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suffering. In the drought of the late 530s, mares would have been unable to suckle their young, and what should have been the next generation would have died off. A few months later, the starving adult animals would have started to die. Robbed of their sources of milk, cheese, and yogurt, the Avars would have had to eat the carcasses of their dead horses.
    As hard winters and drought continued into the second and third years of the catastrophe, families would have begun to starve to death. Unable to find their own food, unable to barter food from others (horses had been their wealth), unable to raid effectively, unable to defend themselves adequately without healthy horses, the Avars’ time had run out. Although the worst of the drought was probably over by the mid-540s, the economic and geopolitical damage had been done.
    First the Turks snubbed the now much-weakened Avars, their official overlords, by establishing direct diplomatic links with the imperial government of northern China in 545. Then, in 551, the Turks virtually saved the Avars from destruction by rebel tribes. And in the following year, the Turks pushed for political equality with their Avar masters by demanding that the Avar ruler give the Turkic
kagan
(king) one of his daughters as a wife. The proud Avar leader refused, and the Turks used his refusal as a pretext for overthrowing Avar rule.
    Thousands of Avars were slaughtered or enslaved. Their leader, Anagui, 7 committed suicide, presumably to avoid the humiliation and ritual execution that would have befallen him if he had been captured by the Turks. The Turks believed that as kings were divinely appointed individuals, their blood must never be allowed to touch the earth, so had they found him alive, he would have been strangled with a silk cord.
    Lesser members of the royal clan, however, were almost certainly captured. It is known that some captives were retained (or sold) as slaves. 8 Some—especially the more important—would have been executed in traditional steppe fashion, their bodies ripped asunder between two young trees. Those Avars who survived fled into exile and began a three-thousand-mile trek westward toward Europe. 9
    There are no eyewitness descriptions of the great journey to the west, but the archaeological and historical record pertaining to later steppe migrations provides a reasonable indication of what it must have been like. Thousands of men, women, and children made the journey—mostly on horseback. The entire caravan would have been more than a mile long. Each family’s possessions, including their round felt tents (known as yurts), would have been carried on large covered wagons pulled by oxen. The caravan may also have included large numbers of spare horses and flocks of sheep. 10
    The most likely route the Avars took from Mongolia to Europe was a relatively northerly one, avoiding the Dzungaria and other central Asian deserts. After following the course of the Irtysh River for some six hundred miles, the Avar refugee caravan would then have cut across what is now northern Kazakhstan, skirting the northern shores of the Caspian Sea into the fertile grasslands to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. Here they encountered and conquered a local tribal group called the Kutrigurs. Their numbers were also swollen by a kindred people—a partially proto-Mongolian and partially Hunnic group called the Hepthalites, or White Huns.
    The Avar horde, now with many of its Kutrigur Hun vassals and Hepthalite allies, then proceeded northwest into what is now the Ukraine, where they conquered the Ukranian Slavs (the Antes). Next, the constantly expanding Avar folk migration (now including some Slav as well as Kutrigur and other contingents) rolled on. They then paused to demand land (unsuccessfully) from the Roman imperial authorities. Having failed at this stage to gain entry to the empire, they moved west around the northern tip of the Carpathian Mountains into what is now Hungary, where