The Bulgars - whose name is interpreted as 'mixed people-mixture'- part of a vast semi-nomadic horde speaking a Turkic language which ranged the steppes round the Sea of Azov in the fifth-seventh centuries, migrated under Khazar pressure from this 'Great Bulgaria' (as the Greeks called it) and reached the lower Danube about the year 660. The Byzantine government allowed, since it could not prevent, their leader Asparuch (Isperich) to bring them over the river and settle in the Dobrudja about the year 679. The next two centuries saw the gradual Slavisation of the Bulgars, the firm foundation of a state and its increasing penetration by the Greeks.
Byzantine interest in this people and all its cousins on the steppes was of long standing: they were a possible menace to the security of the Empite, especially to its Crimean and Caucasian outposts. As early as 619, according to tradition, a Bulgar chieftain Kubrat (or Kovrat), who attempted to create a single Bulgar Empire of the steppes, was converted to Christianity as a friend and ally of the Emperor Heraklios. But this seems to have been a personal act without consequences for his subjects. Certainly none of his five sons, of whom Asparuch was one, was a Christian.
Mavi Boncuk |
The Slavs in the Byzantine Empire
The Slav invasion and settlement of the Balkans can be divided into three phases. During the first, covering the first half of the sixth century, the Slavs were still based north of the Danube but kept up a constan pressure of raids across the river, which yielded them plunder, slaves and bribes to remove themselves. They were behaving much as othe barbarian peoples before them and the Byzantine authorities reacted predictably. There were as yet few attempts to make permanent lodgements south of the Danube. The events of this half-century are treatee in Prokopios's Gothic War. A few landmarks must suftice here. The wide-ranging movements of the Getae in the North Balkans from 517 may have brought Slavs in as contingents in their armies. Prokopios alludes to a large-scale Slav raid on Thrace about 527. In the 530s there were further substantial incursions and in the 540s massive raids, which at one moment menaced Constantinople itself. In 547-8 a great offensive reached the Adriatic coast and devastated Dyrrachium (Durazzo). In the 550s the Imperial City was again menaced; this time the Slavs were strengthened by Kutrigur Turks.
As usual, the Empire made some attempt to tame the barbarians by attracting them as mercenary contingents into its armies and employing them on other war fronts: as early as 536-7 We find a record of such Slav mercenaries fighting against the Ostrogoths in Italy. This was arn important method of rapid if superficial civilisation
and though the barbarian military units might remain pagan as long as they preserved their unity, they saw the civilised world and gained some inkling of Christianity, while some of their officers were soon converted as a necessary step in their careers. Germanic barbarians had done exactly the same.
Such acts of ambitious individuals had naturally no effect on the main mass of the Slavs still outside the Empire. The first steps towards general
Conversion may only be expected to follow a favourable political and military situation when the barbarians realize that the adoption of the civilised way of life is the best way to hold on to and expand the advantages which they have already wrested from their opponents; and the regulator of civilised life, as of their own, is religion.
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