Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/480

452 and embraced the Main and Redantz (Regnitz) Slavs. Thus it lay in what had been Frankish territory, for Samo himself acknowledged: "The land we inhabit and we ourselves are Dagobert's, yet only in case he will maintain friendship with us." Before the irruption of the Avars into the Frankish kingdom in 562, it extended over the Saale to the Elbe. The Sorbs on the Saale and the Elbe as well as the Slavs on the Main and Regnitz were not transplanted (by the Avars) into this previously Frankish district till later. Thus from this time to the founding of Samo's State scarcely forty-four years elapsed, so that he could not have ceased to be conscious of the fact that his land was really Frankish property. Here, in the country of the Regnitz Slavs, the traces of the wintering of the Avars are to this day ineffaceable. On the lower Aisch, which flows from the south-west into the Regnitz between Erlangen and Bamberg, broad visages with protruding cheek-bones, deep-set eyes, and black hair are still to be met with.

But the Slavs were originally blue-eyed and fair, and were only black-haired and mongoloid where their women were systematically violated by the Altaian conquerors, and this "Fredegar" attests expressly of Samo's Slavs. The Avars (or Bulgars) must therefore have wintered here also. The same is the case with the Bohemian Slavs, whose black hair struck the traveller Ibrāhīm ibn Ia'qūb in 965 as peculiar. Whether, or how far, Samo's kingdom extended into Bohemia is not known; it is, indeed, improbable that it did so, for even in historic times no State has ever existed on both sides of the Fichtelgebirge and the Böhmerwald. As late as the ninth century several independent Slav clans existed in Bohemia, and they assuredly took part in the Slav revolt against the Avars, for there is as little trace of a župan class in Bohemia as in Carinthia. It is therefore to be presumed that the Slav tribes did not proceed singly but in combination against the Avars, and that an ephemeral federation was formed, with Samo at its head. But we have no right to speak of Samo's Empire, and the assumption that his kingdom embraced Carantania, the country of the Alpine Slavs, rests only upon the Anonymus de conversione Bagariorum et Carantanorum — a party production of the Salzburg Church directed against the Slav apostle St Methodius, and employing for its own purposes Fredegar's notice of Samo — for the association of Samo with the Carinthian Slavs would prove the latter to be members of the Frankish kingdom, and therefore of the Salzburg diocese.