The Slavic people are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group living in Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, North Asia and Central Asia. The term Slavic represents a broad group of people, who speak languages belonging to the Slavic language family and share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits and historical backgrounds. From the early 6th century they spread to inhabit most of central and eastern Europe and the Balkans.[1] In addition to their main population centre in Europe, some East Slavs also settled later in Siberia[2] and Central Asia.[3] Part of all Slavic ethnicities emigrated to other parts of the world.[4][5] Over half of Europe's territory is inhabited by Slavic-speaking communities.[6] The worldwide population of people of Slavic descent is close to 400 million.
Modern nations and ethnic groups called by the ethnonym Slavs are considerably diverse both in appearance and culturally, and relations between them – even within the individual ethnic groups themselves – are varied, ranging from a sense of connection to feelings of mutual hostility.[7]
Present-day Slavic people are classified into East Slavic (including Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians), West Slavic (including Poles, Czechs and Slovaks),[8] and South Slavic (including Bulgarians, Macedonians, Slovenes, Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs and Montenegrins). For a more comprehensive list, see the ethnocultural subdivisions.
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The Slavic autonym is reconstructed in Proto-Slavic as Slověninъ. The oldest documents written in Old Church Slavonic and dating from the 9th century attest Словѣне Slověne to describe the Slavs. Other early Slavic attestations include Old East Slavic Словене Slověně for "an East Slavic group near Novgorod." However, the earliest written references to the Slavs under this name are in other languages. In the 6th century AD Procopius writing in Byzantine Greek, refers to the Σκλάβοι Sklaboi, Σκλαβηνοί Sklabēnoi, Σκλαυηνοί Sklauenoi, Σθλαβηνοί Sthlauenoi, or Σκλαβῖνοι Sklabinoi,[9] while his contemporary Jordanes refers to the Sclaveni in Latin.[10]
The Slavic autonym Slověninъ is usually considered a derivation from slovo "word," originally denoting "people who speak (the same language)," i.e. people who understand each other, in contrast to Slavic word denoting "foreign people" – němci, meaning "mumbling, murmuring people" (from Slavic němъ – "mumbling, mute"). The latter word may be the derivation of words to denote German/Germanic people in many later Slavic languages: e.g., Polish Niemiec, Ukrainian Німець, Czech Němec, Slovak Nemec, Russian and Bulgarian Немец, Slovenian Nemec, Serbian Немац, Bosnian and Croatian Nijemac etc.[11]
Proposals for the etymology of Slověninъ propounded by some scholars enjoy much less support. B.P. Lozinski argues that the word slava once had the meaning of worshipper, in this context meaning "practicer of a common Slavic religion," and from that evolved into an ethnonym.[12] S.B. Bernstein speculates that it derives from a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European *(s)lawos, cognate to Ancient Greek λαός laós "population, people," which itself has no commonly accepted etymology.[13] Meanwhile others have pointed out that the suffix -enin indicates a man from a certain place, which in this case should be a place called Slova or Slava, possibly a river name. The Old East Slavic Slavuta for the Dnieper River was argued by Henrich Bartek (1907–1986) to be derived from slova and also the origin of Slovene.[14]
The term Slav has different meanings depending upon the context in which it is used. This term refers to a culture (or cultures) living north of the Danube River, east of the Elbe River, and west of the Vistula River during the five hundred thirties CE.[15] In addition, Slav is an identifier for the common ethnic group.[16] Furthermore, Slav denotes any language with linguistic ties to the modern Slavic language family (which has no connection to a common culture or shared ethnicity).[17] Despite the various notions of Slav, it is unclear whether any of these descriptions add to an accurate representation of that group's history, since historians, such as George Verdansky, Florin Curta, and Michael Karpovich have called into question how, why, and to what degree the Slavs were cohesive as a society between the sixth and ninth centuries CE.[18] When discussing the existing evidence which specialists use to construct a plausible history of the Slavs, the information tends to fall into three different avenues of research: the archeological, the linguistic, and the historiographic.
