The settlement of the ancient Slavs is one of thethe most important processes in the evolution of civilizational, geopolitical and ethnic processes in medieval Europe. Slavdom was separated into an independent ethnic group from among the Indo-European peoples around the first millennium BC. e. Several waves of the Great Migration of Nations, mass migrations at the beginning of the first millennium AD also provoked the mobility of Slavic elements. Some of the tribes take an active part in mass migrations. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the settlement of the Slavs is rapidly acquiring an ever broader framework. During this period, they appear in the Balkans, in the Baltic, in Moravia, moving into the middle Russian plain steppe in the east. Such a scattered settlement of the Slavs provokes their division in the middle of the first millennium AD into three large branches: western, southern and eastern.
Southern Slavs
This branch was represented by the tribes of the Macedonians,Montenegrins, Bulgars and Slovenes. Their shelter was the Balkan Peninsula, through which they settled in the V-VI centuries of our era. In addition to the peninsula proper, the southern Slavs also occupied part of the adjacent territories. By the time of their final settling in the Balkans they were already at the stage of the decomposition of the tribal community and were ready to form the first political formations. The first full-fledged state of them was, perhaps, Sklavia, which arose in the 7th century and existed before X. 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 sameperiod. However, they moved in a different, more northerly direction than 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 could not become full-fledged peoples: Luzhichans, Silesians, Kashubians) settled in vast territories from the Vistula and up to the banks of the Elbe River. Also traces of representatives of this branch were discovered by archaeologists in the Baltic States. This branch of Slavdom was in the middle of the 1st millennium AD at about the same level of development with the southern, which enabled them, in the 7th century, to create their first state on the territory of modern Czechia.
Settlement of the Slavs of the Eastern
This significant group occupied an extensiveEast European Plain. In the V-VI centuries, only the decomposition of the primitive communal system took place here. In addition, the Eastern Slavs did not have in the immediate vicinity highly developed nations that would stimulate the emergence of political formations here. As any corresponding map demonstrates, the settlement of the eastern Slavs took place mostly in the Northern Black Sea Region, in the Dnipro, Pripyat, Dvina, Bug, Dniester, Seym, Sula and others basins. And then they moved further north, pushing out their medieval rivals - Finno-Ugric tribes. Since the VII century AD, the Eastern Slavs are beginning to unite into large-scale tribal unions. Such an alliance could include hundreds of tribes united around one of the strongest tribes. Their first significant political education became one of the most powerful medieval states. Speech, of course, about Kievan Rus.
