Early Slavs

The early Slavs were the Slavic-speaking peoples of Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe in the Migration Period and Early Middle Ages, roughly from the fifth to the tenth century. Between the sixth and the ninth centuries their settlements spread from a homeland probably in Polesia, the forest and marsh country of today's Belarus and Ukraine, to the Elbe, the eastern Alps, the Balkans and towards the Volga. Today's Slavic nations descend from them.

Roman writers of the first and second centuries, among them Pliny, Tacitus and Ptolemy, describe a people called the Veneti east of the Vistula, and by the sixth century Byzantine authors linked these with the Slavs, though whether the early Veneti spoke a Slavic language is disputed. The name Slav itself first appears in writing in the sixth century. The historian Jordanes, writing his history of the Goths around 551, said the Venethi were known chiefly as Sclaveni and Antes, while Procopius, who wrote about Justinian's wars, said that both groups spoke the same language.

Proto-Slavic grew out of a Balto-Slavic stage of Indo-European and absorbed early loanwords from the Iranian languages of the Scythians and Sarmatians, including the word for god, bog, and later loans from Germanic. Archaeologists have linked several earlier cultures, such as the Zarubintsy culture of the Dnieper forest zone, to Slavic origins, but how far ethnic labels can be applied to Iron Age cultures is debated. More secure are the Prague-Korchak, Penkovka and Kolochin cultures of the sixth and seventh centuries, which are generally taken to mark the spread of Slavic speakers.

After the collapse of Hunnic power in the fifth century, Slavic groups spread rapidly. Scholars explain this in different ways. Some stress migration into lands left emptier by Germanic emigration, war and the Plague of Justinian; others argue that much of the spread, especially in the Balkans and the east, came about through language shift among existing populations. Slavic raiders crossed the Danube into Byzantine territory from the sixth century, and many Slavs lived under or alongside the Avars. Around 623 a Frankish merchant named Samo led a revolt against the Avars and founded a short-lived Slavic realm in Central Europe.

Early Slavic society was made up of local, decentralised chiefdoms. Procopius claimed that the Sclaveni and Antes were not ruled by one man but decided matters in common, and the Byzantine military manual known as the Strategikon advised generals to keep them from uniting under a single leader. Settlements were small villages of perhaps fifty to seventy people, built of sunken houses with a stone or clay oven in a corner near rivers, often in places hard to reach. People farmed millet, wheat and barley, kept cattle and pigs, hunted, trapped furs and kept bees. From the ninth century fortified strongholds became common, and powerful chiefs with armed retinues emerged.

Pre-Christian Slavic religion revered spirits of nature, the home and the ancestors, with outdoor sacred sites on hills, springs and groves, and in time a supreme god ruling over the rest; most of what is known comes from later Christian writers. Christianisation began in the seventh century and spread through the ninth and tenth: Bulgaria converted officially in 864, Poland's Duke Mieszko I was baptised in 966, and Vladimir the Great baptised Kievan Rus' in the 980s. The Cyrillic script was developed at the Preslav school in Bulgaria and made official there in 893.

From the seventh century onward, Slavic chiefdoms coalesced into states. Carantania in the eastern Alps, the ancestor of Slovenia, is the oldest known Slavic principality. The First Bulgarian Empire, founded in 681, joined a Bulgar ruling class to a Slavic majority. Great Moravia, Bohemia, Croatia, Serbia, Poland and Kievan Rus' followed.

Our 700, 800 and 900 maps draw broad territories labelled Slavonic tribes, Slavic tribes and Proto-Slavs across Central and Eastern Europe, approximate outlines of peoples rather than states, beside the Carolingian Empire, the Khazars and the Balts. By the 1000 map much of the western part has become Poland.