Avar Khaganate

Refugees who took a plain

formationDrafted from Simocatta, The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986)

The Avars entered the Romans' field of view in 558, arriving as refugees fleeing the westward expansion of a rival Turkic federation in central Asia. They moved quickly: within a few years they had defeated the tribes bordering the Black Sea and extended their reach west along the Danube, and Emperor Justinian offered them land to settle - Pannonia Secunda, a former Roman province then held by a patchwork of Lombards, Gepids and Heruls rather than by Rome itself.

Simocatta, The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986) · Bjoertvedt · CC BY-SA 4.0

The Gepids crushed, the Lombards driven out

The Avars took that land by the same method that had brought them west in the first place: alliance and force. Joining the Lombards against the Gepids, who had disputed mastery of Pannonia with them for years, the Avars helped crush the Gepid kingdom outright in 567. The victory unsettled their own allies as much as their enemies - the Lombards, now facing an Avar horde as their only neighbour on a plain the Avars had just helped clear, judged the prospect bad enough to abandon Pannonia for Italy altogether the following year. The Avars simply moved into the space the Lombards left behind, and Pannonia, taken by conquest and vacated by fear, became the base from which every later Avar campaign - against the Franks in the west, against Constantinople in the east - would be launched.

Simocatta, The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986) · James Steakley · CC BY-SA 3.0

An elephant and a gold couch

expansionDrafted from Simocatta, The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986)

For two decades the Avars held Pannonia without pressing Roman territory directly, but that changed when Sirmium - one of the great Roman cities of the middle Danube, standing between the Sava and the river itself - fell to a long Avar siege in 581 or 582. The Romans bought an end to the war on humiliating terms, agreeing to deposit eighty thousand gold coins a year with the Chagan, paid out in silver and embroidered cloth, "as if a prize for excellence" in the historian's own bitter phrase for a treaty that rewarded the party that had broken the peace.

Simocatta, The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986) · Institute for the Study of the Ancient World · CC BY 2.0

The Chagan's contempt for Roman gifts

The peace did not last two years. Before it broke down, the Chagan demonstrated exactly how little the arrangement had satisfied him. Hearing rumours of the enormous animals the Romans kept, he demanded to see one, and the emperor sent him the finest elephant in the imperial stables; the Chagan took one look and sent it straight back, whether from fear or contempt the source does not say. He then demanded a gold couch to match his new standing, and when the emperor had one made and sent to him, the Chagan returned that too, as though it were something cheap. He followed both rebuffs with a demand for twenty thousand additional gold coins a year on top of the existing tribute, and when the emperor refused in anger, the Chagan threw his oaths to the winds and went to war.

Singidunum, Anchialus, and a threat to the Long Walls

Avar forces took Singidunum by surprise that same summer, catching its people at the harvest, and went on to destroy Augustae and Viminacium before besieging Anchialus on the Black Sea coast - reportedly sparing its hot baths only because the Chagan's own harem wished to use them. When Roman envoys came to negotiate, one of them, Comentiolus, answered the Chagan's arrogance with an open rebuke to his face, accusing him of forgetting the "many royal gifts and Roman kindness" his ancestors had received. The Chagan was unmoved: he answered the embassy by threatening to tear down the Long Walls of Constantinople itself, the outer defence line barely thirty miles from the capital. The threat was not yet carried out, but it announced, more plainly than any treaty violation before it, how far the Avars now believed their reach could extend.

A woman alone on the wall

peakDrafted from century), Chronicon Paschale, 284-628 AD (1989)

In the summer of 626 the Chagan brought the entire Avar horde to Constantinople itself, coordinating his attack with a Persian army under Shahvaraz that had advanced to Chalcedon on the opposite shore of the Bosporus. The Chagan himself reached the wall with the whole of his horde on 29 July; two days later he arrayed his forces for battle from the gate of Polyandrion to the gate of the Pempton, fighting from dawn until the eleventh hour with Slavic infantry in the front rank and his own armoured troops behind them. By evening he had begun positioning siege engines along the wall, and within days he had built twelve towers, covered in hides against fire, advanced almost to the city's outworks.

An embassy answered with contempt

The Chagan tried negotiation as well as siege-craft. He brought Persian envoys into view of his own ambassadors' conference with the Romans and boasted that Salbaras had promised him three thousand men in alliance, telling the Roman officials bluntly that unless they left their city and property behind, "it is impossible for you to be saved, unless you can become fish and depart by sea, or birds and ascend to the sky." The Roman envoy George refused him flatly, and when Roman ships intercepted the Persian ambassadors attempting to cross the Bosporus to join the Chagan by night, the defenders beheaded two of them and sent their heads back with a message naming exactly what had happened to the third.