Archaeologically, a myriad of physical evidence exists from this time period pertaining to the Slavs. This evidence ranges from hill forts, to ceramic pots and fragments, and abodes. However, there are three major problems in studying the spread of early Slavic groups by purely archaeological methods. Archaeologists face difficulties in distinguishing what finds are truly Slavic and what are not.[19] In addition, many of these findings are either inaccurately carbon-dated or so isolated that they do not reflect organized Slavic settlement.[20] The combination of these facts makes it difficult to create a reliable chronology of ceramic materials, hill forts, houses, brooches, and other small artifacts. As a result, using archaeological finds without other forms of evidence prevents us from concluding anything about the Slavs and is consequently not wholly reliable for historical debates about this group.[21] The lack of grave sites also diminishes archaeologists' abilities to assess how the Slavs changed as a people, both in terms of their social behavior and their migratory patterns. Consequently, discerning where in northern Europe Slavic groups lived during the sixth to ninth centuries represents a challenge. The cumulative effects of these difficulties circumvents the construction of a thorough history of Slavic development in Northern Europe during this period through archaeological evidence alone.
Historiographically, a number of sources exist which describe the Slavs. However, there are several problems using these texts to build upon the available knowledge of the early Slavs, even when used in a multi-disciplinary fashion. The useful historical information about the Slavs from these texts are either mostly cryptic or lack any mention of their sources of information to confirm their findings.[22] Moreover, these works tend to discuss the Slavs only in terms of their effects on surrounding empires, in particularly with the Byzantines and the Franks. The variety of names from historiographic texts which refer to the Slavs, such as the Antes, Sclaveni, and Venethi, in addition to the locales and regions which they at one point or another occupied, makes it laborious to establish a geographical boundary for major Slavic settlement. In particular, this is a troublesome task when the names of these places have not always remained the same or even survived. Most importantly, the majority of the texts utilized to describe the Slavs during this period are either second-hand accounts or describe an encounter with these groups years, decades, or centuries after it occurred. While earlier texts contextualize the Slavs' early history and later development, texts written about an event long after it had occurred are removed from the time period in question, making the relevant information less reliable. Unfortunately, neither earlier nor later texts directly aid to our understanding of the Slavs during the five hundreds to eight hundreds CE.
Linguistically, the pursuit of a Slavic history is also problematic. This pursuit has focused on three main areas of study: Slavic geographical names, names of flora and fauna, and an examination of “lexical and structural similarities and differences between Slavic and other languages.[23]” The use of ethnic identifiers in written texts during and after the 500s CE, such as the description of the Slavs as Antes, Sclaveni, and Venethi by their immediate neighbors, produces problems when dealing with a group so often perceived as a unified society. Moreover, the concept of ethnicity during this period was so fluid that different ethnicities would be ascribed to the same group depending upon the situation of the encounter, such as in Michal Parczewski's map. This map, which is a conglomeration of different written fragments about the Slav's homeland, selectively draws upon these fragments. In order to validate his preconceived theories about Slavic migration, Parczewski omitted information from his sources which directly contradicted his conclusions, thus making the map of Slavic settlement in relation to their neighbors during the sixth century CE extremely suspect.[24] Moreover, the association of particular styles of pots and burials with specific ethnonyms by archaeologists, and extremely selective use of historiographic materials, presumes a direct connection between language and ethnicity. These facts reinforce how subjective ethnic identification can be, especially in a region where many tribal groups existed and identified themselves as distinct from one another.[25]
It is important to keep in mind that the history of the early Slavs is inseparable from the political agenda behind much nineteenth and twentieth century archaeological, linguistic, and historiographic research. Florin Curta, an expert on the history of the early Slavs, contends that the process of creating such a history “was a function of both ethnic formation and ethnic identification.[26]” However, this process became extremely blurred by a myriad of interests. These agendas ranged from Pan-Slavic researchers in Eastern Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,[27] to post-World War Two European nations strengthening their newfound legitimacy,[28] to contemporary politicization of historical, archaeological, and linguistic discourse.[29] As a result, the very history which professionals continue to clarify to this day was shaped by the agendas of these periods, and must undergo extreme scrutiny when assessing such interpretive histories. In order to create a nonpartisan a presentation of the Slavs, it is crucial to distinguish the linguistic, ethnic, and cultural derivation of the label Slav, how that term informed the various agendas which created it, and the implications such associations has in constructing as accurate a history as possible.
