)” states that the Sparr family was “of the Reformed faith and joined the Mennonites in America.” I mention this because the ancestors of another Swaim extended match, Pennebakker, were also Mennonites. However, the Pennebakers were Mennonites while they lived in the Netherlands and Germany, whereas the Sparr line appears to have become Mennonite only after arriving in America. "Reformed faith" probably means the Swiss Reformed Church, which is Calvinist.
The Sparr/Spahr match is SNP tested as FGC11450, which confirms that this is likely a true match to the Swaim line rather than an artifact of chance.
Shurtz (Germany) - 110 AD
Heilmann (Geiselbach?, Germany) – 270 AD
Altmeyer (Saarbrücken, Germany) – 270 AD
I've grouped these matches together because all three of them have MRCAs earlier than that of the latest of the Balkan extended matches (Antoniou from Greece, 350 AD). There are a few possible explanations for this. One is that the STRs of their lines mutated faster than average and thus their MRCAs are incorrectly early. The first two of these men, and possibly the third, form a cluster centering on Frankfurt, so it is possible that they share a common ancestor a generation or two below that of Jan I, and if through operation of chance that ancestor had more STR mutations than average, those mutations would have been passed on to the descendants of those two or three men, giving all of them “falsely” early MRCAs.
Another possible explanation is that the MRCA dates are correct, and that these men descend not from Jan I, but from a relatively close cousin or cousins of Jan I who had accompanied Jan I with the Roman army (possibly Heyman I). First cousins are 4 generations removed from each other (counting 2 up to a grandparent and 2 down from the grandparent to the cousin), or 1.6 GDs; second cousins are 6 generations removed, or 2.4 GDs.
A third possible explanation is that Antoniou's MRCA is “falsely” late due to a lower than average number of STR mutations in his line. In this case, however, either my MRCA calculations are off for everyone by a GD or two, or Pauw got the date of migration wrong and it was closer to 270 AD than 346 AD (assuming the Swaim line descend from the Arkel line).
A fourth possible explanation is that the Swaim line did not descend from the Arkel line, and that therefore Pauw's migration date of 346 AD is irrelevant for the Swaim line. But this really resolves nothing regarding the MRCA dates of this cluster being earlier than Antoniou's MRCA date; therefore, it is likely that one of the first three explanations is correct.
For the purposes of this blog I'm assuming that my MRCA dates in general are relatively accurate, but that any individual matches could be off by up to a few generations due to the randomness of STR mutations. Hopefully more matches will show up in the future to help clarify this issue. But in general, these three matches do tend to conform to Pauw's history of the Arkel line. The earliest known ancestor of Heilmann possibly lived quite close to Frankfurt, which was Jan I's and Heyman I's first destination in the lower Rhine region. The match Altmeyer lives in Saarbrücken, which lies halfway between between Pierrepont and Worms (on the Rhine) and lies on what was probably the direct route at that time to the Rhine, which was probably used as a path to regions farther north.
Johann Altmeyer: Although the Swaim-Altmeyer estimated MRCA is before the predicted Immigration date by about 1 GD, this is probably due to the inherent error in the STR estimation process and Altmeyer was very possibly a descendant of Jan I from the earliest generations of Arkels in Lorraine (as always, assuming that the Swaim line descends from the Arkel line).
The FTDNA match listed Johann Altmeyer (1665) as his earliest known ancestor, and listed him as having been born in Saarbrucken, Germany. His listing on Wikitree.com actually has him listed as living in Püttlingen, which is a town located about 15 miles northwest of Saarbrücken.
Püttlingen is also located about 40 miles northeast of Metz and by foot/horseback about 60 miles from Pierrepont. In the Middle Ages Püttlingen was owned by the Bishops of Metz, and we've seen that Pauw indicates that the early generations of Arkels were familiar with the Bishops of Metz. Püttlingen is also located about 6 miles from the Saar River, which is navigable, and also less than 15 miles from the ancient Roman town of Vicus Saravus, which was apparently a crossroads of two Roman roads, one an north-south road from Trier to Strasbourg, the other an east-west road from Metz to Worms. In other words, the Püttlingen/Saarbrücken area was likely an area of some economic and strategic importance.
This match is clearly consistent with Pauw's history of the Arkel line, as Püttlingen is relatively close to Pierrepont and is located very near to the route that the earlier generations of Arkels may have traveled to go from Pierrepont to Frankfurt, Mainz, Cologne, and other Rhine cities and towns. This route would be from Pierrepont to Metz, which would be a hard but reasonable one-day ride by horseback, and then from Metz to Saarbrücken, which would be another hard but reasonable one-day horse ride. From Saarbrücken one could have gone by the old Roman road to Worms, which is located on the west bank of the Rhine. From Worms all the cities on the Rhine could be reached by boat, and no doubt there were also roads paralleling the Rhine. Alternatively, from Saarbrücken they could have taken the old Roman road north to Trier. Trier is on the Moselle, which flows into the Rhine at Koblenz. Also, Manderscheid, where Jan VI died and was buried in 915, is about 38 miles, or a hard day's horseback ride, from Trier.
Thus, Püttingen/Saarbrücken was located about a two-day's hard-but-possible journey from Pierrepont, and was possibly the staging point for two routes, north and east, that the Arkels were likely to have used to travel to cities on the Rhine.
From Saarbrücken the Arkels could also have traveled south to Strasbourg, which is a two day's hard ride and would have probably been on he old Roman road. Pauw doesn't mention that the earlier generations of Arkels ever went to Strasbourg, but Geni.com's listing for Jan III van Arkel (b. 1045-1085) was born and died in Strasbourg. This is somewhat confusing since by this time the Arkels were living in the Land of Arkel, but for now I'm only pointing out that Saarbrücken was a place that the Arkels had most likely very familiar with.
Shurtz: I previously believed that the earliest known ancestor of Shurtz came from Darmstadt in Germany, but that was incorrect information due to my mistake in confusing the match Shurtz with a different Shurtz listed in FTDNA's “Shurts Shurtz, etc.” surname project. The Shurtz in that project whose ancestor came from Darmstadt does have the haplotype E-V13, but his STR matches indicate that the Swaim MRCA with him is much further in the past than with the Swaim match Shurtz. The Swaim match Shurtz is not listed in the FTDNA “Shurts” surname project.
When I say that Shurtz is a Swaim match, I mean two things. First, I mean that he is a match with an MRCA who probably was born after the Swaim immigrant ancestor moved from Greece to the Rhine region, which was about 350 AD; this would make him a descendant of that immigrant ancestor. FTDNA would not necessarily show him as a match and would consider him an “extended” match, meaning a match with a greater Genetic Distance than they report to their clients as “matches.” Second, in this case I also mean that he was in fact an FTDNA match with me, although only at the 12-STR level.
The Shurtz match doesn't include a great deal of information about his ancestors, but he does provide enough of a family tree that I was able to find a more complete family tree on the familysearch.org website. The paternal line leads back to George Michael Schortz (1728 Germany – 1791 Pennsylvania). Schortz immigrated to America in 1749 on the Ann, probably from Rotterdam, although its last port from Europe appears to be the city of Cowes on the Isle of Wight in England. Descendants in America apparently went by the surname variations of Shortz, Schurtz, Scherz and Schwartz.
The record on the Shurtz line apparently ends at George Michael Schortz and doesn't include the town or even region of his birth. All we can be reasonably certain of is that he was German.
Johannes Heilman: I'm not certain of the identity or location within the Rhine region of this match's ancestor. I've found 3 Johannes Heilman(n)s who are potentially the ancestor: one born in 1717, one in 1716, and one in 1715. The match listed his ancestor's birth year as 1717, and this is the Johannes Heilmann who lived in Geiselbach.
The 1716 Johannes Heilman lived in Nordheim, a few miles north of Stuttgart. Nordheim is 93 miles southeast of Frankfurt, and is located about 40 miles east of the Rhine, and thus is still well within the region that generations of Arkels may have traveled in.
The 1715 Johannes Heilman lived in Zuzenhausen, which is 25 miles from Nordheim and 73 miles from Frankfurt. It is also about twenty miles from the Rhine.
I don't have enough information to prove which of these 3 men is the ancestor of the match (or whether it's someone else entirely), but all 3 of them are consistent with Pauw's history, both chronologically and geographically.
The FTDNA project page on which the Heilman match is listed also lists another man surnamed “Hileman,” who matches Heilman at 1 GD for 25 STRs (the highest level that Hileman tested). Both “Hileman” and “Heilman” are probably Anglicizations of “Heilmann.”
A brief look at the possible history of the Heilmann surname brings up another of the elusive but persistent connections to Jewishness in the Swaim line. First, “Heilman” clearly sounds similar to “Heyman,” which most Dutch sources spell “Heijman.” It is possible that Heilman was derived from Heyman, the change possibly occurring because Heilman means something in Franconian/German (salvation-man or "whole, undamaged-man"), whereas Heyman does not. We've previously discussed the possible Jewish origin of the name Heyman.
