Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/26

 already mentioned, to the Lusatian Wends in Saxony and Prussia.

In the sixth century the Slovenes occupied a more extensive territory than that held by them to-day; they reached north to the Danube, west to the Tyrol, and covered South-western Hungary. But the invasion of the Avars and other Asiatic hordes, the establishment of the Eastern Mark as a bulwark against them by Charlemagne, and the consequent infiltration of German settlers and missionaries, gradually forced the Slovenes southwards.

Although fragments of this language dating from the tenth century have survived, and considerable examples of it from the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century exist, the real revival of the Slovene nationality and language belongs to the nineteenth century.

Servian or Serbo-Croatian, the other member of this group of the southern division, is in point of numbers of the people who speak it the third most important of the Slavonic languages. It is spoken throughout Servia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Hercegóvina, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, in the Banat in South Hungary, in the southern part of Istria, and also in the Macedonian vilayets of Turkey. It is thus the speech of nearly ten million people, who are distributed in twelve provinces of four political states, Servia, Montenegro, Turkey, and Austria-Hungary. During the period of wholesale migrations the southern Slavs penetrated southwards through Macedonia into Greece, and in the hey-day of their independence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the political boundaries of Servia would seem to have included most of the Balkan peninsula, but generally speaking the territory occupied by the Croatians and Servians to-day is conterminous with that held by them in the ninth century; on their southern border, in Macedonia, they have undoubtedly lost ground before the Albanians, but they have made corresponding gains to the north in Hungary, whither they immigrated in large numbers