massacred them and only seven hundred escaped with their families under Alciocus into the Marca Winidorum (Carantania), where they lived many years with the Slav prince Walluc. This Alciocus must be identical with the Alzeco who with his entire army — evidently stragglers from Hungary — came peaceably to Italy and received from the Lombard king Grimoald (662-672) extensive waste territory in the Abruzzi mountains north-east of Naples. Although these Bulgars learnt vulgar Latin, at the time of Paulus Diaconus they still retained their mother tongue intact. This is natural, for only when they wintered in Apulia did they find it necessary to use the vulgar Latin of the peasants, while in the summer-pastures on the mountains they were by themselves. It is therefore quite conceivable that their descendants did not forget their original language till much later.
The organisation of the South and West Slavs in the centuries that followed is also Avar and Bulgarian. A number of titles of rank of the Altaians, Bulgars, Avars, Chazars, and other West and East Turks (in Chinese Turkestan), Utigurs and Mongols, have survived, and many of these were borrowed early from Iranians and particularly Persians. Many of these titles, some peculiar to the Altaians, some borrowed by them from Iranians, are to be found among the Slavs. At the head of an Altaian empire was the Khagan (East Turks, Avars, Chazars, etc.) or Khan (Bulgars, Cumans, etc.), and as successors of the Chazar Khagans as conquerors of the Russian Slavs, the first princes of the Scandinavian Varangians-Russ bore the title Kogan (in Arabian sources khāqān Rōs). The Turkish title boyla (Magnate) is found in Bulgar-Slavic and Russian (bolyarin). The common Slav word for "Sir," gospodar, came from Altaic, where it is a Persian loan-word — Middle Persian gōspanddār, "owner of sheep" — the Altaian masters of the Slavs were indeed shepherds; hence the change in the significance of the word. Of the remaining titles which have come from Altaian into Slav the most important are župan (pronounced zhoopan) and pan (the latter coming from gŭpanŭ). Both are to be found in the forms ζουπάν and κοπανός in inscriptions on monuments which the Bulgar khan Omurtag (814-831) had erected to his deceased high officials who bore these titles. Both are obviously Persian loan-words in Altaian, although the original Persian words cannot be restored. The second (kopan) occurs among the Patzinaks (χοπόν) also, but župan was common to several Altaian peoples in various pronunciations. An important historic criterion is offered by the fact that certain titles of rank are pronounced yabgu, yugur (Avar), yopan (Avar) in Eastern Turkish, but in western dialects jabgu, ζοῦργου (Bulg.), ζουπάν (Bulg.). Among the Slavs whom the Avar khagan Baian had settled on the west front of his Empire, we find on the Elbe and Saale, and then in the Alps and on the Adriatic, župans; but in the centre on the Danube in the district of Linz, a iopan (pronounced yopan) Physso is mentioned in the year 777. This
