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436 defeat of the Bulgars and Antae. But when Justinian's successor discontinued the tribute, the Dobrudja was no longer of any value to them. They then turned towards the north-west and suddenly appeared in the Eastern territories of the Frankish kingdom on the Elbe. They could not make their way thither through Hungary as it was occupied by the powerful Gepidae, and thus they had to go through North-Carpathian Slavland and through Bohemia. They must therefore first have subdued these lands. Their base of operations against the Franks in Thuringia is to be sought in Bohemia, where they found excellent summer-pastures in the mountain ring and good winter-quarters in the plains for their herds. It would be misunderstanding the entire nature of the mounted nomads, and of the Avars in particular, to regard these wars with Sigebert the king of the Franks as mere plundering expeditions. In the latter the nomads never confronted the enemy, but went round his positions with marvellous speed, and then charged behind his back. They confronted him or sought him out only when they had to defend their own land. In the first campaign they were defeated, but they won the second, and the consequence was that the North Sueves evacuated the oldest German land between the Elbe and the Oder. Nevertheless, Baian, the Avar Khagan, made peace with Sigebert, as he was attracted elsewhere: the Lombard king Alboin in Pannonia was preparing to wrest Italy from the East Romans, and in order to protect his rear he united himself with Baian against the Gepidae in Hungary and Transylvania. The kingdom of the Gepidae was destroyed, the Lombards made their way to Italy, and in 658 the Avars were complete masters of Hungary with its steppe on the Danube and Theiss so excellent for nomads.

The evacuation of Old Germany by the North Sueves, the destruction of the kingdom of the Gepidae, and the withdrawal of the Lombards to Italy — three co-related events — mark an epoch in the history of the world, for the entire East was abandoned by the Germans to the Avars and their followers the Slavs. Once more the map of Europe was suddenly changed, and from the steppes of Hungary the Avars became the terror of all their neighbours. But they did not give up the territories won from the Germans between the Oder and the Elbe, Saale, Main, Regnitz, Nab, for — as we shall see — a horde of the Avars wintered yearly on the Main and Regnitz till about the year 603, and the Khagan resettled the waste German land as far as the Baltic with Slavs brought there from the first, North-Carpathian, Avar kingdom.

The existence of this first Avar-Slavonic kingdom is proved by the account which the Arabian geographer of the second quarter of the ninth century (before the conquest of Hungary by the Magyars) gives of the mare-milking and therefore Altaic Great King, whose realm lay in the territory of the Slavonic Dulyebs or Volynyans south-west of Polesie,