23
By the time the Slavs had settled the former provinces of Noricum and Pannonia,
Roman citizenship had already disappeared from the area. It did survive for considerable
time, despite the major upheavals of the fifth century, as long as the area was still
administered as part of Italy. This era came to an end in western Noricum (where the death in
532 of the deacon Nonnosus, who had worked around Teurnia, was still dated by reference to
the Roman consuls), with the Frankish occupation of 536/537. The eastern Norican and
western Pannonian areas, which in 548 were ceded to the Lombards by the eastern Roman
Emperor Justinian, were separated from the Roman ecumene by the Lombard migration to
Italy in 568, and the establishment of the new Avar dominion in the central Danube area. This
does not mean that the new arrivals did not assume the heritage of antiquity, at least in part.
Older conceptions of the indigenous population completely abandoning the region or being
forced out by the Slavs have long since been superseded. Numerous place names relating to
the name Vlah, which the Slavs gave to the ‘Romans’ (e.g. Laško), as well as some fortified
hilltop settlements – a typical form of settlement in this area in Late Antiquity – such as
Rifnik, south of Šentjur by Celje, which were settled continuously until the seventh century,
indicate the contact and cohabitation of the indigenous inhabitants with the Slavs. The Slavs
also assumed numerous ancient place and river names, as well as some components of their
everyday economic life, particularly Alpine dairy-farming. The further west one travels,
towards Friuli and Italy, the more traces one finds of such contact. Even though the area
newly settled by the Slavs had been cultivated since antiquity, there were many changes in its
structure at this time. The most evident was the collapse of ancient urban centres. The
province, which had previously been centred on its towns, now became completely rural in
character. In the early medieval period, illiteracy replaced the ancient literacy of the area. The
codified legal order and the state it supported was replaced by new legal forms. A different
social structure grew up alongside a new form of arable farming. The ecclesiastical
organisation of dioceses collapsed completely, but the Christian cult did not, with the
indigenous ‘Roman’ population managing to preserve it, at least in some locations, such as
Spittal an der Drau in Carinthia. There, the diocesan church of Teurnia was destroyed around
600, but the preservation of the gravestone of Deacon Nonnosus from 532 mentioned above
in a monastical church from the end of the eighth century in Molzbichl indicates the
continuity of the cult well beyond the initial period of Slavic settlement. The Carantanian
mission of the eighth century would later explicitly associate itself with this core of local
Christian tradition.
24
NEW IDENTITIES
By the end of the sixth century, today’s eastern Tyrol and Carinthia were already
known as the ‘land of the Slavs’ (
Sclaborum provincia), while the presence of an Avar khagan
indicates that this mountainous Alpine world was included in the Avar dominions, the centre
of which lay between the Danube and the Tisza river in Pannonia. The Avars first appeared in
Europe around 560, on the borders of the Byzantine state along the lower Danube. In 567,
they joined forces with the Lombards to destroy the Gepids. The subsequent Avar settlement
of Pannonia, (from where the Lombards migrated into Italy in 568) reached its peak in 582
with the capture of the ancient capital of Illyricum, Sirmium. In a wider sense, the Avar name
included everybody living under the authority of the khagan. The Avar name was used for a
supra-regional political community that was rather unstable and subject to continual changes,
which was characteristic of all the nomadic horse people from the Eurasian Steppes. The
Avars formed a polyethnic alliance, which was always open to incoming groups, and in
addition to the other peoples (gentes) of the Pannonian basin, the alliance also encompassed
Gepids, Bulgars, Kutrigurs, and above all, Slavs. The Slavs settled across a large area of the
Avar political entity, stretching from the Sudetes in the north to the lower Danube to the
south. They were subordinate to their Avar masters, paying tribute and providing military
service. Yet the attitudes and relations of the horse-bound Avar warriors to the various Slavic
groups differed according to the time and geographical circumstances. Avar supremacy over
the Slavs at the heart of the khaganate based around the lower Danube and Tisza river in
Pannonia was undoubtedly more keenly felt than on the periphery, in the hilly and heavily
forested eastern Alpine and northwest Balkan areas, which were less suitable for the life of
nomadic horse people. In Slovene historiography, one finds the relationship described thus:
“Nothing justifies the thinking that Carantanians all had their own Avar master. Months could
pass without seeing an Avar-nomad, and in more remote places perhaps even a year. Yet if a
band stopped in their village, the situation was completely lawless, as described so movingly
by Fredegar and Nestor, and as even the mighty Goths experienced under the Huns.” Traces
of the Avar presence in Carantania may be preserved in the place names of Faning and
Fohnsdorf (Slovene: Baniče and Banja Vas) deriving from the word ban (from the Avar
bajan). The Avar rule described above lasted until the mid-620s, when two not entirely
unconnected events – the start of Slavic resistance to Avar supremacy under Samo in 623 and
the failed Avar siege of Constantinople in 626 – ushered in major changes in the region.
Before 626, barbarian peoples had already reached the walls of the great city on the