front. If they won the Huns advanced to make booty; but if they were defeated they rallied with the support of the Huns. Without these befulci the Avars, who were speedy on their marvellously trained horses but helpless and defenceless on foot, could have done little against trained infantry. They therefore had to call out countless, because wretchedly armed, masses of Slav foot-soldiers who, with certain death at the hands of their goaders behind them, charged forward in despair.[1] On the other hand the Avar cavalry formed an incomparable mail-armed force with sword, bow, and pickaxe, and even the horses of the leaders were protected by armour. However the Avars were not in themselves numerous enough to supply the necessary reserves for their enormous empire, and with the expansion of their dominion the need for new masses of cavalry grew. This need was supplied by constant reinforcements from other Altaian hordes out of the steppe. Among them the most numerous were the Bulgars. The Khagan's victorious flag, and the prospect of booty, worked irresistibly upon the plundering sons of the steppe.
By the transplantation of Slav peoples to the western borders of his robber-State the Khagan meant to keep in check his neighbours, the Saxons on the lower Elbe, the Franks on the Saale, the Bavarians on the Nab and upper Danube, the Lombards in Italy, while he himself, with his rear protected, was free for plundering raids on the East Roman Empire, in which he employed enormous masses of Slavs as befulci. He had no intention of conquering even a part of the Roman Empire and settling it with Slavs, for this was not to his interest; he had land in abundance and he needed the Slavs for his own colonising purposes. He therefore left them the East Roman to pay tribute, and his plundering supplied him further. Nevertheless his procedure was uneconomical. The greater number of the East Romans were partly exterminated and partly carried into slavery. The vacuum thus created was permanently occupied by the Slavs who finally spread almost over the entire Balkan peninsula and even reached Asia Minor. Very exhaustive information about these Avaro-Slavic plundering raids is given in the sources, but it is not definitely known when the Slavs permanently settled there; certainly the greater part not before 602.
In this previously Roman territory the dominating Avar and Bulgar nomad class merged with the Slavonic peasantry into a national organism, and powerful military States of Slav speech arose; but the real holders of power were not the Slavs but the Slavised Altaians, and it is a delusion to think that the Slavs themselves, the Croats, Serbs, (new-) Bulgars, Macedo-Slavs became fit for war in the Avaro-Bulgar school. They remained a peasant folk living — partly to this day — alongside of a nomad shepherd
- ↑ The Mongols in Hungary in 1241 availed themselves of the same aid, driving the captives before them into the fight and against the fortresses, cutting down at once all who recoiled. They did not however put themselves willingly in danger.