Some sources also say that the surname Heilman is Jewish, or sometimes Jewish:
Forbears.io: “(German) The sound or healthy man; descendant of Hellman, a German Jewish synonym for Samuel (God hath heard); descendant of Heilman (salvation, man).”
Wikipedia.com: “Heilman is a surname, found in particular in the U.S., either as a variation of the German/Alsatian surname Heilmann belonging to some protestant families in the south-west of Germany, or from other origins (“heilman” seems to be in Poland the surname of some Jewish families....”).
The match Heilman, if he was from Nordheim or Zuzenhausen, would in fact be from south-western Germany, so he could have been from one of the protestant Heilman/Hellman families mentioned in Wikipedia, rather than Jewish. This is the most likely scenario.
It is also possible that the surname for this particular Heilman is a direct derivation from the given name Heyman, which, as we've seen, was a traditional name in the Arkel line. In the patronymic naming system the son of "Heyman" would be "Heymansson," which could subsequently have been shortened to "Heyman" as a surname and later changed to "Heylman/Heiman/n."
Although the Heilman match did not test SNPs, the administrators of FTDNA's "E-M35 Phylogeny Project" placed Heilman in the "FGC11450 predicted" category, so this increases the likelihood that he is a good match.
Snell – 510 AD
Snell was an FTDNA match at a GD of 2/25 STRs, but not at any other level. Snell could be English, but it could also be an Anglicization of the German Schnell. With an estimated TMRCA of 520 AD, the Arkels would have been living in Pierrepont. Pauw says that Jan III, son of Ritzaert, was born in 542 AD. This means that Ritzaert was probably born in about 510 AD, and his father Heyman II, in about 478. Since none of these dates is exact, either Heyman III or Ritzaert could have been the MRCA of Snell and Arkel/Swaim. But recall that Ritzaert had at least two brothers—Alaert and Olivier—and possibly a third, Reynault (Sinte Reynault). Any of these brothers of Ritzaert could also be the MRCA.
Surnames were generally not used anywhere in western Europe at this time, so “Snell” was adopted later, probably many centuries later. At that time the ancestor of this match was probably living in Germany or in German or Franconian-speaking France or Luxemburg. Although the Arkels may have been living in Pierrepont, Pauw says that Heyman II married Verana, the daughter of the “king” of Cologne. Thus, Heyman II had probably spent a lot of time in what is now Germany, even though he lived in what is now France. It's also important to realize how close Pierrepont is to what is today Germany. Pierrepont is only 40 miles from the German border, and Perl, Germany, and about 180 miles from Cologne. Heyman II, as well as Ritzaert, about whom Pauw says almost nothing, may have spent many years in Germany fighting for his overlords and possibly producingn illegitimate children about whom we know nothing.
We don't know anything specific about Snell, so we can't fit him specifically into Pauw's story, but we can at least say that he isn't inconsistent with it.
Snell, like Shurtz, appeared as a match at one of the lower STR levels, in Snell's case at the 25 STR level. He did not appear at a lower or higher level, but as with Shurtz, his appearance at one of the lower levels does indicate that the matches at those levels can be meaningful.
Jan Pennebaker – 750 AD
This extended match is only tested at the 37-STR level, which is not optimal for determining a true relationship through a common ancestor. However, since the earliest known ancestor lived in the Land of Arkel, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of this being a true match.
The earliest known ancestor of Pennebaker came from Gorinchem, Holland, in the 1500's. Gorinchem was probably built by the Arkels, and in the heyday of the Lords of Arkel their castle there was their primary family home. As mentioned earlier, it is located on the Waal/Merwede?Rhine just a couple miles south of the city of Arkel, where Jan IV had declared that he would “altijt te blijven en te woonen” (“reside there for all time.”). Gorinchem is pronounced “Gorkum” and was in the past often spelled that way, or as “Gorcum.” According to the Netherlands Wikipedia site, the name means “Gorinks Heem,” meaning “Gorink's Home,” which further means that it was the residence of the Goringa, who were the family or followers of a person named Goro. I couldn't find much information about the names similar to Goro that are relevant to the Netherlands other than a famous physican from the 16th century who has the latinized name Goropius, which was derived from the name of the village he was born in, Gorp in North Brabant near the Belgian border. However, the name doesn't seem to be associated in any way with the Arkels, and I think the Netherlands Wikipedia entry for “Gorp” probably provides the true explanation for the origin of the name. According to this entry, the name of the town Gorp was also called Gorop, and is derived from the word goor, which means dirty, filthy, squalid, and which “indicates a muddy or swampy area of land.” Gorinchem, like most of the Batavian island, was definitely swampy and muddy, perhaps more so than most as it was located very close to the Waal, which must have often overflowed from its banks. Thus, the name would not mean the home of a man called Goro or Gorink, but rather “Swampy Home.” Since there seems to be no record of a man named Goro, this seems a more likely etymology.
However, there is another possiblity for the origin of the name, although this is mere speculation. This is that the name "Gorinchem" derives from the name of the Viking Rorik, who in the 800's ruled much of this area from his base in Dorestad. Van der Tuuk in a paper on the Danes in Dorestad says that Rorik “probably wandered about different fulcrums in Frisia and must have left the administration in Dorestad to a notaris (deputy), although he must have had an abode in Dorestad. But Scandinavian rulers were not accustomed to living in a vicus...” A vicus meant a settlement. meaning in this case Dorestad, so what van der Tuuk is saying is that Rorik may have lived in different places in the countryside of the area he ruled. I'm not certain whether or not the word “fulcrums” was translated accurately from the original Dutch, but it may have meant that he stayed in different important areas of his realm. One of these important areas may have been the current location of today's Gorinchem, which is at the confluence of the Waal and the Linge, and could have been reached from Dorestad by traveling about 8 miles overland (south) to the Linge, and then sailing down the Linge to the Waal. The name “Rorik” is actually and anglicization of the Old Norse “Hrsrekr” or “Hrørkr.” The initial “Hr-” sound is not the same as the English “R,” but is a voiced, guttural sound that would sound to American something like clearing one's throat. Now, the Dutch “G” sound is actually somewhat similar, sounding more like an “H” or the German guttural “Ch-” (go to the Wikipedia site “Gorinchem” to listen to the pronunciation, which to my ears sounds very much like the English “H,” although somewhat guttural). Thus, the Danish “Rorik” sounds pretty close to the Dutch “Gorik,” and so my speculation is that it is possible that Rorik had a residence in the location of today's Gorinchem at which he occasionally stayed; this would have given him immediate access to the Waal, which was downstream from Tiel. This would have been useful because Tiel was overtaking Dorestad (on the Lek river) as the area's primary trading route to England and Scandinavia. Locals may have called this residence “Rorik's Home,” perhaps spelled by them “Gorik's Heem,” which could have then been later shortened to "Gorinchem." Gorinchem was often spelled phonetically as "Gorcum, " which to my ears sounds like “Horcum. Even if this was not the origin of the name, Rorik and the Arkels would have been neighbors and would have known each other quite well, either as allies or enemies (or both at various times).
(June 20, 2021 note: There is another possible explanation of who Gorinchem was named after, also grounded in the history of the time of Frankish king Dagobert I, who took large areas of West Frisia from the Frisians for the Franks and, according to Pauw, gave the Land of Arkel to Jan III. This man was Saint Gaugericus (French: Gery, Dutch: Gau or Gorik). In 585 AD Gorik was elected Bishop of Cambrai, France (Kamerijk in Dutch). The Wikipedia article “Gaugericus” says that in 584 Gorik “paid his respects” to King Chlothar II, the new lord of Cambrai, after the death of Chlothar's father. Chlothar was the older brother of the next king, Dagobert I, who was born in 603 and was king after Chlothar. Gorik died in 619, when Dagobert I was 16 years of age, so it is probable that Dagobert personally knew Gorik, possible quite well. Because Gorik was a respected and famous man, and had “devoted himself to fighting paganism,” it would not be surprising that Dagobert and/or Jan van Arkel would have named one of the first new towns in the Land of Arkel after him.)
The Pennebakker surname has numerous spelling variations, which I won't bother to list. There are branches of the family in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky, and there is some uncertainty as to how these lines are related, although all lines are believed to have come originally from Gorinchem and from there to Flomborn, Germany for about five generations, and then to Pennsylvania in 1699 or thereabouts. The earliest known ancestor was Jan de Pennebakker, was born in Gorinchem in about 1530 AD. Pennebakker is an occupational surname meaning “tile baker” (because tiles were fired in a kiln). Jan and his wife were either born into the new Mennonite religion or converted to it. The Mennonites were a branch of the Protestant sect of Anabaptism, which was started by Menno Simons of Friesland.
