Germans, Slavs and Steppe Ponies

Those pesky ponies from the Eurasian steppes have a lot to answer for

. They're only small, but on their backs have sat warlike horsemen who have swept in from the grasslands of central Asia to terrorize the poor old farmers of Europe (and of China, for that matter but more on that another day).

The Huns were one of the most famous of these nomadic peoplesto have spread panic far and wide, and they were followed by Avars, Bulgars, Magyars and a whole host of less well-known hordes. The last, and probably most destructive, were the Mongols.

Avars, Slavs and Germans

I've just put up a page on the Timemaps Atlas of World History on Central Europe in AD 750. The Avars are the resident culprits of the time. They came near to destroying the Byzantine empire, and the disruption they caused within Central Europe was an important ingredient in a more gradual, but profoundly important, movement of peoples that had happened between AD 500 and AD 750. This was the expansion of the Slavs into great swathes of territory to the west and south of their original homeland.

The Slavs seem to have accomplished much of this expansion by harnessing themselves to the expansing power of the steppe nomads. It was the nomads who did much of the fighting, but it was the Slavs who actually settled the newly-conquered lands. This actually makes sense the horsemen were few in number (in most cases, no more than a hundred thousand, counting women, children and camp followers), and were herders rather than farmers by upbringing. The Slavs, on the other hand, must have numbered several millions, and were as skilled as any farmers of the time.

In the west, the Slavs were greatly assisted by the fact that hundreds of thousands of Germans had poured into the old provinces of the western Roman Empire. There was land to spare. To the south, however, the Avar war machine was of decisive importance.

Enduring Changes

In the long-run, of course, it was the Slavic expansion which really counted. The nomads were too few to make a big impression on the population, and they tended to dissipate their power through repeated bouts of in-fighting. The Slavs, however, stayed put for centuries in the newly-settled lands. They permanently altered the ethnic make-up of much of central, eastern and southern Europe, and the struggles which they put up to later German encroachments on these territories had a deep impact on all of European history, right into the twentieth century. But more of that later.

So, those little ponies from central Asia have a caused quite a few changes, one way or another.

Germans, Slavs and Steppe Ponies

By: Timemaps

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