The location of the Slavic homeland has been the subject of significant debate. The Prague-Penkov-Kolochin complex of cultures of the 6th to 7th centuries CE are generally accepted to reflect the expansion of Slavic-speakers at that time.[30] Serious candidates for the core from which they expanded are cultures within the territories of modern Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine. The proposed frameworks are:
The starting point in the autochtonic/allochtonic debate was the year 1745, when Johann Christoph de Jordan published De Originibus Slavicis. The works of Slovak philologist and poet Pavel Jozef Šafárik (1795–1861) has influenced generations of scholars. The foundation of his theory was the work of Jordanes, Getica. Jordanes had equated the Sclavenes and the Antes to the Venethi (or Venedi) also known from much earlier sources, such as Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, and Ptolemy.
Pavel Jozef Šafárik bequeathed to posterity not only his vision of a Slavic history, but also a powerful methodology for exploring its Dark Ages: language.[32]
The Polish scholar Tadeusz Wojciechowski (1839–1919) was the first to use place names to write Slavic history. He was followed by A. L. Pogodin and the Polish botanist, J. Rostafinski.
The first to introduce archaeological data into the scholarly discourse about the early Slavs, Lubor Niederle (1865–1944), endorsed Rostafinski’s theory in his multi-volume work The Antiquities of the Slavs. Vykentyi V.Khvoika (1850–1914), a Ukrainian archaeologist of Czech origin, linked the Slavs with Neolithic Cucuteni culture. A. A. Spicyn (1858–1931) assigned to the Antes the finds of silver and bronze in central and southern Ukraine. Czech archaeologist Ivan Borkovsky (1897–1976) postulated the existence of a pottery “Prague type” which was a national, exclusively Slavic, pottery. Boris Rybakov, has issue a theory that made a link between both Spicyn’s “Antian antiquities” and the remains excavated by Khvoika from Chernyakhov culture and that those should be should be attributed to the Slavs.[32]
From the 19th century onwards, the debate became politically charged, particularly in connection with the history of the Partitions of Poland and German imperialism known as Drang nach Osten. The question whether Germanic or Slavic peoples were indigenous on the land east of the Oder river was used by factions to pursue their respective German and Polish political claims to governance of those lands.
Geneticists entered the debate in the 21st century. See the Genetics section below.
The relationship between the Slavs and a tribe called the Veneti east of the river Vistula in the Roman period is uncertain. The name may refer both to Balts and Slavs.
The Slavs under name of the Antes and the Sclaveni make their first appearance in Byzantine records in the early 6th century. Byzantine historiographers under Justinian I (527-565), such as Procopius of Caesarea, Jordanes and Theophylact Simocatta describe tribes of these names emerging from the area of the Carpathian Mountains, the lower Danube and the Black Sea, invading the Danubian provinces of the Eastern Empire.
Procopius wrote in 545 that "the Sclaveni and the Antae actually had a single name in the remote past; for they were both called Spori in olden times." He describes their social structure and beliefs:
For these nations, the Sclaveni and the Antae, are not ruled by one man, but they have lived from of old under a democracy, and consequently everything which involves their welfare, whether for good or for ill, is referred to the people. It is also true that in all other matters, practically speaking, these two barbarian peoples have had from ancient times the same institutions and customs. For they believe that one god, the maker of lightning, is alone lord of all things, and they sacrifice to him cattle and all other victims.
He mentions that they were tall and hardy:
"They live in pitiful hovels which they set up far apart from one another, but, as a general thing, every man is constantly changing his place of abode. When they enter battle, the majority of them go against their enemy on foot carrying little shields and javelins in their hands, but they never wear corselets. Indeed, some of them do not wear even a shirt or a cloak, but gathering their trews up as far as to their private parts they enter into battle with their opponents. And both the two peoples have also the same language, an utterly barbarous tongue. Nay further, they do not differ at all from one another in appearance. For they are all exceptionally tall and stalwart men, while their bodies and hair are neither very fair or blond, nor indeed do they incline entirely to the dark type, but they are all slightly ruddy in color. And they live a hard life, giving no heed to bodily comforts...".[33]
Jordanes tells us that the Sclaveni had swamps and forests for their cities.[34] Another 6th-century source refers to them living among nearly impenetrable forests, rivers, lakes, and marshes.[35]
Menander Protector mentions a Daurentius (577-579) that slew an Avar envoy of Khagan Bayan I. The Avars asked the Slavs to accept the suzerainty of the Avars, he however declined and is reported as saying: "Others do not conquer our land, we conquer theirs [...] so it shall always be for us".[36]
The Globular Amphora culture stretches from the middle Dniepr to the Elbe in the late 4th and early 3rd millennia BC. It has been suggested as the locus of a Germano-Balto-Slavic continuum (compare Germanic substrate hypothesis), but the identification of its bearers as Indo-Europeans is uncertain. The area of this culture contains numerous tumuli – typical for IE originators.