The Netherlands, like almost all of Europe, had been Catholic until the mid-1500's when Protestantism quickly spread throughout much of northern Europe, including much of the Netherlands. An inquisition in the Netherlands was established by the Catholic Church in 1523 to stamp out the rival Christian sects, the dominant sect of which, in the Netherlands, was Calvinism. This, however, did nothing to stop the spread of Protestantism. The religious tensions ratcheted up when in 1556 the ownership of the the Netherlands passed to king Philip II of Spain. Philip intensified the persecution of Protestants, making it a capital offense to be a Protestant, and the Protestants resisted his rule. In the 1560's Anabaptist and Mennonite preachers illegally held outdoor sermons which attracted large crowds. In 1566 a massive wave of religious rioting (called the Beeldenstorm) overtook much of the Netherlands, in which Catholic churches, monasteries, and priest's houses were ransacked and images, statues, and other possessions were destroyed, urinated upon, and worse, inflaming Catholic passions. This didn't happen everywhere, and apparently it didn't happen in the Land of Arkel, if the following map from Wikipedia is accurate. The Beeldenstorm of course provoked Philip II into further acts of repression, including in 1567 the establishment of a tribunal called the Council of Troubles which sought out suspected heretics and insurrectionists and had them executed hundreds of them, including the Count of Egmont, whose execution helped to spark the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Netherlands, which began in 1568.
This is the background against which Jan Pennebakker and his wife found themselves in 1569. Although details of their arrest appear to be unknown, the Pennebakkers were probably arrested by the Council of Troubles in 1569 who executed them as heretics. Jan's wife was drowned in a tub of water while Jan was forced to watch, after which he was burned at the stake. Their son, Cornelius, and probably other family, fled to Flomborn, Germany, where the next five generations of Pennebakkers were born. In 1699 a Heinrich (Hendrick/Henry) Pennebakker line left Flomborn Germany and immigrated to Germantown, Pennyslvania. Then, in 1730, a Johann Friedrich Pennebakker and his son Weiant moved from Flomborn to Upper Hanover, Pennsylvania.
There is uncertainty as to the relationship between these two different lines of Pennebakkers. Here is what Paul Pennebakker, a family genealogist, wrote in 1999 about this: “The true relationship between Friedrich PFANNEBECKER and Heinrich PANNEBECKER is not clear, with the probability that the link is before they came to America. Some say they were brothers, while others speculate they were nephew and uncle. The association of Friedrich and Weiant I with the families of Heinrich PANNEBECKER and others families from Flomborn and Kriegsheim, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany is shown in the commonality of given names between the families. Among the descendants of Heinrich, Werner, and Weiant I, the tile maker tradition is universal and identical and the family shield is identical. The PENNEBAKER lineage from Weiant (I) to his many descendants is unbroken and essentially not disputed.” The descendants of both lines now live in many states, but in the late 1700's four of five of Weiant's sons moved to Kentucky, and these lines are known as the “Kentucky Pennebakkers.” (http://home.gs.verio.net/~pepbaker/pennebkr.htm)
After this was written, the uncertainty about the relationship between the two Pennebakker immigrants was clarified to some degree by Y-DNA analysis when the Pennebakkers established and FTDNA Surname Project that included one member descended from the Friedrich/Weiant line (“Kentucky Pennebakkers”) and four members from the Heinrich line. This testing proved that the two Pennebakker lines have two different Y-DNA haplotypes despite having the same surname. Since both families came from the small town of Flomborn bearing the same surname and having commonality of given names, it is clear that the two familes are in fact related. However, it is now clear that there are two different paternal lines using the same surname, so that there must have been a “non-paternity event” that probably occurred in either Germany or the Netherlands.
The results show that Heinrich-line Pennebakkers are haplogroup R-M269 and that the Friedrich/Weiant-line Pennebakkers (the “Kentucky Pennebakkers) are E-M35. The Swaim extended match Pennebakker is, of course, from the the E-M35 “Kentucky” line, which was further confirmed by the person in control of the Swaim extended match's Y-DNA, who told me that the match was from the “Kentucky Pennebaker branch.” SNP testing would probably show that the “terminal SNP” of this line is E-FGC11450, confirming that it is a true match rather than false “convergence” match. Even without such testing, once again invoking Occam's Razor, it seems very likely that the match is true, since both lines lived only a few miles from each other during the 1500's in the Land of Arkel.
In this blog we are assuming that the MRCA of an extended match came from the same general location as the earliest known ancestor of that match. However, with the Pennebakker match we have some information that this might not be true. This information comes from a statement written by the Pennebakker genealogist Paul Pennebaker, who was referred to earlier. He wrote: “A mid-1300's family legend implies that the PANNEBAKKERS fled to Gorinchem (Gorcum), Netherlands from Gaul to escape war-torn and plague-ridden central Europe.” (PENNEBAKER History (archive.org)
This information must be viewed with a certain degree of skepticism, since this “family legend” would have had to have been passed down, presumably orally, generation after generation, for 20 or more generations. This is certainly possible, so it cannot simply be dismissed, but it must surely be pretty rare. It would be useful to have more details about this “family legend” and how it was passed down, but the author is now deceased, and that information may have died with him.
This “family legend” forces us to consider two alternative scenarios, one in which the “family legend” is true and the Pennebakker line came to the Land of Arkel from France in the 1300's, and one in which the “family legend” is not true and we don't know how the Pennebakker got to the Land of Arkel and therefore we are assuming they were there at least by the MRCA date of 750 AD. Since we don't know which scenario is correct, we must consider both.
Scenario 1: Pennebakker Line is from France
The first scenario is that the “family legend” is true, and the Pennebakkers were living in the area of today's France (Gaul) before the 1300's and then moved to the Land of Arkel sometime in the 1300's, where they remained until the late 1500's. Since the MRCA of the Swaim line and Pennebakker line lived in about 750 AD, this scenario would mean that the MRCA of the two lines was probably living somewhere in France at the time of the divergence of the lines. What is fascinating about this scenario is how well it fits into Pauw's Arkel history, assuming (as always in the blog post) that the Swaim line descends from the Arkel line. The MRCA date of 750 AD is just an estimate, and if use the date range of 1 GD in either direction, we get a 160-year spread of from 670 AD to 830 AD. Recall that Jan IV was forced to flee from Pierrepont in France to the Land of Arkel in either 689 AD or 694 AD. Both of these dates lie within the MRCA date range, leaving us with the plausible scenario that the Swaim/Pennebakker line split off from the Arkel line at some time just Jan IV's move to Arkel. Thus, the Pennebakker line's progenitor might have been Jan IV's paternal uncle, brother, or son who remained in Pierrepont when Jan IV moved to Arkel. The line moved to Arkel about 650 years later, which would likely mean that the line had kept in contact with its cousin line in Arkel throughout the generations. It is true that there was war and disease in France in the mid-1300: the Hundred Years' War with England was played out in France for much of that century, and the Black Plague burned through France in the mid-century. Less than a century after the Pennebakker move to Arkel, the Jan V van Arkel lost the Arkelse Oorlogen with the Count of Holland and the Count of Holland imprisoned Jan V until his death in 1428 and stripped him of all power and most possessions. His only legitimate son Willem was killed in 1417 in an attempt to regain the Arkel's lost power. However, two bastard male sons, Otto and Dirk, did exist and would of course have carried the van Arkel Y-DNA. And the presumption is that the Swaim line (and den Hartog lines) came from Otto's grandson Claes.
There is another interesting possibility regarding the Pennebakker “family legend.” This is that it was in the mid-1300's that Otto I van Arkel (1330-1396) married Elisabeth (Isabelle) de Bar-Pierrepont, the daughter of Thibaut de Bar and Marie de Dampierre-Namur, both from France. Elisabeth was apparently born in Hagestein, which was either inside the Land of Arkel or just outside of it. I'm not sure why she was born there rather than in France; possibly her family had moved temporarily to near their cousins in Holland to escape the Hundred Years' War in France, or some plague. Possibly they were accompanied by a relative who was the progenitor of the Pannebakker line (possibly a descendant of a brother of Heyman IV, who died fighting Saxons). If so, this explains the Pennebakker “family legend,” and resolves the seeming coincidence that the legend claims the Pennebakkers came to Arkel in the mid-1300's, which was just the time when Otto I married a Bar-Pierrepont.
There is another possibility which is that the “family legend” referred to an even older event, and that the date of the Pennebakker line's arrival in Arkel was actually much earlier than the 1300's. The “family legend” could possibly have been referring to Jan IV's flight to Arkel in 689-694. There was no “war” involved with Jan IV's move to Arkel, but there was certainly a conflict with a lord whom Jan ended up killing, followed by a dramatic and no doubt nerve-wracking flight from France to evade retaliation for the killing. In this case, it likely that the Swaim/Pennebakker line was living in Arkel in 750 when it split into the separate Swaim and Pennebakker lines. In this case, it would be more likely that the Swaim line did descend from the Arkel line, since the Land of Arkel at that time was probably only lightly populated.
