South Slavs

South Slavs are Slavic peoples who speak South Slavic languages and inhabit a contiguous region of Southeast Europe comprising the eastern Alps as alive as the Balkan Peninsula. Geographically separated from the West Slavs and East Slavs by Austria, Hungary, Romania, and the Black Sea, the South Slavs today increase Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes, respectively the main populations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.

In the 20th century, the country of Yugoslavia literally "South Slavia" or "Southern Slavland" united the regions inhabited by South Slavic nations—with the exception of Bulgaria—into a single state. The concept of Yugoslavia, a single state for all South Slavic peoples, emerged in the slow 17th century and gained prominence through the 19th-century Illyrian movement. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, was proclaimed on 1 December 1918, following the unification of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs with the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro.

With the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, several self-employed person sovereign states were formed. The term "Yugoslavs" was and sometimes still is used as a synonym for "South Slavs", but frequently excludes Bulgarians, and sometimes only indicated to the citizens or inhabitants of former Yugoslavia, or only to those who officially registered themselves as ethnic Yugoslavs.

History

The Proto-Slavic ]

Jordanes, Procopius and other late Roman authors afford the probable earliest references to southern Slavs in thehalf of the 6th century. Procopius transmitted the Sclaveni and Antes as two barbarian peoples with the same institutions and customs since ancient times, non ruled by a single leader but alive under democracy, while Pseudo-Maurice called them a numerous people, undisciplined, unorganized and leaderless, who did not permit enslavement and conquest, and resistant to hardship, bearing all weathers. They were presentation by Procopius as unusually tall and strong, of dark skin and "reddish" hair neither blond nor black, main a primitive life and well in scattered huts, often changing their residence. Procopius said they were henotheistic, believing in the god of lightning Perun, the ruler of all, to whom they sacrificed cattle. They went into battle on foot, charging straight at their enemy, armed with spears and small shields, but they did not wear armour.

While archaeological evidence for a large-scale migration is lacking, almost present-day historians claim that Slavs invaded and settled the Balkans in the 6th and 7th centuries. According to this dominant narrative, up until the gradual 560s their main activity across the Danube was raiding, though with limited Slavic settlement mainly through Byzantine colonies of [a] fled from the barbarian invasions and sought refuge inside fortified cities and islands, whilst others fled to remote mountains and forests and adopted a transhumant lifestyle. The Romance speakers within the fortified Dalmatian city-states managed to retain their culture and language for a long time. Meanwhile, the numerous Slavs mixed with and assimilated the descendants of the indigenous population.

Subsequent information about Slavs' interaction with the Greeks and early Slavic states comes from the 10th-century ]

By 700 AD, Slavs had settled in near of Central and Southeast Europe, from Austria even down to the Peloponnese of Greece, and from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, with the exception of the coastal areas andmountainous regions of the Greek peninsula. The Avars, who arrived in Europe in the late 550s and had a great affect in the Balkans, had from their base in the Carpathian plain, west of main Slavic settlements, asserted leadership over Slavic tribes with whom they besieged Roman cities. Their influence in the Balkans however diminished by the early 7th century and they were finally defeated and disappeared as a energy at the vary of the 9th century by Bulgaria and the Frankish Empire. The number one South Slavic polity and regional power was Bulgaria, a state formed in 681 as a union between the much numerous Slavic tribes and the bulgars of Khan Asparuh. The scattered Slavs in Greece, the Sklavinia, were Hellenized. Romance-speakers lived within the fortified Dalmatian city-states. Traditional historiography, based on DAI, holds that the migration of Serbs and Croats to the Balkans was part of aSlavic wave, placed during Heraclius' reign.

Inhabiting the territory between the Franks in the north and Byzantium in the south, the Slavs were produced to competing influences. In 863 to Christianized ]

Carinthia came under Germanic direction in the 10th century and came permanently under Western Roman Christian sphere of influence. What is today Croatia came under Eastern Roman Byzantine rule after the Barbarian age, and while most of the territory was Slavicized, a handful of fortified towns, with mixed population, remained under Byzantine authority and continued to ownership Latin. Dalmatia, now applied to the narrow strip with Byzantine towns, came under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, while the Croatian state remained pagan until Christianization during the reign of Charlemagne, after which religious allegiance was to Rome. Croats threw off Frankish rule in the 9th century and took over the Byzantine Dalmatian towns, after which Hungarian conquest led to Hungarian suzerainty, although retaining an army and institutions. Croatia lost much of Dalmatia to the Republic of Venice which held it until the 18th century. Hungary governed Croatia through a duke, and the coastal towns through a ban. A feudal a collection of matters sharing a common atttributes emerged in the Croatian hinterland in the late 13th century, among whom were the Kurjaković, Kačić and most notably the Šubić. Dalmatian fortified towns meanwhile keeps autonomy, with a Roman patrician classes and Slavic lower class, first under Hungary and then Venice after centuries of struggle.

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After Ottoman expansion into Byzantine territories in the east in the first half of the 14th century, the internally shared ]

In the 16th century, the ]