The flotilla destroyed, the Chagan's own vision

The climax came on Thursday 7 August, when the Chagan tried to ferry the Persian army across the Golden Horn using canoes crewed by his Slavic subjects. The Roman fleet, forewarned, destroyed the flotilla and killed the Slavs who reached shore, some at the Chagan's own furious order once he realized what their failure meant for his plan. He is recorded as saying, at the moment of the defeat, that he had seen "a woman in stately dress rushing about on the wall all alone" - taken by the chroniclers as a vision of the Virgin, whose shrine at Blachernae stood near where the flotilla went down. The following night he burned his own siege towers, palisade and engines and withdrew, insisting he retreated only for want of supplies and not from fear, and promising to return and finish what he had begun. He never did. Within the year several of the Slavic peoples who had fought under him in the siege had risen in revolt, and the Avar reach into Roman territory that the summer of 626 represented was never matched again.

century), Chronicon Paschale, 284-628 AD (1989) · DimiTalen · CC0

A hundred and fifty years of silence

contractionDrafted from Somogyi, New Remarks on the Flow of Byzantine Coins in Avaria and Walachia during the Second Half of the Seventh Century (in Florin Curta and Roman Kovalev, eds., The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans) (2008)

No chronicle picks up the Avars' story where the 626 siege left off. Byzantine writers, who had described the failed siege in such close detail, largely stopped mentioning the Avars afterward, and the khaganate's own history for the century and a half between that defeat and its first clashes with Charlemagne's armies has to be read out of buried coins rather than narrated events. What that evidence shows is not a single story of decline, but at least two distinct turns.

A tribute that stopped, then started again

Byzantine gold coins had been flowing into Avar territory for decades before 626, almost certainly as the annual tribute the Chagan had extorted to keep the peace; the siege, fought explicitly to end that arrangement, marks the point at which the flow of gold into Avar graves stops abruptly. For twenty-five to thirty years afterward, next to no Byzantine coin reached Avar territory at all. Then, from around 650, gold and silver coin begins turning up again in Avar burials - too much of it to explain by ordinary trade alone, and a strong sign that some form of renewed relationship with Constantinople, tribute or gift-giving, had resumed.

Refugees from a broken Bulgar kingdom

Part of what filled that gap was an infusion of new people. Kuvrat, ruler of an Onogur Bulgar polity Byzantine sources call Great Bulgaria, had been Constantinople's own ally against the Avars; when he died, probably in the 650s or 660s, his sons could not hold his kingdom together. One of them led his own followers west across the Danube and into the Avar khaganate itself, reinforcing Avar numbers just as another of Kuvrat's sons, Asparukh, was leading a separate group south to found what would become the first Bulgarian kingdom on Byzantine soil.

An embassy in 678

The clearest single point of contact in the whole period comes in 678, when an Avar embassy reached Constantinople to congratulate Emperor Constantine IV on his victory over an Arab siege of his own capital. Coins struck for Constantine IV between 674 and 681 have turned up in Avar territory in a pattern that fits neatly with gifts carried home by that returning embassy - whether or not it was the first Avar contact with the empire since 626, it stands as proof that a Chagan was again treating with Constantinople as an equal worth congratulating, a century and a half before the same khaganate would meet an enemy it could not outlast.

Somogyi, New Remarks on the Flow of Byzantine Coins in Avaria and Walachia during the Second Half of the Seventh Century (in Florin Curta and Roman Kovalev, eds., The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans) (2008) · Apaleutos25 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The ring taken twice

endDrafted from Oman, The Dark Ages, 476-918 (1905)

Weakened by their own civil wars and by revolts among their Slavic subjects, the Avars nonetheless kept to their old habits, and in 788 they raided the Lombard march of Friuli and the vassal duchy of Bavaria at once - drawing down on themselves a reckoning that two years later arrived in full. Charlemagne marched down the Danube in person with an Austrasian and Saxon army, broke through the long line of fortifications the Avars had built along their own border, and wasted their territory as far as the river Raab, while a separate Lombard army pushed up the Drave valley into the heart of Pannonia, beat the Avars in open battle, and stormed their great circular camps.

The Ring, and Avaric trophies sent as far as Mercia

A Saxon revolt pulled Charlemagne away before the conquest could be finished, and he never again took the field against the Avars in person, but the war continued under his son Pippin and Eric, duke of Friuli. Between them they captured the Ring - the great circular stronghold between the Danube and the Theiss that served as the Avars' central treasury and seat of power - not once but twice, and sent its plunder back to Aachen in such quantity that Charlemagne was able to give Avaric spoils as gifts to distant kings, Offa of Mercia among them.

Oman, The Dark Ages, 476-918 (1905) · James Steakley · CC BY-SA 3.0

Submission at Aachen

The plunder of the Ring broke what was left of Avar cohesion. Their chiefs, known as tuduns, travelled to Aachen of their own accord to do homage to Charlemagne and offered to accept Christianity; he accepted their submission, appointed one of them to rule the remaining Avars in his name, and had him baptized under the name Abraham while he kept the old title of Chagan for the office. The new vassal Chagan paid regular tribute to the Franks and kept his people clear of the Lombard and Bavarian borders that his predecessors had raided for two and a half centuries. Avar power on the Danube, which had once besieged Constantinople itself, ended at Aachen not in battle but in a baptism and an oath of tribute.