Scenario 2: Pennebakker Line is Not from France
If the “Family Legend” is not true and the Pennebakker line before the 1300's did not live in the region of what is today France, then it is possible that the Pennebakker line at the time of the MRCA of Swain and Pennebakker lines (750 AD) was living in the Land of Arkel. If he was not living in the Land of Arkel at the time of the split in the lines, then we must explain how the two lines, which split in 750 AD, ended up both living in the Land of Arkel 750 years later, in the 1500's. If the lines had drifted apart at any point after 750 AD, then it is unlikely that they would have both ended up in the Land of Arkel 750 years later. The Land of Arkel is just a small area of land in the Netherlands, and the Netherlands itself is just a small area within the entire Rhine region. Of course, there are many possible explanations for why the two lines might reunite in the Land of Arkel 750 years after they had split off from one another, but none of them are as likely as if the lines had split in 750 AD in the same place that they both later lived at in the 1500's. In the end, we simply don't know where the MRCA was living at the time of the split in the lines, which is why in this post we are assuming that the MRCA lived in or near the location where the earliest known ancestor of the extended match lived. In this Pennebakker's case, that is the Land of Arkel.
Tudhope – 990 AD
Tudhope appears to be a Scottish name, and I don't know anything about his ancestry. It is worth pointing out, however, that the great-grandson of Maria van Arkel, the daughter of Jan V van Arkel, the last Lord of Arkel, was King James III of Scotland (through his mother Maria of Gelderland). It is possible that when Maria of Gelderland went to Scotland to marry the king, she brought some of her family with her, including a male cousin with “van Arkel” Y-DNA. However, that is just speculation (and, again, would make sense only if the Swaims descended from the Arkels). There may be a more prosaic explanation. The Netherlands in the 1500's-1600's was in turmoil from its war with Spain, which in large degree was a religious war. There was a lot of population movement, and the Netherlands was generally on friendly terms with England and Scotland as both were protestant. A Swaim/Arkel from this time could have moved to Scotland for one of many reasons, including as traders, to escape punishment for a crime, to flee from creditors, as a merchant mariner, or other reasons. There was a “Scots Brigade” of 300 Scots who fought for the Dutch in Holland in the early 1570's in the ongoing 80 Year's War. In short, although we know nohing abut the origin of Tudhope, there were many opportunities for someone from the Netherlands to relocate to Scotland. Most people in the Netherlands used the Patronymic naming system until the 1800's, so a man who moved to Scotland might well adopt a Scottish surname since he lacked a Dutch surname.
Schmid – 990 AD
Schmid is clearly German, but we know nothing about him. His MRCA is 1000 AD, which is a just after Heyman VI claimed lordship of Arkel. Before this Heyman had been fighting for Otto I, King of Germany, so he'd probably spent most of his youth in Germany. Any illegitimate children born in Germany (East Francia) before the relocation to the Land of Arkel would thus likely have descendants living in Germany with German surnames. We don't know anything about Schmid, so we have nothing from him to compare with Pauw's history, other than that Heyman VI had spent time in Germany at around the time of the Swaim-Schmid MRCA.
Sulc – 990 AD
Sulc/Solc is the Bohemian (Czech) name for Scultz, so we can assume the earliest known member of the family had lived in what is now the Czech Republic, or somewhere close to there. Sulc has a MRCA of 1000 AD, which is just about a generation after Foppo I was in Bohemia in the 950's fighting Boleslaus for Otto I. So it is possible that Foppo I was the Swaim-Sulc MRCA.
Although the Heilman match did not test SNPs, the administrators of FTDNA's "E-M35 Phylogeny Project" placed Sulc in the "FGC11450 predicted" category, so this increases the likelihood that he is a good match.
Conclusions
After presenting Pauw's history, Bruch wrote: “We come now to be faced with the question: is this chronicle reliable? or perhaps to put it more correctly, to what extent is it reliable?” Bruch then goes on at some length about events that occurred after the time that this post is interested in, and then he wrote (my translation):
“In the first chapters of the Kronijcke [history] Pauli [Pauw] uses information from his Chronicon Universale [a general history], in which the lords of Arkel may not be mentioned, but where Pauli could easily insert them in the adaptation of his Kronijcke. The generations of the lords of Arkel before the time of Heiman [VI] and Gella [Gilla] is fantasy, but he borrows the events in which they occur from other sources. He added the story of the Trojans for completeness, and with relatively few tools he still manages to make a plausible story. The Anonymous [a history of the Arkels written by an unknown source] only knows of the Arkel pedigree that goes through Hungary and Germany and leads to Holland, whereas Pauw adds a journey through France [Pierrepont]. Relationships with branches of the family from Aquitaine and Hungary are postulated mostly with evidence from a similarity in coats of arms. Finally Pauw takes us from France via Lorraine to Germany, leading us to the point where Anonymous began....”
Thus, Bruch is saying that all of Pauw's early history of the Arkels was simply made up by Pauw and is not based on credible sources. This may be true, but we can't simply accept it as true because Bruch said it was true. How do we know that Bruch is more reliable than Pauw? Pauw was four and a half centuries to the events he describe than was Bruch, and Pauw undoubtedly had access to sources that are unknown or lost to Bruch.
In fact, other than the "journey through France," as Bruch calls the Arkel's time in Pierrepont," the history of the Swaim line seems to be quite consistent with Pauw's history of the Arkel line. And as to "journey through France," there is the match from Saarbrücken, which is located on the border of France, only 50 miles from Metz and 90 miles from Pierrepont. Thus, even that "journey" is possibly accounted for.
Here's a chart in which I've adjusted the MRCAs of Heilmann and Altmeyer to be 1 GD later than his predicted MRCA, and Sparr's to be 1 GD earlier. I've also placed a new match, Adám of Hungary, into the chart and adjusted his MRCA to be 2 GDs earlier than predicted (see the December 12, 2020 Match Update at the end of this post for explanation). These MRCA adjustments should all be well within any range of error for estimating GD/MRCA.
Name/Country of Match Ancestor 111 STR MRCA
Demetrius Antoniou (Greece) 20 350 AD
Adám (Szirma, Hungary) 20 350 AD
Thomas Sparr (Switzerland – Biel-Benken) 20 350 AD
Johanes Heilmann (Geiselbach?, Germany) 20 350 AD
Johann Altmeyer (Saarbrücken, Germany) 20 350 AD
Jan Pennebaker (Gorinchem, Holland) 15 750 AD
Schmid 12 990 AD
Sulc/Solc (Czech/Slovak) 12 990 AD
These matches show an amazing agreement with Pauw's early Arkel history. Here's a chart placing the Swaim Y-DNA/MRCA data in the framework of Pauw's history of the Arkel line:
Pauw's History Swaim Y-DNA MRCA
Greece <346 Greece <350
Pannonia/Hungary 346 Hungary 350
Switzerland (Augst) 346 Switzerland (Beil-Benken/Augst) 350
Frankfurt, Germany 346-388 Geiselbach (near Frankfurt) 350
Pierrepont, Lorraine 388-694 Saarbrücken (near Lorraine) 350
Arkel, Holland 694+ Arkel, Holland (Gorinchem) 750
Bohemia/Czechia 950-60 Bohemia/Czechia 990
This is a limited number of extended matches, but the agreement between Pauw's history and my estimated Swaim ancestry is, again, amazingly close. Thus, despite the inherent problems with my approach to identifying extended matches and determining MRCA dates, every one of the matches that I identified within this time range has an ancestor that lived quite close to where the Arkel line lived at the same time.
But unless this is merely a sequence of coincidences, the following three things are likely to be true:
1 - Pauw's history of the early Arkel line is not necessarily a fantasy that he manufactured as Bruch believed, but may be based on actual documentary evidence; and
2 - My method of determining extended matches and MRCA dates for those matches may be generally valid; and
3 – The Swaim line may have descended from the Arkel line
It is also possible that #1 and #2 above are true, but that #3 is not, if we assume that the family lineages of most Roman soldiers who ended up in the Rhine region during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire had generally the same experiences throughout the early generations. Most Roman soldiers at this time who came from the Balkans probably did go through Castrum Rauracense/Augst/Biel-Benken, and most probably were assigned to posts near Frankfurt. And many may have ended up in the Rhine delta that today is known as the Netherlands. And some of their branches may have ended up in Czechia, the border of which is only a couple hundred miles east of Frankfurt. So the seeming coincidence might just be common circumstance. However, it is nonetheless amazing that the evidence shows that both the Swaim and Arkel lines seem to have come from Greece, and that both lines ended up living in not only in Holland, but also within the Land of Arkel, which in Holland, is certainly at the outer limits of coin. Or, perhaps because they were Greek, the two lines had an ongoing relationship over the generations which led both of them to end up in the Land of Arkel.