The Chernoles culture (8th to 3rd c. BC, sometimes associated with the "Scythian farmers" of Herodotus) is "sometimes portrayed as either a state in the development of the Slavic languages or at least some form of late Indo-European ancestral to the evolution of the Slavic stock."[37] The Milograd culture (700 BC - 100 AD), centered roughly on present-day Belarus, north of the contemporaneous Chernoles culture, has also been proposed as ancestral to either Slavs or Balts.
The ethnic composition of the bearers of the Przeworsk culture (2nd c. BC to 4th c. AD, associated with the Lugii) of central and southern Poland, northern Slovakia and Ukraine, including the Zarubintsy culture (2nd c. BC to 2nd c. AD, also connected with the Bastarnae tribe) and the Oksywie culture are other candidates.
The area of southern Ukraine is known to have been inhabited by Scythian and Sarmatian tribes prior to the foundation of the Gothic kingdom. Early Slavic stone stelae found in the middle Dniester region are markedly different from the Scythian and Sarmatian stelae found in the Crimea.
The (Gothic) Wielbark Culture displaced the eastern Oksywie part of the Przeworsk culture from the 1st century AD, some modern historians dispute the link between the Wielbark culture and the Goths. While the Chernyakhov culture (2nd to 5th c. AD, identified with the multi-ethnic kingdom established by the Goths) leads to the decline of the late Sarmatian culture in the 2nd to 4th centuries, the western part of the Przeworsk culture remains intact until the 4th century, and the Kiev culture flourishes during the same time, in the 2nd-5th c. AD. This latter culture is recognized as the direct predecessor of the Prague-Korchak and Pen'kovo cultures (6th-7th c. AD), the first archaeological cultures the bearers of which are indisputably identified as Slavic.
Proto-Slavic is thus likely to have reached its final stage in the Kiev area; there is, however, substantial disagreement in the scientific community over the identity of the Kiev culture's predecessors, with some scholars tracing it from the Ruthenian Milograd culture, others from the "Ukrainian" Chernoles and Zarubintsy cultures and still others from the "Polish" Przeworsk culture.
The modern Slavic peoples carry a variety of Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups and Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups. Yet two paternal haplogroups predominate: R1a1a [M17] and I2a2a [L69.2=T/S163.2]. The frequency of Haplogroup R1a ranges from 63.39% in the Sorbs, through 56.4% in Poland, 54% in Ukraine, 52% in Russia, Belarus, to 15.2% in Republic of Macedonia, 14.7% in Bulgaria and 12.1% in Herzegovina.[38] The correlation between R1a1a [M17] and the speakers of Indo-European languages, particularly those of Eastern Europe and Central and Southern Asia, was noticed in the late 1990s. From this Spencer Wells and colleagues, following the Kurgan hypothesis, deduced that R1a1a arose on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.[39]
Specific studies of Slavic genetics followed. In 2007 Rębała and colleagues studied several Slavic populations with the aim of localizing the Proto-Slavic homeland.[40] The significant findings of this study are that:
Marcin Woźniak and colleagues (2010) searched for specifically Slavic sub-group of R1a1a [M17]. Working with haplotypes, they found a pattern among Western Slavs which turned out to correspond to a newly-discovered marker, M458, which defines subclade R1a1a7. This marker correlates remarkably well with the distribution of Slavic-speakers today. The team, led by Peter Underhill, which discovered M458 did not consider the possibility that this was a Slavic marker, since they used the "evolutionary effective" mutation rate, which gave a date far too old to be Slavic. Woźniak and colleagues pointed out that the pedigree mutation rate, giving a later date, is more consistent with the archaeological record.[42]
Pomors are distinguished by the presence of Y Haplogroup N among them. Postulated to originate from southeast Asia, it is found at high rates in Uralic peoples. Its presence in Pomors (called "Northern Russians" in the report) attests to the non-Slavic tribes (mixing with Finnic tribes of northern Eurasia).[43]
On the other hand I2a1b1 (P41.2) is typical of the South Slavic populations, being highest in Bosnia-Herzegovina (>50%).[44] Haplogroup I2a2 is also commonly found in north-eastern Italians.[45] There is also a high concentration of I2a2a in north-east Romania, Moldova and western Ukraine. According to original studies, Hg I2a2 was believed to have arisen in the west Balkans sometime after the LGM, subsequently spreading from the Balkans through eastern Europe. Recently, Ken Nordtvedt has split I2a2 into two clades - N (northern) and S (southern), in relation where they arose compared to Danube river.[46] He proposes that N is slightly older than S. He recalculated the age of I2a2 to be ~ 2550 years and proposed that the its current distribution is explained by a Slavic expansion from the area north-east of the Carpathians. There is a much lower level of I2a2a among Greeks and Albanians (including those in Kosovo and R. of Macedonia), which retain their non-Slavic languages, than in present-day majority South Slavic-speaking nations.
