the very people who according to Pseudo-Nestor had been formerly kept in servitude by the Avars. Bordering on the steppes as they did, they were from the earliest times a prey to the inhabitants of the steppes. Before the Avars various nomadic and Germanic peoples were their masters; and these peoples left behind warlike elements which were sharply distinguished — even after becoming Slavised — from the subjected Slav mass. The king was called in Slavic knez (from kŭnęgŭ), Germanic kuninga. Further among the Sorb-Serbs the class of the vićazi-vitezi "knights" (from vitęgŭ), that is, German vikings; and the numerous Polish nobility has the German title szlachta.
Out of this Germano-Altaio-Slavonic mixture of the Dulyebi-Volynyane and other Slavonic peoples north of the Carpathians, Baian created for himself an almost inexhaustible reservoir of men whom he formed into barriers against the Germans[1] on his western frontiers. He transplanted a part of the Dulyebi-Volynyane to Pannonia (where later was the Comitatus Dudleipa), another to South Bohemia (the later countries of Doudleby and Volyň), a third to the distant north (the island of Wollin) at the mouth of the Oder. Similarly he tore apart the North-Carpathian Croats (Khr'vati) of the upper Vistula and placed them partly in the Elbe and Saale, where several villages bear their name, partly in Carantania (pagus Crauuti), partly to Pannonia and Dalmatia, where later independent Croatian States arose; the North-Carpathian Serbs (Serbi) partly on the Saale and the Elbe (later the mighty Sorbs), partly where to-day they are independent in Servia and Montenegro. The Slav nations of to-day are therefore not original but a gradual crystallisation since the sixth century into linguistic units out of the peoples transplanted by the Avars — a process already completed by the tenth century.[2]
- ↑ Transplanting of entire nations was customary with the nomads. Thus the Scythians transplanted many peoples, among them "Assyrians" to the Pontus in Asia Minor, and "Medes" to the Don. In a similar way the Avars transplanted Macedonian Slavs to Pannonia, and the Bulgars, after the destruction of the Avar kingdom by Charles the Great, populated North and South Hungary with Slavs whom they had captured by regular man-hunts in Macedonia. The Mongols too took large numbers of Russians, etc. to Hungary, which they had half depopulated, and these too they destroyed before their own withdrawal thence.
- ↑ No traces of an earlier intermixture are to be observed in the individual Slav languages. Even in the tenth century the Nortabtrezi of Mecklenburg spoke a different dialect from the Osterabtrezi of South Hungary, and the Sorbs on the Saale and Elbe from the Serbs on the Drina. The Nortabtrezi belong with the Sorbs to the Elbe-Slavonic, the Osterabtrezi with the Serbs to the South-Slavonic language-group, and all the Slavonic languages form one unbroken chain of languages connected by transitionary dialects. Hence many Slavists declare that the duplication of these folk-names is accidental, and that the Slavs in their original home were divided into the same peoples as at present, who spread unmixed in all directions. But in our time it is recognised how quickly fragments of a people adopt the language of their environment, and the historical arguments against a radiating expansion of the Slavs are admitted by other Slavists.
