the West Slavs could not graze their herds in connected winter-quarters as in the steppes, because the snow lies deeper and longer in central Europe. Neither had they there, as in Dalmatia, mild coasts rich in salt and free from snow — the best imaginable winter-pasture — and so they had to break up and live scattered in the Slav villages where the peasantry had to store up grain and hay for them during the summer and convert even the villages into suitable cattle-pens. This is pointed to by the very small Slavonic round villages with one single exit, which are common in Bohemia and as far as the Baltic, and which still preserve the character of closable cattle-pens.[1]
Compared with the Slavs, the Avar oppressors were very few in number, and could not therefore always master them. Now and then these became restive, and refused obedience. The Khagan, occupied in many distant places, did not always find leisure to chastise them, and thus many Slav tribes gained their liberty.
There were, however, differences among the Avars themselves, who were only held together by the iron hand of the Khagan. They were but a mixed multitude. Where there was a prospect of rich booty they followed him joyfully, but where no treasure allured them — e.g. in 602 against the poor but warlike Antae — they simply refused obedience and deserted to the Romans. According to "Mauricius" such desertion was a common event, and it helps to explain why the Khagan did not repeat his victorious marches against the Frankish kingdom till the year 596.[2] Avar hordes were indeed very loosely held together, and some fell away and established small States on the old basis of Slav servitude. The dissolution began as early as 603 in consequence of the successful revolution of a part of the north-west Slavs and the formation of a Slav union under Samo. By this the Avar hordes distributed among the Elbe Slavs between Bohemia and the Baltic were permanently cut off from the main horde in Hungary.
After the dissolution of the great Avar State the Avars and the Bulgars themselves remained as a noble class, which finally became Slavised and nationally absorbed in the subjected peasantry. In Dalmatia as late as the tenth century the Avars were still sharply distinguished from the Croats. The mare-milking grand-prince north of the Carpathians in the ninth century may indeed already have become Slav, but by origin he must have been Avar. Strange was the fate of a Bulgar horde which later than 641 fled to Dagobert. The Bavarians
- ↑ Illustrated by Meitzen, Siedlung, I. p. 52, II. pp. 259, 362, 450-6, 485, Atlas 87 and explanatory map.
- ↑ This irruption of the Avars into Thuringia in 596 was due to outside pressure, for since 593 the Avar Slavs in what is now Roumania had been hard pressed by the Romans, and even the Avars' own territory in the Hungarian steppe was threatened. Something very pressing in the north-west of the Avar State must have therefore occurred to compel the Khagan to abandon the south-east and to leave the Slavs there to themselves.