Whilst physical anthropology has suffered criticism ever since the abuses of the discipline by Nazi Germany, it continues to enjoy popularity in eastern European scholarship. Some of the conclusions reached by physical anthropologists have recently been disproven by molecular and DNA technology; however, it remains useful in describing general phenotypic variations between populations. Tatyana Alexeyeva has recently described five cardinal Slavic physical types:[47]
(1) White Sea and Baltic type: characterized by their fair skin and blond hair, and medium facial features; they are predominantly meso- and brachy-cephals. Typical of northern Russians, Belarusians. Compared to the related West Baltic type (Scandinavians), they possess less prominent noses, sparser beards and a slight swelling of the upper eyelid.
(2) Eastern European type: this group includes virtually all Russian people (except northern Russians) and part of the Belarusians populating predominantly Russia's east and south. This type is distinguished by their darker hair and eyes. The anthropological composition of East European populations emerged through intermixing among the indigenous northern, southern and Ural tribes. The indigenous types had long or medium heads, large facial features, sharp horizontal profiles and prominent noses. The Uralic admixture is characterized by somewhat flattened faces and less prominent noses. Both groups must have created an anthropological groundwork for the formation of a significant part of the population inhabiting the East European Plain (apparently, of the Finno-Ugric type) that mixed with the Eastern Slavs.
(3) Dnieper-Carpathian type: includes Ukrainians and Poles, ethnic groups populating the Carpathian area, Slovaks and some of the Czechs. These are rather dark brachycephals with relatively broad faces. Such types have been found in Slavic burial grounds of Slovakia and Moldavia. Morphologically, those people were akin to the Alpine ethnic type of Ripley which stretched westward to what is now Austria, Switzerland and part of northern Italy. It might be that the Dnieper- Carpathian populations are a northeastern variant of this local race.
(4) Pontic type. It is represented mostly by Bulgarians: dark-haired, of medium height, with longish or medium heads. Their facial features are moderately broad or else narrow. Judging by paleoanthropo-logical data, this combination type, a variant of the southern branch of Europeoids, must have originated in the Eastern Europe of the Neolithic time, though its origins might be traced earlier than that, when its tribes settled in these parts. The propagation of the Pontic type from the Mediterranean and Caucasia to southern Russian steppes continued down to the Late Bronze Age (1st millennium B.C.). Its traces are present in Eastern Slavs, the plainsmen of the Middle Age, in the contemporary Ukrainian population related to the Prut anthropological type, and among the Russians of the Don-Sura Region.
(5) Dinaric type takes in Yugoslavia's high-landers (Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro). They are known for having broad faces, prominent cheekbones and prominent or snubbed noses. Color of hair varies from blonde to brunette. Usually, tall, smooth straight hair, pale to rosy complexion and high stature. They differ from the other southern Europeoids in the lighter color of eyes.
According to eastern homeland theory, prior to becoming known to the Roman world, Slavic speaking tribes were part of the many multi-ethnic confederacies of Eurasia - such as the Sarmatian, Hun and Gothic empires.[48] The Slavs emerged from obscurity when the westward movement of Germans in the 5th and 6th centuries AD (thought to be in conjunction with the movement of peoples from Siberia and Eastern Europe: Huns, and later Avars and Bulgars) started the great migration of the Slavs, who settled the lands abandoned by Germanic tribes fleeing the Huns and their allies: westward into the country between the Oder and the Elbe-Saale line; southward into Bohemia, Moravia, much of present day Austria, the Pannonian plain and the Balkans; and northward along the upper Dnieper river. Perhaps some Slavs migrated with the movement of the Vandals to Iberia and north Africa.[49]
Around the 6th century, Slavs appeared on Byzantine borders in great numbers.[50] The Byzantine records note that grass would not regrow in places where the Slavs had marched through, so great were their numbers. After a military movement even the Peloponnese and Asia Minor were reported to have Slavic settlements.[51] This southern movement has traditionally been seen as an invasive expansion.[52] By the end of the 6th century, Slavs had settled the Eastern Alps region.
