Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Pannonian Avars were an alliance of Eurasian nomadic groups of various origins who established the Avar Khaganate in the Pannonian Basin from the late 6th to the early 9th centuries. Recent archaeogenetic studies indicate their core elite had Ancient Northeast Asian ancestry similar to peoples from Mongolia and the Amur River region, with a possible origin in the remnants of the Rouran Khaganate.
The Avars sent their first embassy to Constantinople in 557, arriving from the northern Caucasus. They agreed to subjugate unruly neighboring peoples on behalf of the Byzantines in exchange for gold, and by 562 they controlled the lower Danube basin and the steppes north of the Black Sea.
A series of Frankish campaigns beginning in 788 ended Avar power within a decade. Charlemagne led a campaign in 791 that met no resistance, as the Avars had fled and disease killed most of their horses. By 796 the Avar chieftains had surrendered and accepted Christianity, and the last Avar prince is mentioned in records from 822.
The language spoken by the Avars remains unknown. Classical philologist Samu Szadeczky-Kardoss noted that most Avar words recorded in Latin or Greek texts appear to derive from possibly Mongolian or Turkic languages, while Shimunek in 2017 proposed that the elite core spoke a Para-Mongolic language called Serbi-Avar. Other scholars have proposed Caucasian, Iranian, Tungusic, Hungarian, or Turkic origins for Avar speech.
A study published in Current Biology in May 2022 examined 143 Avar samples and found the elite preserved ancient Mongolian pre-Bronze Age genomes with roughly ninety percent Ancient Northeast Asian ancestry. A 2025 study of 722 remains from sites in Lower Austria found that East Asian ancestry remained dominant among the Avar elite even 200 years after their arrival in Europe, sustained through systematic partner selection within the Avar realm.
The Avars incorporated Slavic tribes as subjects, employing them as foot soldiers and using them as client forces to guard western borders and conduct diversionary raids. A fused Avar-Slavic material culture developed over time, characterized by half-moon-shaped earrings, Byzantine-styled buckles, and beads. A 2018 genetic study of a burial site in Cifer-Pac, Slovakia suggested mixed Avar-Slav intermarriage, with evidence pointing to Avar males and Slavic females as the primary pattern.