It was a complex and messy process,
involving many independent movements, phases of slow colonisation as well as
opportunistic raids and military conquests. By the fifth century, the Slavs had
colonised southeastern Poland; then they expanded into Slovakia, Moravia,
Bohemia, Silesia, northwestern and central Poland, and finally
into the lands between the Oder and the Elbe. In the south, they reached
the lower Danube in the early sixth century. In the 530's, there were reportedly
some Slav mercenaries in Belisarius' army, and about 550 large groups of
Slavs crossed the Danube and invaded the Balkans. One invasion route was from
Slovakia and the Hungarian Plain into the western Balkans, the other from the
lower Danube into the eastern and southern Balkans. The division of modern South
Slavic into two linguistic groupings (Serbian/Croatian/Slovene and
Bulgarian/Macedonian) still reflects the complex origin of the southern
Slavs.
In the late sixth
century numerous Slavic tribes, politically subdued by the
Avars, participated in the Avar conquests of Dacia and Pannonia and raids
against Byzantium. It seems that despite the Slavs' low status and
subjugation to the Avars it was a period of lively demographic growth and
territorial expansion for them, from which they were to profit enormously as the
power of the Avars ebbed away.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 7:44 PM
Subject: [tied] for ignorants
like me , in many cases it is requiered a lot of help.
I
read now about slavs ( gotta curious:-))and about their
migration.
Does
one know a good chronological image of the migration of
the slavs in the
south and south -east of Europe?
Are there several migrations
waves?
many thnaks in advance for infos.