either that these lands must have possessed very extraordinary powers of

recuperation to make it worth while for invaders to pillage them so

frequently, or, what is more probable, there can have been after some time

little left to plunder, and consequently the Byzantine historians'

accounts of enormous drives of prisoners and booty are much exaggerated.

It is impossible to count the number of times the tide of invasion and

devastation swept southwards over the unfortunate peninsula. The emperors

and their generals did what they could by means of defensive works on the

frontiers, of punitive expeditions, and of trying to set the various

hordes of barbarians at loggerheads with each other, but, as they had at

the same time to defend an empire which stretched from Armenia to Spain,

it is not surprising that they were not more successful. The growing

riches of Constantinople and Salonika had an irresistible attraction for

the wild men from the east and north, and unfortunately the Greek citizens

were more inclined to spend their energy in theological disputes and their

leisure in the circus than to devote either the one or the other to the

defence of their country. It was only by dint of paying them huge sums of

money that the invaders were kept away from the coast. The departure of

the Huns and the Goths had made the way for fresh series of unwelcome

visitors. In the sixth century the Slavs appear for the first time. From

their original homes which were immediately north of the Carpathians, in

Galicia and Poland, but may also have included parts of the modern

Hungary, they moved southwards and south-eastwards. They were presumably

in Dacia, north of the Danube, in the previous century, but they are first

mentioned as having crossed that river during the reign of the Emperor

Justin I (518-27). They were a loosely-knit congeries of tribes without

any single leader or central authority; some say they merely possessed the

instinct of anarchy, others that they were permeated with the ideals of

democracy. What is certain is that amongst them neither leadership nor

initiative was developed, and that they lacked both cohesion and

organisation. The Eastern Slavs, the ancestors of the Russians, were only

welded into anything approaching unity by the comparatively much smaller

number of Scandinavian (Varangian) adventurers who came and took charge of

their affairs at Kiev. Similarly the Southern Slavs were never of

themselves able to form a united community, conscious of its aim and

capable of persevering in its attainment.



The Slavs did not invade the Balkan peninsula alone but in the company of

the Avars, a terrible and justly dreaded nation, who, like the Huns, were

of Asiatic (Turkish or Mongol) origin. These invasions became more

frequent during the reign of the Emperor Justinian I (527-65), and

culminated in 559 in a great combined attack of all the invaders on

Constantinople under a certain Zabergan, which was brilliantly defeated by

the veteran Byzantine general Belisarius. The Avars were a nomad tribe,

and the horse was their natural means of locomotion. The Slavs, on the

other hand, moved about on foot, and seem to have been used as infantry by

the more masterful Asiatics in their warlike expeditions. Generally

speaking, the Avars, who must have been infinitely less numerous than the

Slavs, were settled in Hungary, where Attila and the Huns had been settled

a little more than a century previously; that is to say, they were north

of the Danube, though they were always overrunning into Upper Moesia, the

modern Serbia. The Slavs, whose numbers were without doubt very large,

gradually settled all over the country south of the Danube, the rural

parts of which, as a result of incessant invasion and retreat, had become

waste and empty. During the second half of the sixth century all the

military energies of Constantinople were diverted to Persia, so that the

invaders of the Balkan peninsula had the field very much to themselves. It

was during this time that the power of the Avars reached its height. They

were masters of all the country up to the walls of Adrianople and

Salonika, though they did not settle there. The peninsula seems to have

been colonized by Slavs, who penetrated right down into Greece; but the

Avars were throughout this time, both in politics and in war, the

directing and dominating force. During another Persian war, which broke

out in 622 and entailed the prolonged absence of the emperor from

Constantinople, the Avars, not satisfied with the tribute extorted from

the Greeks, made an alliance against them with the Persians, and in 626

collected a large army of Slavs and Asiatics and attacked Constantinople

both by land and sea from the European side, while the Persians threatened

it from Asia. But the walls of the city and the ships of the Greeks proved

invincible, and, quarrels breaking out between the Slavs and the Avars,

both had to save themselves in ignominious and precipitate retreat.



After this nothing more was heard of the Avars in the Balkan peninsula,

though their power was only finally crushed by Charlemagne in 799. In

Russia their downfall became proverbial, being crystallized in the saying,

'they perished like Avars'. The Slavs, on the other hand, remained.

Throughout these stormy times their penetration of the Balkan peninsula

had been peacefully if unostentatiously proceeding; by the middle of the

seventh century it was complete. The main streams of Slavonic immigration

moved southwards and westwards. The first covered the whole of the country

between the Danube and the Balkan range, overflowed into Macedonia, and

filtered down into Greece. Southern Thrace in the east and Albania in the

west were comparatively little affected, and in these districts the

indigenous population maintained itself. The coasts of the Aegean and the

great cities on or near them were too strongly held by the Greeks to be

affected, and those Slavs who penetrated into Greece itself were soon

absorbed by the local populations. The still stronger Slavonic stream,

which moved westwards and turned up north-westwards, overran the whole

country down to the shores of the Adriatic and as far as the sources of

the Save and Drave in the Alps. From that point in the west to the shores

of the Black Sea in the east became one solid mass of Slavs,

and has remained so ever since. The few Slavs who were left north of the

Danube in Dacia were gradually assimilated by the inhabitants of that

province, who were the descendants of the Roman soldiers and colonists,

and the ancestors of the modern Rumanians, but the fact that Slavonic

influence there was strong is shown by the large number of words of

Slavonic origin contained in the Rumanian language.






Place-names are a good index of the extent and strength of the tide of

Slav immigration. All along the coast, from the mouth of the Danube to the

head of the Adriatic, the Greek and Roman names have been retained though

places have often been given alternative names by the Slavonic settlers.

Thrace, especially the south-eastern part, and Albania have the fewest

Slavonic place-names. In Macedonia and Lower Moesia (Bulgaria) very few

classical names have survived, while in Upper Moesia (Serbia) and the

interior of Dalmatia (Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Montenegro) they have

entirely disappeared. The Slavs themselves, though their tribal names were

known, were until the ninth century usually called collectively S(k)lavini

([Greek: Sklabaenoi]) by the Greeks, and all the inland parts of the

peninsula were for long termed by them 'the S(k)lavonias' ([Greek:

Sklabiniai]).



During the seventh century, dating from the defeat of the Slavs and Avars

before the walls of Constantinople in 626 and the final triumph of the

emperor over the Persians in 628, the influence and power of the Greeks

began to reassert itself throughout the peninsula as far north as the

Danube; this process was coincident with the decline of the might of the

Avars. It was the custom of the astute Byzantine diplomacy to look on and

speak of lands which had been occupied by the various barbarian invaders

as grants made to them through the generosity of the emperor; by this

means, by dint also of lavishing titles and substantial incomes to the

invaders' chiefs, by making the most of their mutual jealousies, and also

by enlisting regiments of Slavonic mercenaries in the imperial armies, the

supremacy of Constantinople was regained far more effectively than it

could have been by the continual and exhausting use of force.