Pannonian Avars

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pannonian Avars left one of the most perplexing puzzles in the history of early medieval Europe. In 557, a delegation of horsemen appeared at the gates of Constantinople, riding in from the northern Caucasus. Nobody in the Byzantine capital knew quite where they had come from, and the riders seemed content to let the mystery stand. Within a decade, these newcomers controlled the lower Danube basin and the steppes north of the Black Sea. Within a generation, they had assembled a khaganate stretching from what is now Austria to the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Who were the Avars? Where did their ancestors come from? Why did their identity seem to vanish as completely as their empire? And what do the skeletons buried across the Carpathian Basin say about a people whose language nobody can yet agree on?

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• 2. A Name Borrowed From Prestige

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  Theophylact Simocatta, writing around 629, preserved a remarkable confession. A small section of nomads called the Var and Chunni had fled west and settled in Europe during the reign of Emperor Justinian. When neighboring peoples, including the Barsils, Onogurs, and Sabirs, saw these newcomers, they panicked, assuming the strangers were the fearsome Avars. The fleeing groups saw their opportunity. They adopted the Avar name and accepted the gifts that terrified neighbors pressed upon them. Theophylact himself called them "Pseudo-Avars", insisting it was the more correct term. The Göktürk prince Turxanthos, in a letter preserved by Menander Protector, called the Pannonian Avars "Varchonites" and "escaped slaves of the Turks", numbering around twenty thousand. Walter Pohl, summarizing the dynamics of steppe empire formation in 2003, noted that a new group's name was often drawn from a repertoire of prestigious names with no necessary link to actual descent. The Avar name was simply the most formidable available label on the steppe at that moment, and the Var and Chunni took it.

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• 3. The Question of Origins

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  The 18th-century historian Joseph de Guignes proposed a link between the Pannonian Avars and the Rouran Khaganate of Inner Asia, pointing to Chinese sources including the Wei Shu and Bei Shi. The linguist Janos Harmatta rejected that identification on chronological grounds: the Chinese records of Rouran defeat predate the relevant Turkic campaigns by around fifty years. Peter Benjamin Golden and several other historians have argued for a Turkic origin, likely from the Oghur branch. A 2002 study by Emil Hersak and Ana Silic concluded that the Avars were of heterogeneous origin, combining mostly Turkic and Mongolic groups, with Germanic and Slavic peoples later assimilated into them. The researcher Savelyev and Jeong in 2020 concluded that the initial Pannonian Avars formed in Central Asia from Iranian peoples, Ugrians, Oghur-Turks, and Rouran tribes. The scholar Shimunek in 2017 proposed that the elite core spoke a Para-Mongolic language called Serbi-Avar, a sister branch to the Mongolic languages. Genetic analyses published in Cell in April 2022 examined 48 Avar samples from the early, middle, and late periods and found nearly all of them carrying a high level of Ancient Northeast Asian ancestry, with strong affinity to modern peoples inhabiting the region from Mongolia to the Amur River.

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• 4. Arrivals and Alliances

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  By the time the Avar horsemen reached the Balkans, they numbered roughly twenty thousand mounted fighters. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian I paid them to move on, and they pushed northwestward into Germanic territory until Frankish resistance stopped their expansion. Seeking rich pastoral land south of the Danube in what is now Bulgaria, they were refused by Byzantium, which threatened Avar aggression with its Göktürk contacts. The Avars then turned their attention to the Carpathian Basin. In 567 they allied with the Lombards, enemies of the Gepids who occupied the basin, and together they destroyed much of the Gepid kingdom. The Avars then persuaded the Lombards to move into northern Italy, a migration that became the last Germanic mass-movement of the Migration Period. That departure left the Carpathian Basin open, and the Avars moved in.

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• 5. War and Tribute

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  Avar Khagan Bayan I commanded an army of ten thousand Kutrigur Bulgars and sacked Dalmatia in 568, severing the Byzantine land connection to northern Italy and western Europe. By 582, the Avars had captured Sirmium, a former Roman capital in Pannonia. When Bayan's son Bayan II demanded higher tribute payments and was refused, the Avars seized Singidunum, the city now called Belgrade, and Viminacium. The Avar wars with Byzantium ran from 568 to 626. While negotiating beneath the walls of Constantinople in 617, Khagan Bayan II launched a surprise attack. The Avars failed to take the city center, but they pillaged the surrounding suburbs and carried off around two hundred seventy thousand captives. Payments in gold and goods to the Avars reached a total of two hundred thousand solidi shortly before 626. In that same year, the Avars cooperated with a Sassanid Persian force in a failed siege of Constantinople. After that defeat, Avar military and political power began to decline. Emperor Maurice's earlier account of Avar fighting style, preserved in the Strategikon, described an army almost entirely on horseback, refusing to dismount even in battle, letting vast herds of male and female horses follow the army to suggest an even larger force than they fielded.

