Pannonian Avars

The Avars who ruled the Carpathian Basin from the 560s until about 800 were mounted nomads from the eastern steppe who built one of early medieval Europe's great powers, the Avar Khaganate. From their base on the plains of today's Hungary they dominated Slavic, Germanic and Bulgar subjects, besieged Constantinople and shaped the Slavic settlement of the Balkans, before Frankish armies broke their realm in the 790s. They are called Pannonian Avars to set them apart from the separate Avars of the Caucasus.

Byzantine writers reported that the Turks dismissed them as escaped subjects and "pseudo-Avars", and modern scholars have proposed Turkic, Mongolic, Iranian and mixed origins. Many have linked their ruling core to the Rouran Khaganate of Mongolia, which had been overthrown by the Göktürks. Ancient DNA studies published in 2022 strongly support an origin in present-day Mongolia: elite Avar burials carry overwhelmingly Northeast Asian ancestry, while most of the khaganate's ordinary population was of local European descent. The khagan's language is unknown; one recent proposal makes it a sister of the Mongolic languages.

The Avars first sent envoys to the Byzantine Empire in 557, offering to fight its enemies for gold, and soon subdued the Kutrigurs and Sabirs north of the Black Sea. Paid off by Justinian I, they turned west, and in 567 they joined the Lombards to destroy the Gepid kingdom in the Carpathian Basin. After persuading the Lombards to move on to Italy, the Avars took the basin for themselves, and the khagan Bayan I made himself overlord of its Slavic, Germanic and Bulgar tribes. They captured Sirmium by 582 and later Singidunum, modern Belgrade, raiding the Balkans whenever Byzantine payments stopped. By 600 their power reached from Austria to the Pontic steppe.

During talks with Emperor Heraclius outside Constantinople in 617, the Avars attacked by surprise and, by one account, carried off 270,000 captives. In 626 they besieged the city together with a Persian army, with Slavic allies fighting on foot, but failed. Defeat weakened them: the Slavic ruler Samo built a rival realm to the north-west in the 630s, and the Bulgar leader Kubrat threw off Avar overlordship farther east.

The khagan stood at the head of a small warrior aristocracy whose richest graves hold gold coins, decorated belts, weapons and stirrups of Central Asian type. Their armies combined horse archers and armoured lancers with Slavic and other subject troops. Over time the Avars settled down, farming and raising cattle and pigs, and a mixed Avar-Slavic material culture developed. An eighth-century art of griffins and tendrils on belt fittings may reflect steppe newcomers or change from within; this is still argued.

After Charlemagne annexed Bavaria in 788, war with the Franks began. A Frankish army marched down the Danube in 791 against little resistance, and Charlemagne's son Pepin of Italy later seized the Avar treasure fortress known as the Ring. By 796 Avar chiefs had submitted and were open to baptism, and the Carolingian Empire made their western lands a frontier march, while the Bulgars took the south-east around 804. The last Avar ruler is mentioned in 822, and an Avar presence in Pannonia is still recorded in 871.

The Avars gradually merged with the Slavic majority, and survivors were probably absorbed by the Hungarians after the Magyar conquest of the 890s, which laid the ground for the later Kingdom of Hungary. The archaeologist Gyula László argued that late Avars survived in large numbers and even passed their speech to the Hungarians, a theory known as Avar-Hungarian continuity. Whether they had any link with today's Caucasian Avars is uncertain.

Our maps for 600, 700 and 800 draw the approximate Avar realm in the Carpathian Basin, beside the Byzantine Empire, the Lombards, the Slavs and later the Frankish realm. The 900 map still shows an Avar territory, although the khaganate itself had collapsed by the early ninth century; that year it borders the Magyars, Great Moravia, the Bulgars and the Croatian kingdom.