The Balkans | Page 6

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.
[Illustration: THE BALKAN PENINSULA ETHNOLOGICAL]
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