Garam Éva szerk.: Between East and West - History of the peoples living in hungarian lands (Guide to the Archaeological Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum; Budapest, 2005)
HALL 8 AND CORRIDOR - The Avar period (567/568-804 A.D.) (Éva Garam)
HALL 8 AND CORRIDOR The Avar period (567/568-804 A.D.) In the winter of 558/559, Avar envoys appeared in Constantinople before the Emperor Justinian. "The whole city was poured forth to behold with curiosity and terror the aspect of a strange people: their long hair, which hung in tresses down their backs, was gracefully bound with ribbons," noted Theophanes, chronicler of the remarkable events of his time. In 804, the armies of Khrum, the Bulgar khan, defeated the last warriors of the Avar khagan. The Avar nobles fled to the Frankish lands, but the commoners remained. The roughly two hundred and fifty years between these two events and the ensuing decades were a remarkable period in the history of Hungary during the early Middle Ages. This period marks the European history of the peoples lumped together under the label "Avar", who lived in the Carpathian Basin before the arrival of the ancient Hungarians. Most of them remained here after the fall of their empire. The people which styled itself as Avar arrived to Europe as fugitives. As a matter of fact, the Avars were an amalgam of two peoples: the Juan-juan of Inner Asia and the Hephtalites of Central Asia, fleeing from their Turkic overlords. They did not arrive to Europe as nomads herding their livestock, but as members of a military organisation who had been driven away from their homeland. The Avar envoys requested land suitable for settlement from the Byzantine emperor. The two regions best suited to their semi-nomadic lifestyle were the Lower Danube region and the area rich in water, grazing and arable lands protected by the arc of the Carpathians, both of which resembled the environment of their former homeland. Both were the continuation and the westernmost fringes of the steppe, the windswept grassland extending from the Mongolian desert, through the Kazakh steppe, the foreland of the Caspian Sea and the Pontic to the Carpathian Basin. The Emperor Justinian accepted the Avars' offer of alliance, but he did not grant them any land. In the meantime, the Turks pursuing the fugitives sent menacing messages, boasting that they would "crush the Avars with the hoofs 129 of their horses" . The new emperor, Justinus II, turned the Avars away, who then forged an alliance with the Langobards, with whom they defeated the Gepids of the Tisza region. In 567, the Avars moved to the Great Hungarian Plain. In 568, the Langobards fled to northern Italy from their menacing allies and the Avars, now masters of the entire Carpathian Basin, turned against their new neighbour, the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was caught unaware by the volte-face of the Avars, who a decade earlier had been begging at her doors. As a matter of fact, they were unfamiliar with the strict hierarchical Avar society based on the military leader' hereditary power and the strong centralised power - the Avars were a strange lot in their eyes, not only because of their appearance, tongue, music and writing, but also because of their utterly different customs and mindset. These sons of the East added a new hue to the colourful mosaic of Greeks, Romans and Germanic peoples of late antiquity. Byzantium soon leamt that her new neighbour was far from peaceful and had no fear of Constantinople - the Avars posed a constant threat to the Byzantine towns. The period between 567 and 626 were marked by repeated raids and attacks against Byzantium, followed by diplomatic negotiations and peace treaties. Bayan, the Avar khagan demanded Sirmium, the one-time imperial town which had later become the Gepidic royal seat, which he regarded as his lot according to the nomadic laws of war. The campaigns shattered the Danubian defences and the Avars' eastern Slavic auxiliaries poured into the Balkan Peninsula, redrawing the ethnic map of Eastern Europe. Byzantium's troops were tied down by the Persians on her eastern frontier and she was forced to buy peace by paying the Avars an annual tribute in gold. A staggering four and a half million gold solidi, the equivalent of roughly 20 thousand kilograms of gold, were paid between 573 and 626 as tribute and