We have probably wrung as much information from Swaim Y-DNA as is possible at this time, but as more Y-DNA matches trickle in through the years, we will probably be able to get a better understanding of distant history of the Swaim line. Finding extended matches is harder than it should be, but perhaps in the future FTDNA will allow its users to examine the extended match data. Such a function would cost FTDNA almost nothing, although if the reason that they do not allow it today is to protect the privacy of its users, then perhaps it never will provide such a function. It would also be useful if all of the Y-DNA databases merged into one super-database, but in a competitive, for-profit environment that's unlikely unless one company buys out the other companies.
Swaim Line Synopsis
The Swaim extended DNA matches are limited in number but are all consistent with Pauw's history of the Arkel lineage. If the Y-DNA matches I was able to locate are representative of the matches as a whole, and if my computed MRCAs as relatively accurate, the history of the Swaim line goes something like this:
Before 350 AD
The Swaim line lived in Greece for some unknown length of time, probably hundreds and possibly thousands of years. Since the E-V13 haplogroup was probably formed in the southern Balkans about 8,000 years ago, it is likely that the Swaim line had lived in the southern Balkans since at least about 6000 BC.
350 AD
The Swaim line made its first great migration, from the Balkans to the Rhine region, possibly passing through Augusta Rauracense in what is today Augst, Switzerland. The line may have remained in Switzerland for months or years, or possibly only overnight, before following the Rhine downstream to the north.
350 AD - 750 AD
The Swaim line lived in the Rhine region of what is today Germany, possibly mostly in the Frankfurt-Mainz region. The line, or a branch of it, may also have lived a bit further south, in the region between Stuttgart and Heidelberg. The line, or a branch of it, may also have lived a bit further west of Frankfurt, in the region of today's Saarbrucken.
750 AD - 1660 AD
At about 750 AD the line made its second great migration, from Germany to Holland--specifically to what later became known as the Land of Arkel. The Swaim line remained here for 900 years. However, either a member of the line or a member of a branch may have visited or moved to Bohemia (today's Czech Republic).
1661 AD
The Swaim line made its third great migration from the Land of Arkel in Holland to New Netherland, which in a few years became New York. From there the line branched out to the north, west, and south, in both America and Canada.
That we are able to recreated from Y-DNA evidence the Swaim paternal line's migration route from, from before 350 AD to 1661 AD, is quite amazing. It would have much easier to accomplish, and probably more accurate, if FTDNA had made extended match data available to its users. Presumably they do not do so out of privacy concerns, but even anonymized extended matches, out to 30-40 Generational Distances for 111 STRs (and an equivalent distance for lower STR levels) would be useful.
Beyond the Swaim line's history, my goal was to determine how closely the Swaim line's history coincided with the Arkel line's early history as outlined by Pauw. This was meant as an indirect means of trying to determine the likelihood that the Swaim line did in fact descend from the Arkel line; the closer the two lines coincided chronologically and geographically, the more likely it would be that they were in fact the same line. There were two potential problems with this approach. One was that my method of identifying extended Y-DNA matches and determining the Time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor of those matches might be too flawed to determine a TMRCA with enough precision. The second and probably more serious potential problem was in the accuracy of Pauw's history of the Arkels, which might very well have been based on mere fantasy.
Both of these problems are still serious issues. However, as we've seen, all of the Swaim extended matches I've located do in fact coincide quite well with Pauw's history of the Arkel line, both chronologically and geographically. The Swaim line has a match whose earliest known ancestor lived very close to Augusta Rauracense, and the calculated TMRCA is very close in time to the year given by Pauw (346 AD). The Swaim line has at least two matches whose earliest known ancestors lived very close to Frankfurt, and although their TMRCAs are 160 years and 240 years earlier than Pauw's general time that the Arkels first arrived in Frankfurt, these time differences can simply be due to imprecision in my process for determining TMRCAs by using STRs; in any event, they indicate that the Swaim line was likely in the Frankfurt region at the same time the Arkels were, in the fourth and fifth centuries, at least. The Swaim line also has a match whose earliest known ancestor lived in Gorinchem, Holland, with a TMRCA of 750 AD, which is consistent with Pauw's claim that the Arkels had first colonized the Land of Arkel (in which Gorinchem resides) in about 689-694 AD. The Swaim line also has a match whose surname indicates that he is Czech or Slovakian, with a TMRCA of 990 AD, which is within a few decades of when Heyman VI of the Arkel line was in Bohemia.
Thus the times and places where the Swaim line lived, as reconstructed from Y-DNA data, matches very closely with the times and places that Pauw claimed the Arkel line lived. This doesn't prove that the Swaim line is descended from the Arkel line, but it does indicate that it is plausible. If the Swaim line did not descend from the Arkel line, then members of the two lines must have bumped into each other now and again, perhaps in Greece, in the Rhine region around Frankfurt, and in the Land of Arkel. I believe that if the Pennebaker TMRCA can be established more conclusively, this would be very strong evidence that the two lines were the same at that time, because it is likely that very few people lived in the Land of Arkel in the 700's, and most of those who did were probably Arkels.
The only part of Pauw's history that the Swaim matches possibly don't support is that the van Arkels lived for several generations in Pierrepont in Lorraine. If the Swaim line had lived in France for several generations, we would expect to see more matches from France, or more matches with surnames that appear to be French, with MRCA's between 388 AD and around 900 AD. The closest match with a seemingly French surname is at Genetic Distance of 27, with an estimated MRCA of 210 BC, or about 600 years before Jan 1's migration to Germany. That match also appears to be Jewish, but that isn't necessarily a disqualifying factor. However, there is another probable French match at a GD of 28 and MRCA of 280 BC, and then a few more-distant matches. These matches are too distant to have split off from the Swaim/Arkel line in western Europe, so they probably indicate a common ancestor from Greece/Balkans, one descendant of which later went to Gaul with the Roman army.
However, the lack of French matches is not at all contrary to the theory that the Swaims descend from the Arkels, as there are various reasons why Swaims might not have French matches. The most convincing reason is that home DNA Testing is actually illegal in France, with violators being subject to a ridiculously high fine of €3,750, so there is no doubt this law must have a chilling effect on DNA testing--even if, as it seems, nobody has yet been actually been fined. Of course, many French people do ignore the law and illegally test their DNA anyway. (https://www.thelocal.fr/20181220/french-ban-on-dna-testing-cant-stop-the-craze, https://www.statnews.com/2019/11/14/france-consumer-genetic-testing-ban/) This ban is probably meant as an extension France's ban on paternity testing, a violation of which is punishable by a fine quadruple the other fine (€15,000). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_paternity_testing#:~:text=Private%20DNA%20paternity%20testing%20is,%22the%20peace%20of%20families.%22). These laws appear to be designed to force a husband to accept the costs (psychological and financial) of raising another man's child by his unfaithful wife. And, of course, these laws might very well explain the lack of Swaim Y-DNA matches from France. Y-DNA testing in particular, as opposed to autosomal testing, might be impacted since Y-DNA testing, more so than autosomal testing, could possibly be characterized as "paternity" testing.
The Altmeyer match from Saarbrücken could also be considered as consistent with a match from Pierrepont, since it is located on the border of France, 50 miles from Metz and 90 miles from Pierrepont.
Also, the Pennebakker "family legend," which claims that the Pennebakker line moved to the Land of Arkel from France in the mid-1300's, is also consistent with the Arkel line living in Pierrepont.
Another possibility is that the Arkels never did live in Pierrepont, and that Pauw or his sources falsified the documentation to provide a ancient claim to that land in order to bolster a more recent claim. The more recent claim was that based on Otto van Arkel's (1330-1396) marriage to Elisabeth de Bar-Pierrepont. Elisabeth had become the heiress to Bar-Pierrepont when her father died without a legitimate male heir, leaving her son Jan V as the lord of Pierrepont. Jan V's only legitimate son pre-deceased Jan V, leaving Maria van Arkel as a legitimate daughter, Otto van Arkel (1400-1475) as an illegitimate son, and Henneke, as an illegitimate daughter (there may also have been another illegitimate son). On Jan V's death, the claim to Bar-Pierrepont should go to Maria as the only legitimate living child, but perhaps by 1428 the rights of illegitimate children were being increasingly recognized at law and Otto or one of his descendants felt that he had a chance at receiving that claim but felt that his chances were better if he could convince Pauw to provide a falsely ancient claim to Bar-Pierrepont. Or perhaps Elisabeth de Bar-Pierrepont's relatives in France were asserting a claim to Bar-Pierrepont and Pauw was helping bolster Maria van Arkel's claim with a spurious ancient claim to that estate. I have absolutely no evidence that any of this is true, but given the apparent lack of relatively close French Y-DNA matches, this is a possibility that should be considered.
