Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/176

 140 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE developed among them, and, while they were kindly, thrifty, and inured to hardships, they were rather wanting in enterprise and aggressiveness, and were fonder of music than of warfare. Many of them became a subjected peas- antry, toiling under the yoke of the nomads from the East, but others seem to have learned from their invaders the lesson of fighting and ravaging, and to have become invaders themselves when the East Goths left the Balkan peninsula free for new plunderers and occupants. Procopius speaks of the Slavs especially in Bessarabia, Moldavia, and Wallachia. Toward the close of Justinian's reign two important changes occurred in the barbarian world. The White Huns Turks and or Ephthalites, a barbarian tribe in the Oxus Avars Basin beyond the Persian Kingdom, which they had often distracted by their attacks from its aggressions against the Byzantine Empire, were overthrown by the Turks, who were later to affect European history so pro- foundly. At the same time another wave of Asiatic nomads, the Avars, began to roll westward. Justinian in his last years paid them a yearly subsidy as a reward for defeating the Bulgars and Slavs who had been attacking his territo- ries. Soon after Justinian's death they fought under their khagan, Baian, against the Franks in Thuringia, and then combined forces with the Lombards to defeat the Gepidae on the Upper Danube. The Lombards then descended from Pannonia upon Italy, while the Avars absorbed the territory of the Gepidae and occupied the plain of present Hungary. Soon they came to tyrannize over a much greater region, for the Germans in pushing west and south had left central Europe open. During the remainder of the sixth century Avars wintered yearly in the neighborhood of modern Nurnberg in northern Bavaria; their sway at its height probably extended from the Baltic Sea to Sparta and from the Tyrol to Russia. But by the eighth century' their power began to decline. Returning to Justinian, we have to note some of his administrative reforms. He abolished the sale of offices, a practice liable to lead the purchaser of the office to make