344 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



alive ; Thrace and Illyria were strewn with unburied corpses ; 

 captives were shut up with horse and cattle in stables, and all 

 consumed together, while the brutal hordes danced to the music 

 of their shrieks and groans. Indescribable was the horror inspired 

 by the Bulgars, who killed for killing's sake, wasted for sheer love 

 of destruction, swept away all works of the human hand, burnt, 

 razed cities, left in their wake nought but a picture of their own 

 cheerless native steppes. Of all the barbarians that harried the 

 Empire, the Bulgars have left the most detested name, although 

 closely rivalled by the Slavs. 



To the ethnologist the later history of the Bulgarians is of 

 exceptional interest. They entered the Danubian lands in the 

 seventh century as typical Ugro-Finns, repulsive alike in physical 

 appearance and mental characters. Their dreaded chief, Krum, 

 celebrated hiS triumphs with sanguinary rites, and his followers 

 yielded in no respects to the Huns themselves in coarseness and 

 brutality. Yet an almost complete moral if not physical trans- 

 formation had been effected by the middle of the 9th century, 

 when the Bulgars were evangelised by Cyril and Methodius, 

 exchanged their rude Ugrian speech for a Slavonic tongue, the 

 so-called "Church Slav," or even "Old Bulgarian," and became 

 henceforth merged in the surrounding Slav populations. The 

 national name "Bulgar" alone survives, as that of a somewhat 

 peaceful southern " Slav " people, who have in our time again 

 acquired the political independence of which they had been de- 

 prived by Bajazet I. in 1392. 



Nor did this name disappear from the Volga lands after the 

 great migration of Bulgar hordes to the Don basin 



Great and 



Little Bui- during the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. On the 

 contrary, here arose another and a greater Bulgar 

 empire, which was known to the Byzantines of the zoth century 

 as " Black Bulgaria," and later to the Arabs and Western peoples 

 as " Great Bulgaria," in contradistinction to the " Little Bulgaria " 

 south of the Danube 1 . It fell to pieces during the later "Tatar" 



1 Rubruquis (i3th century) : "We came to the Etil, a very large and deep 

 river four times wider than the Seine, flowing from 'Great Bulgaria,' which 

 lies to the north." Farther on he adds: "It is from this Great Bulgaria that 



