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Slavs, name of a people (communication community), speakers of an Indo-European language. Between the 6th and the 7th c. they spread across a great territory in Europe, from Ukraine in the east to the Balkans in the south, the river Unstrut, possibly even the Upper Main, in the west, and Schleswig Holstein in the north-west (...)
The name is recorded for the first time in Greek and Latin sources during the first half of the 6th century as: Σκλαβηνοι; Σκλαβοι; sclavi. It may be what the Slavs called themselves. The original form, is reconstructed by some as *slověne; perhaps this has something to do with the Slav word slovo, which in Polish still means ‘word’ and ‘language’. During the Middle Ages Slavs are sometimes also referred to as “Wends, from the Antique Veneti (cf. Germanic Wenden, Finnish Venäja)
The earliest written record on S., from around 550 AD is in →Cassiodorus, his work known from its summary, handed down by →Jordanes (Getica), and →Procopius of Caesarea (especially, his De bello Gothico). Both Jordanes and Procopius report that Slavs were divided into Sclaveni and Antae; Jordanes mentions also the race of the Venethi whom he considers an earlier name of the people, or possibly, a tribe contemporary to the Sclaveni and Antae (Getica, V.34-35, p. 16). From Procopius we learn that the Sclaveni and Antae were known originally as Spori, or Sporoi (De bello Gothico III.14, p. 272-273).
According to →Jordanes the Sclaveni lived in the lands to the north of the Danube, as far as the Upper Vistula in the west and the Dniester in the east (map 1-2.); the territory of the Antae extended east from the Dniester to the Dnieper (Getica, V.34-35, p. 16). If we accept that Antae indeed were Slavs, then the first Slav ruler known from the written record was Boz, defeated in late 4th century by Vinitharius of the →Ostrogoths (Getica, XLVIII.246-247, p. 101-102).
According to the Byzantine records in the second half of 6th and during the 7th century Slavs moved into the Balkans. (...)
