Saw some dude here (possibly Iranian) claiming it was some myth and that anyone who disagrees hates Slavs. I guess some people just have a hard time dealing with reality of history and how it went down.


While most details about the movement of the early Slavs into the Balkans are unclear, the basic facts are known. A large tribal population of Slavs among whom the Serbs and the Croats were two particular tribes, or tribal groupings - occupied parts of central Europe, north of the Danube, in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. The Serbs had their power-base in the area of the Czech lands and Saxony, and the Croats in Bavaria, Slovakia and southern Poland. This central European location was not the earliest known home of the Serbs; most of the evidence points to an earlier migration from the north and north-eastern side of the Black Sea. At that earlier period the Serbs and Croats seem to have lived together with more warlike Iranian tribes, and their tribal names may derive from Iranian ruling elites: Ptolemy, writing in the second century AD, located the 'Serboi' among the Sarmatians (an Iranian grouping) on the northern side of the Caucasus.




The first major Slav raids took place in the middle of Justinian's reign. In 547 and 548 they invaded the territory of modern Kosovo and then (probably via Macedonia and the Via Egnatia across central Albania) got as far as Durres on the northern Albanian coast. More substantial invasions took place in the 580's, bringing Slavs deep into Greece. Historians used to think that it was only these later invasions that involved any permanent settlement; but there is evidence of Slav placenames in the Balkans - particularly along the river Morava - by the 550's, which suggests a more continuous process of infiltration. One factor which may have turned the southward movement of Slavs from a trickle to a flood was the arrival, in the north-western part of the Balkans, of an especially warlike Turkic tribe, the Avars, who subjugated or coopted some Slavic tribes but drove many others away. By the early seventh century the Avar armies were raiding as far as the walls of Constantinople, and threatening the very existence of the Byzantine Empire.

It was at this point, in the 610's or 620's, that the Emperor of the day (according to a detailed but somewhat confused account by a later Emperor-cum-historian, Constantine Porphyrogenitus) invited the Croats to come down from central Europe and deal with the Avar threat. This they did, bringing with them their neighbours, the Serbs.

Both populations then settled in the territories abandoned by the Avars: the Croats in modern Croatia and Western Bosnia, and the Serbs in the Rascia area on the north-western side of Kosovo, and in the region of modern Montenegro. In some of these areas they supervened on an already existing Slav population, which, as a result, must gradually have taken on a Croat or Serb identity. The Serbs did not have anything like a state at this stage, but they developed several small tribal territories, each called a zupa and ruled by a tribal chief known as the zupan. By the mid seventh century, Serbs (or Serb-led Slavs) were penetrating from the coastal lands of Montenegro into northern Albania. Major ports and towns such as Durres and Shkodra held out against them, but much of the countryside was Slavicized, and some Slav settlers moved up the valleys into the Malesi. By the ninth century, Slav speaking people were an important element of the population in much of northern Albania, excluding the towns and the higher mountainous areas (especially the mountains in the eastern part of the Malesi, towards Kosovo.) Slav-speaking people lived in the lowlands of this area gradually becoming a major component of the urban population too, until the end of the Middle Ages.

What happened to the local populations of the western and central Balkans during and after the Slav invasions ? Something is known about the urban inhabitants, but much less about the people in the countryside. Despite the apocalyptic tone of early Byzantine writers, who give the impression that all civilization came to an end here in about 600, there is good evidence that the main cities survived (or were revived), just as they had done after earlier sackings. Refugees from central Balkan towns such as Nish and Sofia fled to the safety of Salonica at first, but many must have gone back home later. The main towns on the Dalmatian and northern Albanian coastline, too, retained their Latin-speaking populations and stayed under Byzantine rule. (for naval and commercial reasons, Durres was the most important Byzantine possession on the entire Adriatic coast of the Balkans.) But outside the major cities there are signs of decline and contraction: typical of the seventh to ninth centuries are the remains of small townships based on hill-forts, such as the one at Koman in the mountains o north-Central Albania, where a Christian and probably Romanized (Latin-speaking population must have led a rather limited existence.

As for the rural population, which was also mainly Latin-speaking in most of the territory of Yugoslavia and north-western Bulgaria, it is assumed that large numbers of people were driven southwards by the Avars, Croats and Serbs. Some evidence from place-names suggests a flow of such refugees down the Dalmatian coast into northern Albania; and a folk tradition set down by a later Byzantine writer referred to a large movement of native people southwards and eastwards away from the area of the Danube and the Sava - that is, from northern Bulgaria, northern Serbia and Croatia. No doubt Latin speaking peasants and farmers continued to live in many of these areas, especially where they were in contact with a large town or city. But sooner or later the majority were Slavicized, and the towns in the interior of the Balkans filled up with Slav-speakers too.






This other document suggests that the Justinian plague paved the way for a Slavic invasion since it weakened the Balkans after killing millions and causing a massive depopulation.

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...-8th_centuries