class. The domination of the nomads appears most clearly among the Bulgarian Slavs who to-day are named after their nomadic masters the Altaian Bulgars. After the destruction of the Avar kingdom by Charles the Great, the Bulgarian kingdom extended from the Balkans to the Moravian Carpathians. The Serbs and Croats also founded mighty States. In the Middle Ages the Slavs of Dalmatia were dreaded pirates, and even the tiny Slav peoples of Macedonia and Greece kept the Romans occupied with many wars. But even at the beginning of the seventh century the commercial town of Saloniki obtained grain from the Thessalian Slavs. Led by the Avars, the Slavs pressed into the Peloponnesus, and the report was long believed that the Avars occupied the Peloponnesus for 218 years so that no Roman durst enter it.[1] According to Constantine Porphyrogenitus the Croats of the tenth century could put 60,000 horsemen and 100,000 foot into the field. But as the Slavs were a foot people, such a very strong cavalry must refer to the Avar and Bulgar ruling class, which at that time stood out clearly from the Slav peasantry in Dalmatia; and to this day the name of the Khagan Baian denotes to the Croat the highest state official, the Ban, Banus (in Constantine: βοάνος), just as the name of Charles the Great — Karl — denotes to all Slavs Kral, the king. The Old Servian State also had a strong body of cavalry, in connexion with which it must be noted that numerous nomadic Roumanians with horses and sheep, but without agriculture and ox-rearing, were, and still are, to be found in Servia and the other Balkan countries.
The Roumanians, Slavonic Vlasi, Vlakhs, are Romanised Altaians, probably Avars and Bulgars, for a still older nomad people could not have survived the wild Bulgar-Avaro-Slavonic storms which raged for a century over the Balkan peninsula. Like all mounted nomads the Bulgars and Avars were intent on cattle robbery (baranta), and so the indigenous wandering herdsmen specially suffered, for herds of sheep are not quick-footed enough to be hidden in time from mounted robbers. With the loss of his herds the wandering herdsman inevitably perishes as he cannot acquire new herds, and the acquisition of single animals would be of no use to him. The vegetarian peasant can better secure himself since he does not depend on cattle but on the soil, which the robber cannot destroy, and seed-grain is more easy to obtain than a herd of cattle.
The nomadic Vlakhs lived along with the peasant peoples of the Balkan peninsula and gradually adopted their language and became denationalised for a second time. They further attained to their highest prosperity as wandering herdsmen in Turkish times, after the fall of the Slav States effaced the customs barriers with a tithe on the import and export of sheep and horses; the herdsmen could thus graze summer and
- ↑ For the literature v. Niederle, Starožitnosti, II. p. 210.
