Jasz

The Jasz are an Alanic community in Hungary, descended from Pontic Sarmatian Alans who fled the Mongol conquest in the mid-thirteenth century. King Béla IV admitted them with the Cumans, hoping to use their cavalry against the Tatars; after quarrelling with Hungarian nobles and withdrawing, they returned as the Mongol tide receded and settled the plains between the Zagyva and Tarna.

Their district, Jászság, centered on Jászberény, enjoyed crown self-government while the Jasz kept to pastoral life. Their Jassic tongue, a dialect of the Eastern Iranian language that became Ossetian, died by the sixteenth century as they adopted Hungarian, though keeping a separate identity.

Ottoman rule covered Jászság in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries until the Habsburg reconquest. When Emperor Leopold I sold their liberties to the Teutonic Order, the Jasz raised a ransom and won the Act of Redemption of 1745 from Maria Theresa, restoring their self-government.