The Avars

Ábaroi enters Greek in 558 with the embassy of the qaghan Bayan’s people to Justinian, long-haired envoys whose appearance astonished the capital, demanding subsidies and land; Menander’s fragments record the negotiation and the decades of extortionate diplomacy that followed. The name itself became a Byzantine controversy: Theophylact Simocatta’s famous excursus insists these Danube Avars were Pseudábaroi, false Avars, fugitive tribes who had stolen the terrifying name of the true Avars of the east, the Rouran whom the Türks had just destroyed, precisely because the name alone frightened nations into submission. Byzantine usage kept the name regardless, through the great siege of 626 down to the historians who recorded the qaghanate’s fall.

The excursus makes this entry the atlas’s most explicit ancient meditation on its own subject matter: a sixth-century historian arguing that an ethnonym could be looted like treasure, worn as armor by people with no right to it, because the name, not the nation, carried the power. Whether Theophylact’s genealogy is sound is still debated, but his premise is the premise of this whole catalogue, stated fourteen centuries early. The Avars, true or false, ran a two-century empire on tribute and terror, and by the historian’s own account the first thing they extorted was the name.

The Medieval Latin Avari, the name under which the Frankish annals narrate the qaghanate’s destruction. The Royal Frankish Annals track Charlemagne’s Avar wars of the 790s to the capture of the Ring, the qaghanate’s treasure-fortress between Danube and Tisza, and Einhard’s life of the emperor pauses over the result: fifteen wagons of gold and silver hauled to Aachen, all the plunder of two centuries of Byzantine tribute changing hands in a season, so that the Franks, in his phrase, who had been almost poor, became rich. Frankish usage often glosses the people as the Huns of old, the new steppe enemy filed under the ancient name, but Avari is the annalists’ working term.

The entry is the only one on the page written by the people who ended its subject. Greek named the Avars at their arrival and through their extortions; Latin named them chiefly to record their obliteration, and the name’s densest cluster of attestations is an inventory of loot. Within a century a Frankish chronicler could cite a proverb of the region: they vanished like the Avars, who have neither offspring nor successor. A steppe empire that left no writing of its own thus survives in Latin mainly as the measure of what was taken from it, its name preserved, like its treasure, in the victor’s accounts.