THE SLAVS
The land of origin of this tribe, today occupying an enormous part of the dry land of the earth - from the Vladivostok to the Oder and from the Arctic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea - was in Central Europe. The ancient Greek and Roman authors place them in the plains, forests and fenlands between the River Wisla and the Baltic Sea. In the south the Slavs got as far as the river valleys of the Bug and the Dniester, and reached the ridges of the Carpathian Mountains.
In their type of race and in their way of life the Slavs resembled the Germans. They were fair, well-built people, who lived a settled life and who were engaged in primitive agriculture, cattle-breeding, hunting and armed brigandage. Their social organization was characterized by the domination of the clan communes, uniting temporarily, but not obligatory, all for any common undertaking - for instance, an armed attack on the borderlands of the Roman Empire. In this epoch state formations were unknown to the Slavs.
At the end of the 4th century there began their resettlement in all directions of Europe. We can only guess the reasons for the powerful demographic explosion which resulted in enormous waves of human beings overflowing into the present day German, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Hungarian, Rumanian, Czech, Croatian, Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian lands. In a short time the Slavs conquered and made settlements all over Europe up to the Elbe in the West, to the Urals and the Volga in the East, and to the Danube in the South. Even today historians still wonder at their irresistible forward drive! Probably, their conquests took place at the price of many victims in their ranks - the Slavs had no cavalry, did not possess any armor or other means of defense, and their weapons were very primitive.
To the south of the Danube, the Slav infantry detachments began to appear in the decades round the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century. Here things seemed to be lost for them - to the south of the Danube there were flourishing areas of the Eastern Roman Empire /Byzantium/, thickly populated with thousands of well-built fortresses, connected by roads and with garrisons armed to the teeth. In spite of this, the incredible happened - in about only one hundred years, in spite of the terrible casualties inflicted by the armies and garrisons of the Romans, the Slavs succeeded in gnawing away all the lines of defense of their opponents and in occupying the whole Balkan Peninsula. From the Trieste to the Varna and from the Danube to the Peloponnisos. The splendid civilization of the Roman Empire collapsed for ever and irrevocably. Enormous Roman cities became derelict and deserted, churches, amphitheaters, baths, roads and villas were overgrown with brushwood and thorn. In their places there sprang up the numberless straw huts and underground dwellings of the fair-haired new settlers. At the end of the 5th century, like lonely islands in the Slav sea, only Constantinople and Thessaloniki were left. They were still dominated by Eastern Rome and were besieged and terrorized every ten or fifteen years by the notorious Slav incursions, which were so vividly described by the Church writers in the Passionals of countless martyrs.
Now, at the beginning of the 6th century the Slavs were permanently settled not only in the lands between the Danube River and the Balkan Range, but also in vast areas in the Thrace and the Macedonia. The Seven Slav Tribes and the Severi had settled in the Danube plain, the Smoleni chose the Rhodope region, the Versiti and Sagudati moved to North and Central Greece, etc.
Historical sources of that time say that the Slavs used to be rather conservative ethnic community. They lived by hunting, fishing and relatively primitive farming. The Slav settlements were usually built along rivers, around marshlands or in woodlands - in other words, places that provide natural protection. The main type of housing was the dug-out, a rough dwelling dug out of a slope or a river bank. The Slavs used primitive building techniques. In spite of their many contacts with other cultures, the Slavs of that period still did not know the potter's wheel.
The Slavs religious tradition of that time comprised two types of deities: 1. deities embodying the elements /such as lightning and rain/; 2. deities embodying deified ancestors /such as mermaids and goblins/. The Slavs, however, had no separate cult system /priest, shrines/ which shows they made no clear distinction between the world of man and the world of magic.
Originally, the Slavs lived in clans in a kind of military democracy system. What some chroniclers called "democracy" and others called "want of will" was, actually, a familial community which in settling the lands south of the Danube River had gradually turned into territorial communes, the so called "slavinia". The territorial commune was related to a larger ethnic community, the tribe. The next step was establishing tribal alliances, usually for military reasons such as raids or defense. The marked isolationism of Slav culture was due mainly to the exceptionally important role of war in the life of the Slavs. War marked all the institutions of power of the Slav society: the Prince /"knyaz"/ and the Assembly /"horungva"/ of the army. As circumstances would force Slavs to constantly defend their acquisitions, warfare remained their only contact with neighboring people for a long time.
In spite of the fact that they had penetrated densely populated imperial territories, the Slavs had settled far from towns usually in deserted lands. Living in such isolation, maintaining no contacts with local inhabitants, they preserved their traditional clan culture for a long time. The situation would begin to change only around the end of the 7th century due to reasons outside Slav society. Although at the beginning of the 7th century the Byzantium had finally acknowledged the gravity of the Slav problem, it was still engaged in eastern wars with the Arabs. In year 658 A.D., however, Byzantium conducted a military expedition against the Slavs and showed it no longer underestimated the importance of the Slav problem.
More exhausting information on the Slavs problem can be found in two volumes from the Dumbarton Oaks Series, Washington D.C.: 1. Obolensky, D. The Byzantine Commonwealth and Eastern Europe, 500-1453. New York: SVS Press, 1971; 2. Dvornik, F. The Slavs in European History and Civilization. New Jersey: RUP Press, 1962.