21
them, conceding “the Norican city and the Pannonian fortresses”, i.e. the former Gothic
Pannonia and the part of Noricum south of the Drava, over which the Roman (Byzantine)
emperor still had power. With the exception of the “Norican city” – which some historians
understand as the urban area of Poetovio, others as Celeia – Noricum had then been ruled for
over a decade by the Franks, who had also taken Venetia around 545. Lombard settlement
then spread to upper Sava valley, as testified by a graveyard discovered in Kranj, where the
older graves are Ostrogothic and the newer Lombard. The treaty of 547/48 had made the
Lombards imperial foederati, and their advance into the area south of the Danube was initially
aimed against the Franks. In 567 King Alboin – who would later lead his people into Italy –
and his Lombards destroyed the Gepids, who then ruled over Sirmium, largely because he had
allied himself with the Avars, who had recently moved into the lower Danube area. Yet these
new allies and neighbours would soon also represent a new enemy for the Lombards. The
following year, the Lombards left Pannonia to the Avars, perhaps even by treaty. Soon, Slavic
people joined the Avars in migrating to Pannonia. The migration of Lombards from Pannonia
to Italy, which may have been encouraged by the embittered Byzantine general Narses, had
two long-term consequences: first, the political unity of Italy came to an end for many
centuries, and second, the Avars’ hegemony finally separated Pannonia, including most
Slovene territory, from the Roman ecumene.
THE SETTLEMENT OF THE SLAVS
The settlement of Slavic people – one cannot speak of Slovenes until well after the
Early Middle Ages – in the eastern Alps and the basins of the eastern Alpine rivers culminated
in the final decades of the sixth century, although the process had started before that and
would only end at the beginning of the ninth century. As indicated by some Slovene dialectal
reflexes, preserved to this day in the Gailtal dialect in Carinthia, and place and river names in
present-day Austria south of the Danube, the first Slavic thrust into the eastern Alpine space
came from the north, from the area of the western Slavic language group. The first wave
seems to have turned south around 550, leaving present-day Moravia and crossing the Danube
between Traun to the west and Vienna to the east, encompassing first the territory of Upper
and Lower Austria, then gradually spreading into the interior along the Alpine river valleys up
to the Karavanke mountain range, and then along the Drava river to the southeast. It seems
that the diocese in Poetovio (Ptuj) collapsed before 577, during the waves of Slavic migration.
A second wave of Slavic migration to the eastern Alps from the southeast came somewhat
later and was very closely linked to the Avars. This nomadic people from the Steppes had
22
taken control of the Pannonian Plain after the Lombards moved into Italy in 568, and had then
attacked the Byzantine state across the Danube and Sava rivers. In 582 they captured
Sirmium, the former capital of Illyricum, and also started to move towards the northwest,
accompanied by Slavs. The Slavic-Avar advance led to the collapse of ancient structures,
including the ecclesiastical organisation. Based on the synodal records from the metropolitan
church of Aquileia, which describe the fall of the ancient dioceses in this area (Emona, Celeia,
Poetovio, Aguntum, Teurnia, Virunum, and Scarabantia), it may be possible to trace the stages
of the Slavic-Avar advance into the eastern Alps. By 588, the upper Sava valley had fallen
into their hands, and by 591 they had taken the upper Drava valley, where in the following
years, skirmishes with northern neighbours, the Bavarians, began around present-day Lienz.
In 592, the Bavarians were successful, but then, in 595, they were heavily defeated in a battle
decided by the Avar leader (khagan) with his cavalry. These battles, which flared up once
more around 626, led to the development and consolidation of a border area that divided the
eastern Alpine area for centuries: a Frank-dominated western half separated from an Avar and
Slavic east and southeast.
To the south, along the Soča (Isonzo) river and in Istria, which then reached to the
Nanos massif and to Snežnik mountain, the border was established somewhat later. Following
battles with the Friulian Lombards at the start of the eight century, the Slavs occupied the hilly
land to the west of the Soča, up to the edge of the Friulian plain. This ethnic boundary has
lasted, with minor changes, for over 1,200 years, up until the present day. The advancing
Slavs moved into Istria from the northeast, via the Postojna Gate. First, until around 600, they
settled the lands up to the peninsula’s natural threshold to the south of the Trieste-Rijeka road,
where the Karst plain falls sharply down to the hinterland of Trieste and Buzet. At the end of
the eighth century, for reasons of recruitment and economic need, the local Frankish authority
organised the resettlement of Slavs from the continental part of Istria into the unpopulated
urban territories in the peninsula’s interior, to counter the influx of armed Avar groups. It is
not possible to reliably determine the number of Slavs that settled in the eastern Alpine and
pre-Alpine areas. A population figure of 20,000 for the area of modern-day Slovenia, which
covers 20,000 km
2
– acquired by taking the oldest statistical source for Slovene territory, the
first urbarial record for the Freising Škofja Loka seigneury from 1160 and working backwards
and generalising for the whole area – seems small but acceptable. It should be pointed out that
the population density was certainly higher in some areas, such as the Klagenfurt Basin in
Carinthia and around Kranj in Carniola, but settlement of an area that was far more forested
than today would have been very uneven.