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• 6. Fractures Within the Khaganate

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  In the 630s, a merchant named Samo rose to lead the first known Slavic polity, called Samo's Tribal Union, and expanded its authority over lands north and west of the Khaganate at Avar expense until his death in 658. The Chronicle of Fredegar records that during Samo's rebellion in 631, nine thousand Bulgars led by Alciocus left Pannonia for what is now Bavaria, where King Dagobert I massacred most of them. The remaining seven hundred joined the Wends. Around the same time, Bulgar leader Kubrat of the Dulo clan led a successful uprising, ending Avar authority over the Pannonian Plain and founding Old Great Bulgaria. Civil war between the Kutrigurs under Alciocus and opposing Utigur forces raged from 631 to 632. After Kubrat's death in 665, his sons failed to maintain cohesion in Old Great Bulgaria. One branch of Onogur-Bulgarians under Khan Asparukh, father of Khan Tervel, settled along the Danube around 679-681, establishing the First Bulgarian Empire. A 2022 genetic study in Current Biology noted that Avar individuals with different genetic ancestries were buried in separate cemeteries, suggesting that internal ethnic distinctions remained sharp even after generations of shared political life.

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• 7. Frankish Conquest and Dissolution

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  Conflict between Avars and Franks began in 788, following the Frankish deposition of Bavarian duke Tassilo III and the establishment of direct Frankish rule over Bavaria. The Avars suffered a defeat that year on Ybbs Field near the river Ybbs. In 790 they tried to negotiate peace and failed. Charlemagne led a large army across the Enns in 791, advancing along the Danube in two columns, but found no resistance; the Avars had fled, and disease killed most of their horses. Tribal infighting exposed the khaganate's weakness. Charlemagne's son Pepin of Italy captured a large fortified encampment called "the Ring", which held much of the plunder from earlier Avar campaigns. By 796, the Avar chieftains had surrendered and accepted Christianity. The song celebrating Pepin's victory over the Avars, "De Pippini regis Victoria Avarica", still survives. In 804, Bulgaria conquered the southeastern Avar lands in Transylvania and southeastern Pannonia up to the Middle Danube. Khagan Theodorus, a convert to Christianity, died in 805 after asking Charlemagne for help. The last Avar prince known by name was mentioned in records from 822. Pohl observed that Avar identity disappeared almost instantly once Avar institutions collapsed, though preliminary results from newer excavations suggest that a disastrous depopulation of the Avar Khaganate never actually happened.

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• 8. What the Graves Reveal

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  A genetic study published in Current Biology in May 2022 examined 143 Avar samples and found that the Avar elite preserved ancient Mongolian pre-Bronze Age genomes, with roughly ninety percent Ancient Northeast Asian ancestry. The paternal lineage N1a-F4205 was their predominant characteristic, the highest frequency of that haplogroup among any modern group being found today among the Dukha people of Mongolia at 52.2%. Wang et al. in 2025 analyzed 722 remains from sites at Leobersdorf and Modling in Lower Austria, dated from 650 to 800 CE. Although both sites shared material culture, the Leobersdorf remains showed mostly East Asian ancestry while those at Modling showed mostly European-like ancestry. The authors concluded that after two centuries in Europe, the Avar elite maintained East Asian ancestry primarily through what they described as systematically choosing partners with similar ancestry from across the Avar realm. Non-Asian locals were fully assimilated into Avar culture and were indistinguishable in terms of material objects, but the genetic boundary held until the absorption into the Frankish empire beginning at 800 CE. Gyula Laszlo's Avar-Hungarian continuity theory adds one more layer: he argued that Hungarian graveyards average forty to fifty graves, while Avar cemeteries contain between six hundred and one thousand, which would mean the Avars not only survived the collapse of their polity but far outnumbered the Magyar conquerors who arrived in 895.

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