5 - The Slavs, Avars, and Hungarians

Summary

From the late fourth century onwards, Christendom was assailed by a succession of invaders. The first wave consisted of Germanic tribes – Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals – and their irruptions brought down the West Roman Empire. During the sixth century, Slavonic groups emerged in the territory north of the Danube that the Germanic tribes had evacuated and began incursions into the South-East European lands of the Byzantine empire. In the late ninth century, the old Roman province of Pannonia together with the Hungarian Great Plain was occupied by the Magyars, a Finno-Ugrian group, originally from Siberia, that had over the preceding centuries made its home on the western steppes. The Magyar settlement destroyed several nascent Slavonic principalities and was accompanied by extensive raids into the Balkans and Western Europe.