When their migratory movements ended, there appeared among the Slavs the first rudiments of state organizations, each headed by a prince with a treasury and a defense force. Moreover, it was the beginnings of class differentiation, and nobles pledged allegiance either to the Frankish/ Holy Roman Emperors or the Byzantine Emperors.
In the 7th century, the Frankish merchant Samo, who supported the Slavs fighting their Avar rulers, became the ruler of the first known Slav state in Central Europe, which, however, most probably did not outlive its founder and ruler. This provided the foundation for subsequent Slavic states to arise on the former territory of this realm with Carantania being the oldest of them. Very old also are the Principality of Nitra and the Moravian principality (see under Great Moravia). In this period, there existed central Slavic groups and states such as the Balaton Principality, but the subsequent expansion of the Magyars, as well as the Germanisation of Austria, separated the northern and southern Slavs. The First Bulgarian Empire was founded in AD 681, the Slavic language Old Bulgarian became the main and official of the empire in AD 864. Bulgaria was instrumental in the spread of Slavic literacy and Christianity to the rest of the Slavic world.
Throughout their history, Slavs came into contact with non-Slavic groups. In the postulated homeland region (present-day Northern Ukraine), they had contacts with Sarmatians and the Germanic Goths. After their subsequent spread, they began assimilating non-Slavic peoples. For example, in the Balkans, there were Paleo-Balkan peoples, such as Illyrians, Greeks and romanized (North of the Jireček Line) or hellenized (South of the Jirecek-line) Thracians . Over time, due to the larger number of Slavs, the descendants most of the indigenous populations of the Balkans were Slavicized. The Thracians and Illyrians vanish from history during this period. An exception was Greece, where the smaller number Slavs scattered there came to be Hellenized (aided in time by more Greeks returning to Greece in the 9th century and the role of the church and administration).[53] The Romance speakers within the fortified Dalmatian cities managed to retain their culture and language for a long time,[54] as Dalmatian Romance was spoken until the high Middle Ages. However, they too were eventually assimilated into the body of Slavs. In contrast, the Romano-Dacians in Wallachia managed to maintain their Latin-based language, despite much Slavic influence. After centuries of peaceful co-existence, the groups fused to form the Romanians.
In the western Balkans, south Slavs and Germanic Gepids intermarried with Avar invaders, eventually producing a Slavicised population. In central Europe, the Slavs intermixed with Germanic and Celtic, while the eastern Slavs encountered Uralic and Scandinavian peoples. Scandinavians (Varangians) and Finnic peoples were involved in the early formation of the Rus state but were completely Slavicised after a century. Some Finno-Ugric tribes in the north were also absorbed into the expanding Rus population.[43] At the time of the Magyar migration, the present-day Hungary was inhabited by Slavs, numbering about 200,000,[55] who were either assimilated or enslaved by the Magyars.[55] In the 11th and 12th centuries, constant incursions by nomadic Turkic tribes, such as the Kipchaks and the Pechenegs, caused a massive migration of East Slavic populations to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north.[56] In the Middle Ages, groups of Saxon ore miners settled in medieval Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria where they were Slavicised.
Polabian Slavs (Wends) settled in parts of England (Danelaw), apparently as Danish allies.[57] Polabian-Pomeranian Slavs are also known to have even settled on Norse age Iceland. Saqaliba refers to the Slavic mercenaries and slaves in the medieval Arab world in North Africa, Sicily and Al-Andalus. Saqaliba served as caliph's guards.[58][59] In the 12th century, there was intensification of Slavic piracy. The Wendish Crusade was started against the Polabian Slavs in 1147, as a part of the Northern Crusades. Niklot, pagan chief of the Slavic Obodrites began his open resistance when Lothar III, Holy Roman Emperor invaded Slavic lands. In August 1160 Niklot was killed and German colonization (Ostsiedlung) of the Elbe-Oder region began. In Hanoverian Wendland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Lusatia invaders started germanization. Early forms of germanization were described by German monks: Helmold in the manuscript Chronicon Slavorum and Adam of Bremen in Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum.[60] The Polabian language survived until the beginning of the 19th century in what is now the German state of Lower Saxony.[61]
Cossacks, although Slavic-speaking and Orthodox Christians, came from a mix of ethnic backgrounds, including Tatars and other Turks. Many early members of the Terek Cossacks were Ossetians.
