548 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



Herodotus, and remembered their exodus, their wanderings round 

 the Caspian, and down the great river valleys to the Euxine. 



Both Slav and Germanic tribes had probably in remote times 

 penetrated up the Danube and the Volga, while some of the 

 former under the name of Wends (Venedi, Heneti, Eneti) appear 

 to have reached the Adriatic and the present Venetia on the 

 one hand, and on the other the Baltic shores down the Vistula, 

 thus enveloping and pressing westward their Keltic and Germanic 

 forerunners. The movement was continued far into medieval 

 times, when great overlappings took place, and when numerous 

 Slav tribes, some still known as Wends, others as Sorbs, Croats, or 

 Chekhs, ranged over central Europe to Pomerania and beyond 

 the Upper Elbe to Suabia. Most of these have long been Teu- 

 tonised, but a few of the Polabs 1 survive as Wends in Prussian 

 and Saxon Lausatz, while the Chekhs and Slovaks still hold their 

 ground in Bohemia and Moravia, as the Poles do in Posen and 

 the Vistula valley, and the Rusniaks or Ruthenes with the closely 

 allied "Little Russians," in the Carpathians, Galicia, and Ukrania. 

 It was from the Carpathian 2 lands that came those Yugo- 

 Slavs ("Southern Slavs") who, under the collective 

 The Southern name o f Sorbs (Serbs, Servians), moved southwards 



Slavs. 



beyond the Danube, and overran a great part of the 

 Balkan peninsula and nearly the whole of Greece in the 6th and 

 yth centuries. They were the Khorvats 2 or Khrobats 2 from the 

 upland valleys of the Oder and Vistula, whom, after his Persian 

 wars, Heraclius invited to settle in the wasted provinces south of 

 the Danube, hoping, as Nadir Shah did later with the Kurds in 

 Khorasan, to make them a northern bulwark of the empire against 

 the incursions of the Avars and other Mongolo-Turki hordes. 

 Thus was formed the first permanent settlement of the Yugo- 

 slavs in Croatia, Istria, Dalmatia, Bosnia, and the Narenta valley 



1 That is, the Elbe Slaves, from/<? = by, near, and Z#&?=Elbe; cf. Pomor 

 (Pomeranians), "by the Sea"; Borussia, Porussia, Prussia, originally peopled 

 by the Pruczi, a branch of the Lithuanians Germanised in the ryth century. 



2 Carpath, Khrobat, Khorvat are all the same word, meaning Highlands, 

 mountains, hence not strictly an ethnic term, although at present so used by the 

 Crovats or Croatian*, a considerable section of the Yugo-Slavs south of the 

 Danube. 



