IX.] THE NORTHERN MONGOLS. 345 



wars, and nothing now remains of the Volga Bulgars, except the 

 Volga itself from which they were named. 



In the same region, but farther north 1 , lay also a "Great 

 Hungary," the original seat of those other Ugrian 

 Finns known as Hungarians and Magyars, who Magyars!" 

 followed later in the track of the Bulgars, and like 

 them formed permanent settlements in the Danube basin, but 

 higher up in Pannonia, the present kingdom of Hungary. Here, 

 however, the Magyars had been preceded by the kindred (or at 

 least distantly connected) Avars, the dominant people in the 

 Middle Danube lands for a great part of the period between the 

 departure of the Huns and the arrival of the Magyars 2 . Rolling 

 up like a storm cloud from the depths of Siberia to the Volga and 

 Euxine, sweeping everything before them, reducing Kutigurs, 

 Utigurs, Bulgars, and Slavs, the Avars presented themselves in 

 the 6th century on the frontiers of the empire as the unwelcome 

 allies of Justinian. Arrested at the Elbe by the Austrasian Franks, 

 and hard pressed by the Gepidae, they withdrew to the Lower 

 Danube under the ferocious Khagan Bayan, who, before his over- 

 throw by the Emperor Mauritius and death in 602, had crossed 

 the Danube, captured Sirmium, and reduced the whole region 

 bordering on the Byzantine empire. Later the still powerful 

 Avars with their Slav followers, "the Avar viper and the Slav 

 locust," overran the Balkan lands, and in 625 nearly captured 

 Constantinople. They were at last crushed by Pepin, king of 



issued those Bulgarians who are beyond the Danube, on the Constantinople 

 side" (quoted by V. de Saint-Martin). 



1 Evidently much nearer to the Ural Mountains, for Jean du Plan Carpin 

 says this "Great Hungary was the land of Bascart" that is, Bashkir, a large 

 Finno-Turki people, who still occupy a considerable territory in the Orenburg 

 Government about the southern slopes of the Urals. 



- With them were associated many of the surviving fugitive On- Uigurs 

 (Gibbon's "Ogors or Varchonites"), whence the report that they were not 

 true Avars. But the Turki genealogies would appear to admit their claim 

 to the name, and in any case the Uigurs and Avars of those times cannot 

 now be ethnically distinguished. Kandish, one of their envoys to Justinian, 

 is clearly a Turki name, and Varchonites seems to point to the Warkhon 

 (Orkhon), seat in successive ages of the eastern Turks, the Uigurs, and the 

 true Mongols. 



