Baian

Baian († 602 ) was an Avar Chagan who ruled from 562 until his death in 602. When the Kök Turks under Sizabulos spread to the west, Baian and most of the Avars initially fled to the west of what is now Ukraine .

In 567 he allied himself with the Longobards and together with them defeated the Gepids . When the Lombards evaded to Italy in 568, he also occupied Pannonia , which they had previously settled, and thus took possession of the entire Hungarian lowlands . In addition to the Gepids, he subjugated all Slavs in southern Europe as well as in present-day Bohemia , Moravia and Slovakia .

In the same year he invaded the eastern Roman province of Dalmatia . Three years later he made peace with Eastern Rome in exchange for tribute payments, but later repeatedly looked for excuses to increase his claims for tribute and to undertake raids into the Balkan provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire. The war started by Emperor Justin II in 571 against the Persian Sassanid Empire (see also Roman-Persian Wars ) was particularly convenient for him, as there were only a few troops in the Balkans. In 582 he took Sirmium and thus built a bridgehead on the Danube from which he could operate in the Balkans. In the years 584-585 he pushed across the Via Pontica to northern Thrace and claimed , according to Syrian sources, to rule the empire in Aquae Calidae for himself.

In 585 his raids took on such threatening forms that the Persian great king Hormizd IV wanted to use the situation in the Balkans to persuade the Eastern Roman emperor Maurikios to give up his claims on Armenia . Baian was at the height of his power.

But when Maurikios was able to conclude a very advantageous peace with Persia in 591, he was able to deploy most of the much more experienced troops deployed on the Persian front in the Balkans (see Maurikios' Balkan campaigns ). Despite tremendous threatening gestures, Baian avoided direct encounters with the Eastern Roman troops and even broke off the siege of Singidunum in 595 when an army under the command of Priskos approached. Instead, he invaded Dalmatia again, with moderate success.

When he invaded the Balkan provinces again, encouraged by successes against the Franks and strengthened by tribute payments from the Frankish Queen Brunichild in 597, he succeeded in a surprise success that brought him further tribute payments in 598. But he lost seven of his sons off Constantinople as a result of a plague epidemic . In addition, the campaign from 599 to 602 provoked retaliatory actions by the Eastern Romans who devastated the Banat . Not only were many Avars and Gepids killed in these battles, but also three other sons of the Chagan. Of great psychological importance was the fact that the Avars, previously considered invincible, were defeated in their own country and were not able to protect themselves and their subjects. As a result, the Avars suffered a considerable loss of reputation; Sub-tribes and subjugated peoples began to rebel against Baian. When Baian died in 602, the Avar empire was on the verge of collapse and was only saved by the fall of Maurikios at the end of the same year, as the new emperor Phocas, for various reasons, did not continue these campaigns for long. But even if his successors overcame the crisis and were able to plunder the Balkan Peninsula after 612, they did not succeed in restoring the aura of invincibility of the Avars. This also explains why the empire was shaken by unrest (revolt of the Bohemian-Moravian Slavs under Samo ) during the looting of the Balkans from 623/624, which became a complete success after the failed siege of Constantinople (626) .

literature

• Walter Pohl : The Avars. A steppe people in Central Europe 567–822 AD . Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-48969-9 (standard work on the Avars).
• Michael Whitby : The Emperor Maurice and his Historian - Theophylact Simocatta on Persian and Balkan Warfare . Oxford 1988.

Remarks

1. ↑ The interpretation of this episode (obtained from Michael Syrus ) is controversial, cf. on this Walter Pohl: The Avars. Munich 2002, p. 78.