Jasz people

The Jász (Jazones) are a Hungarian subgroup of Eastern Iranic descent who have lived in Hungary since the 13th century. They live mostly in a region known as Jászság, which comprises the north-western part of Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county. They are sometimes known in English by the exonym Jassic and are also known by the endonyms Iasi and Jassy. They originated as a nomadic Alanic people from the Pontic steppe. Jászság The cultural and political center of Jászság is the town of Jászberény. Jászság is sometimes, erroneously, known as "Jazygia", after a somewhat related Sarmatian people, the Iazyges, who lived in a similar area in ancient times. The Jasz people descend from nomadic Alanic tribes who settled in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary during the 13th century following the Mongol invasions. Their language, which belonged to the east Iranian group that includes modern Ossetian, died out by the 16th century, since which time the Jasz speak Hungarian. Their name is almost certainly related to that of the Iazyges, one of the Sarmatian tribes which, along with the Roxolani, reached the borders of Dacia during the late 1st century BC (the city of Iași is named for them). Residual elements of these tribes, ancestors of the Jasz people, remained behind in the central North Caucasus, mingling with Caucasian peoples to form the present-day Ossetes. The Jasz people came to the Kingdom of Hungary, together with the Cumanians (Kun people) when their lands to the east, in some in the later Moldavia (see Iași or Jászvásár) were invaded by the Mongol Empire in the mid-13th century. They were admitted by the Hungarian king, Béla IV Árpád, who hoped that the Jaszs would assist in resisting the Mongol-Tatar invasion. Shortly after their entry, the relationship worsened dramatically between the Hungarian nobility and the Cumanian-Jasz tribes, which then abandoned the country. After the end of the Mongol-Tatar invasion they returned and settled in the central part of the Pannonian Plain, near the rivers Zagyva and Tarna.