One can argue that my method of determining TMRCA is flawed, and that may be true because I'm not trained in statistics or in genetic genealogy. But then one has to explain how these extended matches fit in so well to Pauw's Arkel history.
One can also argue that Pauw's history is flawed, and cite as proof the fact that he included several fictional people such as Priam, Francio, and so on, and that therefore we can't rely on anything else that he says. This is true to a certain extent, and early historians and genealogists did often make false genealogies in order to glorify the family they were writing about, but I came to Pauw's history with an open mind. The truth is, no one today can possibly know how accurate Pauw was based on historical records alone, because records from the Rhine region before 1000 AD are fragmentary at best. But now with relative cheap Y-DNA testing, it should be possible to verify or disprove at least certain historical events. Neither Pauw in 1483 nor Bruch in 1931 could possibly have anticipated DNA testing or the "Roman Legionary hypothesis" for the origin of at least some of the E-haplogroup DNA in western Europe. And yet Pauw's history has the Arkel line originating in the Balkans and migrating to the Rhine region via the Roman army and--if the Swaims really do descend form the Arkels--they would have E-Haplotype DNA.
However, it isn't quite proven genealogically that the Swaims do derive from the Arkels. It is likely, but not proven. However, it can, and probably will, one day be proved by Y-DNA matching.
At the very least, this amateur study does suggest that the Swaim line was originally Greek, and that it migrated to the Rhine region some time near the end of the Western Roman Empire. It is most likely the Swaim migrant was a Roman soldier, but of course DNA analysis can't prove that one way or the other. He may have been a trader, a refugee, or a Christian missionary or member of the Catholic hierarchy (similar to Agatumber, the supposed 22nd Bishop of Metz--perhaps Agatumber was the Swaim migrant). But in any case, based on these extended matches, it does appear that the Swaim line, if they were not the Arkel line at this time, lived in many of the same locations as the Arkel line, and at roughly the same time.
As more men take Y-DNA tests more matches should eventually emerge and at some point in the future we might be able to prove or disprove all of these issues.
Appendix I
If the Swaim paternal line was originally Greek, how Greek are the Swaims today?
Autosomal DNA
If the Swaim ancestor who migrated from Greece to the Rhine region did so in the year 350 AD, then that was about 52 paternal-line generations ago for someone born in 2,000 AD.
How many ancestors does any person have 52 generations in the past? If we built a family tree, each generation up (in the past) has twice as many direct ancestors as the previous generation, since each person has two parents. The first generation above any particular person will have two ancestors: the father and mother. The second generation will have four: the two sets of grandparents. The number of ancestors will continue doubling at each subsequent generation up the tree. That is obvious and intuitively makes sense. However, a series of doubled numbers very quickly become incredibly large. If you imagine that after 52 generations, the number of ancestors on the 52nd line of the family tree would be several thousand, or perhaps even tens of thousands, you'd be off by several orders of magnitude. In fact, after 52 generations of doubling, the number of ancestors on that 52nd line of the family tree would be an amazing 5.5 quadrillion! This is a million billion, which is almost inconceivably large. And it would keep getting larger and larger with each subsequent generation, and 52 generations is only back to about 350 AD. And every person in the world would have this many ancestors in the 52nd line of their trees, also.
How can this be? The total number of people who ever lived is estimated to be 100 billion. And in the year 350 AD, the total population of the world is estimated to have been only about 200 million people, with about 26.6 million of those living in Europe. So how can everyone living today have had 5.5 quadrillion ancestors who were living in the year 350 AD? These seems to be an insoluble paradox.
But the answer is simple. Nobody could possibly have had 5.5 quadrillion unique ancestors; therefore, the vast majority of those 5.5 quadrillion ancestors were the same few million people repeated millions of times. That is, you may have had only 10 million, or perhaps even 200 million, ancestors who were alive in the year 350 AD, and each of those people was filling millions of ancestor slots in the 52nd line of your family tree.
Another way to think about it is to think about the first two humans, whether you want to consider them as the biblical Adam and Eve or as the first two “fully human” male and female pair. All humans today come from this ancestral pair. For the sake of argument, say that this is 5,000 generations ago (which would be about 160,000 years ago or longer). The 5,000th line up of you family tree would have a gigantic number of slots to be filled in, and yet there would only be 2 unique individuals filling those slots: Adam and Eve (or the "DNA Adam" and "DNA Eve"). All the quadrillions of slots would be filled in with only those two names, because everyone descends from them. The next line down would have a minimum of 2 names and a maximum of about 20 or so. So everybody's family tree will, at some generation, come to the exact same two individuals. Thus, although the family tree will grow geometrically in size with each generation, at some point the number of unique ancestors will stop growing and begin to shrink back down to the two founding ancestors.
Whether or not there were actually ever only two ancestors of the human race is debatable, but it's likely that there were always more than that. Apparently the human race did go through one or two population “bottlenecks,” in which most individuals died out and everyone afterward descended from that small bottleneck population. But a bottleneck population of only two people might not be survivable, partly due to the lack of genetic diversity that would result from entire human genome being comprised of only what was in two particular individuals. This would especially be true if those two individuals were closely related to each other, because then they would share more duplicate alleles than if they were less closely related.
It is impossible to determine how many unique individuals were in that 52nd row of the family tree. No more than 200 million for a certainty, if that was the total population of the earth at that time, and probably many less than that. In 350 AD the European population of the Roman Empire was about 18.3 million, and the European population outside of the Roman Empire was about 8.3 million.
In my particular case, most of my ancestors lived outside the Roman Empire. These were what later became known as Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Irish, and Scots. Some of my English ancestors were undoubtedly from within the Roman Empire, but the Saxon, Frisian, and Scandinavian component was not. Some of my Dutch and German ancestors at that time probably lived inside the Empire, but most probably did not. My French ancestors at that time would have lived inside the empire, and also the few Italian ancestors I might have. At a guess, most of my ancestors at this time probably came from a population pool of about 10 million people who mostly lived outside of the Roman Empire.
These ancestors would not have been evenly distributed across the various geographical regions of Europe, but if they were, and assuming that each of those 10 million people was in fact an ancestor (which is probably true), then each of these unique 10 million people would have filled in 55 million slots on the 52nd generational row of the family tree. This seems bizarre and counter-intuitive, but that's what the math says.
It is possible that some of those 10 million unique ancestors, other than Swaim migrant, were Greeks. 23&Me says that I have 1% Italian ancestry, although none of the other genealogy sites says this. In my Ancestry crowdsource tree there is a line of Italians, so 23andMe may be picking this up (or 23andMe may be wrong). If I do have Italian ancestry, then there may also be deeper Greek ancestry since the Greeks had colonized large areas of coastal Italy and since there has undoubtedly been a great deal of gene flow between the two countries.
I have no autosomal Greek ancestors that I know of, so assuming no Greek ancestry through any Italian ancestry, of all the 5.5 quadrillion 52nd-generation ancestors, only one of them was Greek—the paternal line Greek migrant to the Rhine region. Thus, one could say that I, and probably most Swaims, are autosomally about 1/5.5 quadrillionth Greek.
To say that isn't much Greek ancestry is an extreme understatement.
But it's actually even less than that, because of DNA recombination at every generations (also called a “meiosis event”). Recombination means that your autosomal DNA is inherited about half from your father and half from your mother. At every generations, larger chunks of DNA are broken up into smaller chunks, and after a few generations the chunks are so small that the DNA is no longer identifiable as coming from any particular ancestor. Thus, it is likely that no Swaim today has any autosomal DNA that he inherited from the Swaim paternal migrant from Greece. It takes only 8 generations of halving to go from 100% to less than 1%, so it is likely that by at the latest 610 AD the Swaim line had lost all Greek physical or psychological characteristics. And since it is the autosomal DNA that is probably completely responsible for physical and psychological difference between populations, this means that no Swaim would have any “Greek” characteristics that he inherited from the paternal migrant from Greece. There are some possible exceptions to this, however. If a particular individual had an allele that provided his line with a survival advantage, that allele would be selected for in his descendants and could conceivably be identified as having come from a particular population. For example, the Classical Greeks seem to have had a greater than average intelligence that fueled their sophisticated culture, and it is possible that this came from a particular allele or pattern of alleles that was unique to that population. If the Swaim line picked up this allele or pattern of alleles while in Greece, it is possible the Swaim line would have retained that allele or pattern of alleles because of a survival advantage it provided, and that would have been passed down to through the line (and spread throughout western Europe). And the allele or pattern of alleles might be able to be traced back to Greece, because it would show up there with greater frequency than elsewhere. In a hypothetical case such as this, it might be possible to say that the Swain line did retain a “Greek” characteristic.
Thus, the answer to the question posed in this appendix is that, assuming no other recent Greek ancestors, a Swaim today will likely be 0% Greek in his autosomal DNA.
