Avar Khaganate

The Avar Khaganate was the state of the Pannonian Avars, a confederation of Eurasian nomads who settled in the Carpathian Basin in the late sixth century and dominated central and eastern Europe for more than two hundred years. The Avars arrived from the Pontic steppe in 568, pressed by the Göktürks, and within a generation they had made the Hungarian plain their centre and reduced the Gepids and parts of the Lombard and Frankish marches to tributaries. Under their khagan Bayan they besieged Constantinople in 626 and extorted enormous payments from Byzantium, and their pressure helped to push Slavic groups into the Balkans. Avar society was organised around a supreme khagan and a sacred ring of camps; archaeology has revealed spectacular burials with gold, harness and Byzantine loot. After the failed siege of Constantinople the khaganate's power waned, while Frankish campaigns from 788 destroyed the Avar realm within a decade. The khaganate vanished as a state in the early ninth century, but Avar communities survived in Hungary, and their memory lived on in the Slavic word obri for a vanished giant people.