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Rh the very people who according to Pseudo-Nestor had been formerly kept in servitude by the Avars. Bordering on the steppes as they did, they were from the earliest times a prey to the inhabitants of the steppes. Before the Avars various nomadic and Germanic peoples were their masters; and these peoples left behind warlike elements which were sharply distinguished — even after becoming Slavised — from the subjected Slav mass. The king was called in Slavic knez (from kŭnęgŭ), Germanic kuninga. Further among the Sorb-Serbs the class of the vićazi-vitezi "knights" (from vitęgŭ), that is, German vikings; and the numerous Polish nobility has the German title szlachta.

Out of this Germano-Altaio-Slavonic mixture of the Dulyebi-Volynyane and other Slavonic peoples north of the Carpathians, Baian created for himself an almost inexhaustible reservoir of men whom he formed into barriers against the Germans on his western frontiers. He transplanted a part of the Dulyebi-Volynyane to Pannonia (where later was the Comitatus Dudleipa), another to South Bohemia (the later countries of Doudleby and Volyň), a third to the distant north (the island of Wollin) at the mouth of the Oder. Similarly he tore apart the North-Carpathian Croats (Khr'vati) of the upper Vistula and placed them partly in the Elbe and Saale, where several villages bear their name, partly in Carantania (pagus Crauuti), partly to Pannonia and Dalmatia, where later independent Croatian States arose; the North-Carpathian Serbs (Serbi) partly on the Saale and the Elbe (later the mighty Sorbs), partly where to-day they are independent in Servia and Montenegro. The Slav nations of to-day are therefore not original but a gradual crystallisation since the sixth century into linguistic units out of the peoples transplanted by the Avars — a process already completed by the tenth century.