Settlement of the Slavs across Europe in the early medieval period

The settlement of the ancient Slavs is one of the most important processes in the evolution of civilizational, geopolitical and ethnic processes in medieval Europe. Slavdom was separated into an independent ethnic group from among the Indo-European peoples around the first millennium BC. E. Several waves of the Great Migration of Nations, mass migrations at the beginning of the first millennium AD also provoked the mobility of the Slavic elements. A part of the tribes takes an active part in mass migrations. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the settlement of the Slavs is rapidly acquiring an ever broader framework. During this period, they appear in the Balkans, in the Baltic, in Moravia, moving to the middle Russian plain steppe in the east. Such a scattered settlement of the Slavs provokes their division in the middle of the 1st millennium AD into three large branches: the western, southern and eastern branches.

Southern Slavs

This branch was represented by the tribes of Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bulgars and Slovenes. Their shelter was the Balkan Peninsula, through which they settled in the V-VI centuries of our era. In addition to the peninsula proper, the southern Slavs also occupied part of the adjacent territories. By the time of their final settling in the Balkans, they were already at the stage of the decomposition of the clan community and were ready to form the first political formations. The first full-fledged state of them was, perhaps, Sklavia, which arose in the 7th century and existed before X. The descendants of those peoples are modern Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Slovenes and partly Bosniaks.

Western Slavs

The settlement of the Slavs of this branch took place in the same period. However, they moved in a different, more northerly direction than Slovenes and Bulgars. This group of peoples, which gave the modern world Poles, Czechs and Slovaks (as well as a number of ethnic groups that did not manage to become full-fledged peoples: Lusik, Silesians, Kashubians), settled in vast areas from the Vistula and up to the banks of the Elbe River. Also traces of representatives of this branch were discovered by archaeologists in the Baltic States. This branch of Slavdom was in the middle of the 1st millennium AD at about the same level of development with the southern ones, which enabled them, in the 7th century, to create their first state on the territory of modern Czechia.

Settlement of the Slavs of the Eastern

This significant group occupied an extensive East European plain. In the V-VI centuries, only the decomposition of the primitive communal system took place here. In addition, the Eastern Slavs did not have in the immediate vicinity highly developed nations that would stimulate the emergence of political formations here. As any corresponding map shows, the settlement of the eastern Slavs took place mostly in the Northern Black Sea Region, in the Dnipro, Pripyat, Dvina, Bug, Dniester, Seym, Sula and others basins. And then they moved further north, pushing out their medieval rivals - Finno-Ugric tribes. Since the 7th century AD the Eastern Slavs are beginning to unite into large-scale tribal unions. Such an alliance could include hundreds of tribes united around one of the strongest tribes. Their first significant political education became one of the most powerful medieval states. Speech, of course, about Kievan Rus.