Y Chromosome DNA
However, Y chromosome DNA is a different matter entirely. For the most part, Y DNA isn't recombined with the DNA of the sex partner. This is because a man's Y DNA is paired with the woman's X chromosome DNA to form an XY chromosome, and recombining Y with X must have been evolutionarily harmful and was prevented from occuring. And since Y chromosome DNA isn't recombined, it passes down from father to son intact except for a few possible mutations. And since it appears that the Swaim line had lived in Greece for about the 700 years immediately preceding its migration to the Rhine region (and in the Balkans for thousands of years before that), it could arguably be considered “Greek” DNA, although it might be more accurate to call it by the more generic term “Balkan” DNA. However, since the line has lived in western Europe (and its colonies in America) for the last 1,700 years, perhaps around twice as long as it existed in Greece, it is equally logical to consider it to be “western European” DNA. The ultimate truth, however, is that all DNA, including Y chromosome DNA, is not determined by geographical location, but rather by its lineage in relation to other lineages, as plotted by the growing Y DNA tree that is being created through Y DNA testing. In a certain sense E-V13 is “Balkan” or “Greek” DNA, but the Swaim branch of E-V13 is no longer “Balkan” but rather western European and American, because those are the geographical regions where it is found most frequently.
Whatever geographical label it is given, Y chromosome DNA comprises almost 2% of a man's total DNA. So there's a second answer to the question: a male Swaim is almost 2% “Greek” DNA, if one chooses to call it “Greek.”
However, since Y chromosome DNA probably doesn't code for any proteins that make you look or act Greek, that 2% “Greek” DNA is in a very real sense not “Greek” at all. It mostly controls various sex-related functions, and probably in a way that isn't significantly different from the way it is performed by any other haplotype.
But even though that 2% of DNA doesn't make a Swaim “Greek” in any real sense of the word, it's still interesting to know the history of the Swaim lineage. If my interpretation of the limited data that I have is correct, then the Swaim line perhaps lived in Greece during its famous “Classical” period, the period of the greatest Greek genius, although probably toward the end of that period. Since there are also earlier extended matches from Turkey (Anatolia), it's even possible that the Swaim line (and the Arkel line, assuming the two lines are related) actually did have an ancestor who was a Trojan nobleman!
One last thing. Just who were those other 5.5 quadrillion 50th great-grandparents that we had 52 generations ago? The answer is, there's no way we can break that down with any accuracy. Most of those people in the 52 row up of that hypothetical family tree would be the same few individuals filling in millions or even billions of the slots in that row. This implies consanguineous parentage (“incest”) on a massive scale, but that's normal and natural, because that's exactly what a “population” is: a group, large or small, of relatively closely related individuals. The constant recirculation through the gnerations of the same patterns of DNA is what gives a population its unique genetic characteristics.
“Pedigree collapse” is the term for the point at which, in your genealogy, you start having fewer and fewer individual ancestors on each level as they start becoming the same individuals multiple times.
Various mathematical analyses have claimed that the Most Recent Common Ancestor for every living person with any European descent is occurred around 1,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, or some other time. Both of these numbers intuitively seem far too recent, but in any case I think it probably means less than it seems to mean. I have a few percent Finnish ancestry, and the Finns are probably the most isolated European population. But within the last 1,000 years a lot of Finnish DNA has flowed into Sweden, so Swedes have traveled extensively throughout Europe, so it is probably true that “Finnish” DNA has made it into many or all corners of Europe. But this would be a very tiny amount of Finnish DNA in most places, within an absolutely insignificant genetic impact. I suspect analyses like these are motivated less by science than by a propagandistic social engineering intent, because rarely if ever are such factoids placed in a proper context. All Europeans may share a common ancestor some few thousand years ago, but if so that ancestry is paper only, and most of it is very distant. All Europeans definitely do not share identifiable DNA segments, regardless of their hypothetical, mathematical relationship (other than the DNA that all humans share in common, of course; but when we speak of genetic genealogy we are talking about those alleles that are used to distinguish one population group from another, or one individual from aother. We have millions of alleles in common with finches and peas, but those are useless for genealogy).
In summary, I think we can say that most Swaims today are not in an significant way Greek, but that they do have almost 2% DNA that can be considered “Balkan,” since the large E-V13 branch was probably born there, and in any case remained there for thousands of years. But that “Balkan” DNA is Y chromosome DNA that appears not to code for any characteristics that could be considered specifically “Greek.” The Swaim line did apparently reside in Greece for at least 700 years, but resided in the lower Rhine region for much longer. You could also trace Y-DNA back to Africa and claim the Swaim line is African, but that would tell us nothing at all because all human genetic lines ultimately came from Africa.
Appendix II
How I Determined Genetic Distance and MRCA
Genetic Distance based on STR matching is determined by the difference in STRs between two men. STRs mutate at a relatively constant rate on average, and at a rate that is useful for determining relationships that extend further in the past than is possible with autosomal DNA. This is because autosomal DNA is recombined at every generation with the male's and female's chromosomes, whereas Y-DNA does not recombine at all. But Y-DNA does mutate, and the rate at which it mutates, combined with the Genetic Distance between two men, can be used to determine roughly how long ago the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) lived. The MRCA would have been the father of the two sons who formed the two lineages from which both Y-DNA tested men descended.
FTDNA tests 5 different sets of STRs and then compares each of those sets against everyone else in its Y-DNA database (12STR, 25STR, 36STR, 67STR, 111STR). Men who match within a certain number of differences are considered to be "matches." For each match FTDNA will provide a estimated time to the MRCA (TMRCA) via its TiP Report.
FTDNA's difference cutoff points to be considered a match are designed to provide matches who fall within about the last 15 generations, which is roughly the farthest back that documentary evidence exists that can be used to support a genealogy. If a tested customer wants to look further back in time than that he is out of luck because FTDNA doesn't provide those "extended" matches, even though they are readily available and can be accessed by the Y-DNA "project" administrators. A customer could join a project and ask an administrator to provide a list of extended matches, but the success of that approach would probably depend upon the good will and diligence of that administrator.
FTDNA has a lot of Y-DNA "projects," which are groups of STR data sets that are organized around a concept such as a surname, a geographical location, or by some other concept that is meant to place men together who have similar sets of STRs. These projects can be used to locate "extended" matches, although of course gathering and comparing each set of data individually is a lot more tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error, than if the extended matches had been generated by computer.
I didn't randomly choose which matches to compare with my own set of STRs because that would take far too long and would also be pointless. I only chose matches that were listed as E-M35 or downstream of E-M35 (I really only wanted matches that were E-V13, but any designation downstream of E-M35 would require SNP testing, which most matches did not do). And within the E-M35 category, I also narrowed down the matches to those that looked the most closely related, based on a look at the first 37 STRs. By doing this, it turned out that most of the matches I ended up comparing STR-for-STR had a GD of less than 40/111.
It is always better that each match has tested at the highest level of 111-STRs, but the fact is that many men only tested at the 37-STR or 67-STR level. I still used that data, but I projected the GD out to what it what would be at 111STRs under the assumption that the same ratio of matching to nonmatching STRs that were available would hold true for the STRs that were not available. This assumption seems generally to be true, but I've seen times when in fact there are proportionately more non-matching STRs in the last 44 of 111 STRs than in the first 67 (or 37). Still, I had to work with the data that was available. To project the data to 111 STRs I multiplied a 37-STR set by 3 (37X3=111), and a 67-STR set by 1.65 (1.65x67=110.55).
Manual matching also raises the question of what constitutes a "difference" between two sets of data. If a particular STR in a set of 111 STRs for man#1 has a value of 11 and for man#2 a value of 14, is that counted as 1 difference or 3 differences? That is, did that mutation occur during 1 meiosis event (generations) or 3? Or, for that matter, did it take 4 or more, since one or more mutations for either man may have been a "backward" mutation? Of course all these issues have been much debated long before I came across them, and FTDA has its own protocol it uses in determining the GD between two matches.
In determining the GD between 2 matches, I decided to keep things simple and just consider any difference in an STR to be 1 difference, regardless of the numerical difference between the two STRs (this is the "infinite allele" method). Also, for "palindromic" STRs, which are those STRs that FTDNA groups together with dashes (DYS385, DYS459, DYS464, YCAII, CDY, DYF395S1, DYS413), I counted any differences in the group as only 1 difference). I chose to use this method only because it was the simplest method and not because I have any particular insight into how STRs mutate. I also made one adjustment to the STR data in comparing sets. I considered a match for DYS389II to be either a value of 31 or 32, and for CDY to be either a value of 31-36 or 31-37. My reason for doing this is that my value at those 2 STRs is different from the value that most Swaims have, which appears to have occurred only in descendants of Thys Barentsen's son Anthony, and possibly of his son Cornelius. Since I know these are recent mutations and that most Swaims don't have them, I wasn't certain if I should count only one value or the other, so in the end I just decided to count either value as a match. Because STR values can mutate "backward" as well as "forward," there is a degree of inaccuracy built into STR testing anyway, so I figured this irregularity would probably be within that degree of inaccuracy anyway.
