2 - The Duchy of Nitra

Summary

The territory of contemporary Slovakia was first inhabited by Slavs from about the end of the fifth century AD. These peoples arrived in the territory of Slovakia from the north, passing through gaps in the Carpathian mountains. Their settlements stretched down to the Danube river in the south. Traces of their simple square houses of wood and straw, dug into the ground, complete with a small stone hearth in the corner, grain storage pits and cremation graves with pottery of the ‘Prague type’ are found across the plains and basins of southern Slovakia.

In the second half of the seventh century, the developments in Moravia and Slovakia were not paralleled in the rest of the Western Slavic world. But they were comparable to the other Slavic settlements across the Carpathian basin, where Slavic duchies grew in strength. One of these, Carinthia, lay in the shadow of the eastern Alps, on the upper courses of the Drava, Mur and Ens rivers. Another was Slavonia, on the middle course of the Sava, separated from the Avar khanate by the marshy lower course of the Drava. The remnants of material culture here, characterised by cast bronze objects from the skeleton graves of the second half of the seventh and eighth centuries, are similar to those found across the whole Carpathian basin. By this stage the Slovaks were already part of the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary, where they would remain for a thousand years; thus the ethno-genesis of the Slovaks, and their evolution into a separate nation, was to be a lengthy process.