The settlement of the ancient Slavs is one of the most important processes in the evolution of civilizational, geopolitical and ethnic processes in medieval Europe. Slavism emerged as an independent ethnic group from among the Indo-European peoples around the 1st millennium BC. e. Several waves of the Great Migration of Nations, mass migrations at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD also provoked the mobility of the Slavic elements. Some tribes take an active part in mass migrations. In the V-VI centuries, the settlement of the Slavs is rapidly gaining wider scope. During this period, they appear in the Balkans, in the B altic, in Moravia, moving into the Central Russian plain steppe in the east. Such a scattered settlement of the Slavs provokes their division in the middle of the 1st millennium AD into three large branches: western, southern and eastern.
South Slavs
This branch was represented by the tribes of Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bulgars and Slovenes. Their shelter was the Balkan Peninsula, along which they settled in the 5th-6th centuries AD. In addition to the peninsula itself, the southern Slavs also occupied part of the territories adjacent to it. By the periodAfter their final settlement in the Balkans, they were already at the stage of decomposition of the tribal community and were ready to form the first political formations. Their first full-fledged state was, perhaps, Sklavia, which arose in the 7th century and existed until the 10th century. The descendants of those peoples are modern Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Slovenes and partly Bosniaks.
Western Slavs
The settlement of the Slavs of this branch took place in the same period. However, they moved in a different, more northerly direction than the Slovenes and Bulgars. This group of peoples, which gave the modern world Poles, Czechs and Slovaks (as well as a number of ethnic groups that failed to take shape into full-fledged peoples: Lusatians, Silesians, Kashubians), settled in vast territories from the Vistula to the banks of the Elbe River. Also, traces of representatives of this branch were found by archaeologists in the B altic states. This branch of Slavism was in the middle of the 1st millennium AD approximately on the same level of development as the southern ones, which allowed them to create their first state in the territory of modern Czechia already in the 7th century.
Resettlement of Eastern Slavs
This sizable group occupied the vast East European Plain. In the 5th-6th centuries, only the decomposition of the primitive communal system took place here. In addition, the Eastern Slavs did not have highly developed peoples in the immediate vicinity that would stimulate the emergence of political formations here. As any relevant map will demonstrate, settlementEastern Slavs occurred for the most part in the Northern Black Sea region, in the basin of the rivers Dnieper, Pripyat, Dvina, Bug, Dniester, Seim, Sula and others. And then further they moved to the north, pushing back their medieval rivals - the Finougor tribes. From the 7th century AD, the Eastern Slavs began to unite in large-scale tribal unions. Such an alliance could include hundreds of tribes united around one of the most powerful tribe. Their first significant political formation became one of the most powerful medieval states. This, of course, is about Kievan Rus.