Now I had a list of matches with various Genetic Distances, and I needed to calculate an MRCA for each. To do this I needed a factor to multiply against the GD. This factor would be the average time in years for one mutation to occur among a set of 111 STRs. How would I compute this?
There are a number of scientific papers that have come up with formulas for this. However, since I had actually genealogical data for the Swaim/den Hartog line spanning nearly 500 years, I decided to go with the GD that came from that data.
The MRCA for the Swaim line and the den Hartog line is Claes Willems Ottens (Deventer), born in 1475. The Swaim line descends from his son Anthonis and the de Hartog line from his son Willem. I was born in 1957, so 1957-1475=482. So our MRCA was born 482 years before I was born. Next, I divided 482 by 6, because 6 is the projected GD for 111 STRs between the den Hartog match and myself. 482/6=80.33. So the factor is 80.33, which represents the number of years it took in my line for 1 mutation to occur in FTDNA's set of 111 STRs (this, by the way, was 15 generations of data, and also gave an average of 32.1 years per generation, so that 80.33 years equals 2.5 generations).
This mutation rate is faster than is reported in the few scientific studies on Y-STR mutation rates that I've read (and hopefully understood properly), but the Swaim line may simply mutate STRs more rapidly than other lines; the verified mutation rate for the Swaim lines after branching off from Thys Barentsen is even faster than the rate I used here (for example, my GD from L Swaim is 8 at 111 STRs. Since our known MRCA is no later than Thys Barentsen, who was born in about 1621 AD, this STR mutation rate is about 1 mutation every 42 years (1957-1621=336; 336/8=42), which is almost twice as fast as the figure of 1 mutation every 80.33 years--for 111 STRs--that I used).
Now all I had to do to find the date of the MRCA for each of my extended matches was to multiply each GD by 80.33 and then subtract that number from 1957.
I could have used other methods to determine this factor. Using the den Hartog match was not perfect for a couple of reasons, but I thought it was probably good enough to use, and it was in fact based on actual data for this particular line which, remember, we are hypothesizing is an extension of the van Arkel line.
By using this factor of 80.33 I was able to determine that the MRCA for the most recent non-western European match (Antoniou GD 20) was 350 AD, which is very close to Pauw's migration date for Jan of 346 AD. This is amazingly close, so you may be asking yourself if I fudged the data to get such a good result. The answer is no, I did not. You can find Antoniou's STR set on FTDNA and calculate his GD for yourself.
The year 350 AD was 1,607 years before my year of birth of 1957. 1,607 divided by 20 (Antoniou's GD) is 80.35, so you can see that I could have worked out this same factor by going backward from Pauw's migration date even without having known the MRCA between the Swaim and den Hartog lines.
December 12, 2020 Match Update
I found a new match that would require me to revise the Swaim paternal line history if the match in the future either upgrades his STR testing or takes some form of SNP testing to determine his terminal SNP to narrowly identify his haplotype. The match surname was not shown on the FTDNA project page, but the match provided the surname and geographical location of his presumed earliest known paternal ancestor.
Name & Location 37 67 111 MRCA
Adám (Szirma, Hungary) (E-FGC11450 predicted) 6 11 18 510 AD
So we now have a Hungarian as a match with a paternal line MRCA within the time period in which we're interested. The problem with this match is that if the Swaim line had left the Balkans/Pannonia at about 350 AD, there shouldn't be any matches from those locations with a date later than 350 AD, and yet now we have a Hungarian with an MRCA date of 160 years (2 GDs) later than that.
However, our data for this match is low quality, as he only tested up to the 37-STR level. This level definitely provids more accurate matches than the 12-STR and 25-STR levels, which often provide "false" convergence matches. but each incremental step up in STR testing greatly increases the accuracy of matching, for the simple reason that by increasing the number of STRs that are matched, the probability decreases that a non-related line will randomly match the Swaim STR pattern and the probability increases that a match to the Swaim STR pattern had a common ancestor with the Swaim line. Although in the majority of cases the proportion of mismatches at the 1-37 STR level will generally reflect the proportion of mismatches at the 38-67 level and the 68-111 level, in many cases this will not be true, and in some cases the differences will be stark. Thus, although I've projected the 111-STR GD to be 18, by multiplying 6 times 3, in fact the true 111-STR GD could be higher, and even much higher.
In fact, I believe that in this case the 111-STR GD will be higher than 18, if it is ever tested, because the projected age of this match's MRCA doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense in terms of the rest of the matches. This is true because the other than this match the most recent Hungarian match has a GD of 29 with an estimated MRCA of 375 BC. There are a few other older Hungarian matches, but not enough to indicate that the Swaim line had ever lived for any length of time in Hungary.
There are two plausible scenarios to explain this match, assuming that it is a good match (the proof of which would require further STR and/or SNP testing). The first scenario is a that a close paternal member who had accompanied the Swaim migrant to the Rhine region returned to eastern Europe after retiring from the Roman army rather than remaining in the Rhine region, and that he or one of his descendants at some point had ended up in Pannonia/Hungary. The second scenario is that the Swaim migrant or his immediate ancestors had moved from Greece to Pannonia for a short time before moving on to the Rhine region, and that he or a close relative had children who remained in Pannonia, and that the MRCA date is actually around 350 AD rather than 510 AD. Either of these scenarios is reasonable, and either of them are also consistent with Pauw's history of the Arkel line.
Pauw stated that Jan I and his fellow refugees from Troy had lived in Pannonia before Jan I had migrated to the Rhine region, and that these Trojans made "veel kinderen" (many children) while in Pannonia. Pauw didn't say that these children were Jan I's children, but it is reasonable to assume that some of them may have been the children of close paternal relatives who would pass down the Arkel/Swaim Y-DNA. Thus, this Swaim extended match is, like the other extended matches, quite consistent with Pauw's Arkel history.
As I mentioned previously, a plausible scenario could be that Jan I as a Roman soldier of Greek ancestry had fought for Licinius in the Battle of Adrianople and/or the Battle of Chrysopolis, and after Licinius had been defeated by Constantine, Jan I might have been stationed in Pannonia (perhaps in Aquincum) before being sent to Frankfurt under Constans. There is some evidence that Aquincum was once called Sicambria (A Collection of Archaeological Pamphlets on Roman Remains Formed by Sir B.C.A. Windle and Relating Principally to Great Britain (googleusercontent.com); mention in the Nuremberg Chronicle), or in the Middle Ages was believed to have been called Sicambria, so this also agrees with Pauw.
I found this match in FTDNA'z “E-M35 project,” and the administrators of that project placed this match as a haplotype projected to be FGC11447. FGC11447 is "downstream" of FGC11450, meaning that someone positive for the FGC11447 SNP is also positive for the "Swaim" FGC11450 SNP, but that the converse is not true. The FGC11447 SNP formed 3,200 years ago, which is about 1,500 years before 350 AD, so it is likely that if this match is FCG11447 today, the match's ancestor in 350 AD was also FCG11447 and thus not the Swaim ancestor. However, this match has not been SNP tested, so he may in fact be FGC11450 rather than FGC11447. I don't know what STR criteria the FTDA project administrator used to estimate this match's haplotype, but the administrator did correctly predict Den Hertog to be FGC11450, so it is possible that he is also correct regarding Adám (the administrator/s also predicted Solc/Sulc, Heilmann and Antoniou to be FGC11450, but without SNP testing these remain predictions).
So as it now stands, we don't know whether or not Adám is a good match or, if he is, whether or not his estimated 111-STR GD of 18 and MRCAof 510 AD is accurate.
It it turns out that Adám is a good match, then if we adjust his MRCA 2 GDs earlier than predicted, and Heilmann's and Altmeyer's MRCAs 1 GD later than predicted, and Sparr's 1 GD earlier than predicted, we get the following chart:
Name/Country of Match Ancestor 111 STR MRCA
Demetrius Antoniou (Greece) 20 350 AD
Adám (Szirma, Hungary) 20 350 AD
Thomas Sparr (Switzerland – Biel-Benken) 20 350 AD
Johanes Heilmann (Geiselbach?, Germany) 20 350 AD
Johann Altmeyer (Saarbrücken, Germany) 20 350 AD
Jan Pennebaker (Gorinchem, Holland) 15 750 AD
Schmid 12 990 AD
Sulc/Solc (Czech/Slovak) 12 990 AD
This chart is consistent with Pauw's Arkel history. There are no matches for the years between 388 AD and 750 AD, when the Arkel line would have been living in Pierrepont. Even this is consistent with Pauw's history, since we would expect fewer matches from a country such as France that has outlawed user-initiated DNA testing.
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