The Gorals of southern Poland and northern Slovakia are partially descended from Romance-speaking Vlachs who migrated into the region from the 14th to 17th centuries and were absorbed into the local population. The population of Moravian Wallachia also descend of this population.
Conversely, some Slavs were assimilated into other populations. Although the majority continued south, attracted by the riches of the territory which would become Bulgaria, a few remained in the Carpathian basin and were ultimately assimilated into the Magyar or Romanian population. There is a large number of river names and other placenames of Slavic origin in Romania.[62] Similarly, the populations of the respective eastern parts of Austria and Germany are to some degree made up of people with Slavic ancestry.
As of 1878, there were only three free Slavic states in the world: Russian Empire, Kingdom of Serbia and Principality of Montenegro. Bulgaria was also free but was de jure vassal to the Ottoman Empire until official independence was declared in 1908. In the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire of approximately 50 million people, about 23 million were Slavs. The Slavic peoples who were, for the most part, denied a voice in the affairs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were calling for national self-determination. During World War I, representatives of the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes set up organizations in the Allied countries to gain sympathy and recognition.[63] In 1918, after World War I ended, the Slavs established such independent states as Czechoslovakia, the Second Polish Republic, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of World War II was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all East and West Slavs from their native lands and killing 30 millions Slavic people, so as to make living space for German settlers. This plan of genocide[64] was to be carried into effect gradually over 25 to 30 years.
Because of the vastness and diversity of the territory occupied by Slavic people, there were several centers of Slavic consolidation. In the 19th century, Pan-Slavism developed as a movement among intellectuals, scholars, and poets, but it rarely influenced practical politics and did not find support in some nations that had Slavic origins. Pan-Slavism became compromised when the Russian Empire started to use it as an ideology justifying its territorial conquests in Central Europe as well as subjugation of other ethnic groups of Slavic origins such as Poles and Ukrainians, and the ideology became associated with Russian imperialism. The common Slavic experience of communism combined with the repeated usage of the ideology by Soviet propaganda after World War II within the Eastern bloc (Warsaw Pact) was a forced high-level political and economic hegemony of the USSR dominated by Russians. A notable political union of the 20th century that covered most South Slavs was Yugoslavia, but it ultimately broke apart in the 1990s along with the Soviet Union.
The word "Slavs" was used in the national anthem of the Slovak Republic (1939–1945), Yugoslavia (1943–1992) and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1992–2003), later Serbia and Montenegro (2003–2006).
The worldwide population of people of Slavic descent is close to 400 million. The three largest Slavic ethnic groups are Russians (150 million), Poles (60 million), and Ukrainians (50 million). Other Slavic ethnic groups include Czechs (11 million), Serbs (10,5 million), Bulgarians (10 million), Belarusians (10 million), Croats (8 million), Slovaks (7 million), Bosniaks (3 million), Macedonians (3 million), Slovenes (2,5 million), Montenegrins (700 000).
Most Slavic populations gradually adopted Christianity (the East Slavs Orthodox Christianity and the West Slavs Roman Catholicism, with South Slavs split by the two religions) between 6th and 10th century, and consequently their old pagan beliefs declined. See also Rodnovery.
The majority of contemporary Slavs who profess a religion are Orthodox, followed by Roman Catholic. A very small minority are Protestant. Bosniaks are the Muslim Slavic ethnic group, Gorani are also Muslims, but their ethnic group is miniature, inhabiting some villages. Religious delineations by nationality can be very sharp; usually in the Slavic ethnic groups the vast majority of religious people share the same religion. Some Slavs are atheist or agnostic: only 19% of Czechs professed belief in god/s in the 2005 Eurobarometer survey, making them one of the most irreligious people in the world.
The main Slavic ethnic groups by religion:
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Mainly Orthodox Christians
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