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they subjugated the local population, the Gepids. (See Chapter 4.)
    By 568 the Avars had created a new empire, every bit as impressive as the one they had ruled in Mongolia sixteen years and three thousand miles away. It consisted of eastern Hungary, western Romania, Slovenia, Moravia, Bohemia, eastern Germany, and the western Ukraine. It covered approximately a million square miles, from what is now Germany in the west to the river Volga in the east, from the Baltic in the north to the frontier of the Roman Empire in the south.
     
    P erhaps the most historically significant of the Avars’ vassals were the Slavs, who themselves were relative newcomers to much of eastern Europe. Together, these two barbarian peoples helped transform the world.

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    T H E  A V A R
D I M E N S I O N
     
     
    “T hey are treacherous, foul, untrustworthy and possessed by an insatiable desire for riches.” These “scoundrels” are “very experienced in military matters” and “prefer to prevail over their enemies not so much by force as by deceit, surprise attacks and the cutting of supply lines.”
    Thus wrote the Roman emperor Maurice, in the late sixth century, in a detailed army manual describing in precise and far from complimentary terms the hordes of Mongolian Avars who had migrated across Asia and begun to cause major problems for his empire.¹
    The same climatic problems that had triggered the chain of events leading to the arrival of the Avars appear to have already led to increased pressure on the Roman Empire by the Slavs. And, as described in Chapter 1, since 541 there had been several major outbreaks of bubonic plague, which cumulatively had reduced the empire’s population substantially.
    Maurice was in many ways a highly competent ruler. Yet the combination of the Avars, the Slavs, and other problems, all ultimately triggered by the climatic events of the 530s, eventually led to a people’s revolution that changed Roman and world history forever. How did the empire lose control?
     
    I n 536–537 the climatic problems that were affecting so many other parts of the world seem also to have hit the Slavs, an agricultural people who lived in Poland and the western half of the Ukraine and who had, since the 520s, also settled in parts of Romania.
    It is known from imperial edicts that in 537 the food situation was dire in the neighboring Roman provinces—Moesia Secunda (northeast Bulgaria) and Scythia (southeast Romania)—and the agricultural problems without doubt extended over the border into Slav territory.
    The situation was so bad that in 536 or 537 the Slavs poured over the Danube frontier and were reported by the Roman historian Procopius as having “plundered the adjoining country and enslaved a very great number of Romans.”
    It is almost impossible to believe that the only direction the Slavs took was into Roman territory. Hunger and the search for food would have forced them to expand into any adjacent area in which native resistance was weak. It is more than likely, therefore, that it was at this juncture that the Slavs started also to expand westward, up the Danube and through the strategic Iron Gate Pass, into what is now Slovenia.
    From the Roman Empire’s point of view, the years 536 and 537 marked the beginning of major Slav invasions of imperial territory. The episode seems to have ushered in a period of increased Slav political instability and aggression. Around 545—as the empire was recovering from the first bout of the plague—another invasion was launched by the Slavs.
    “At about this time,” wrote Procopius, “an army of Slavs crossed the River Danube and spread desolation throughout the whole of Illyricum [now the former Yugoslavia] as far as Epidamnus [Durres in Albania], killing or enslaving all who came in their way, young and old alike, and plundering their property.”
    Then, in 550, the Slavs poured over the frontier yet again, this time capturing a Roman commander and seizing a