AVARS. - Of Mongol race, coming from the Asian plateau, with a marked affinity to the Huns, the A. turned, a little after the middle of the 5th century, toward the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. Confused with the Huns, they are not spoken of again for another century, until around 558 they appear settled between the Crimea and the Caucasus. In that year, in fact, they sent an embassy to Justinian to ask for new settlements, and he granted them Ukraine in order to set them against the Huns and the Slavs. Opposed in particular by the Turks, the A. pushed from western Ukraine over the whole of Pannonia, as far as the eastern borders of the kingdom of the Franks. Defeated between 561 and 562 by Sigebert, king of Austrasia, they were able, immediately afterward, to force him into a pact of friendship, and this in order to move against their former patron, the emperor of the East. Having insinuated themselves into the struggle between the Lombards, allies of the Franks, and the Gepids, allies of Byzantium, a struggle that raged fiercely in Pannonia, and having come to an understanding with the Lombard king Alboin, the A. took part in the destruction of the kingdom of the Gepids and claimed for themselves the country invaded through the action of the Lombards, who were forced to move into Italy. To reduce to impotence the frontier population, in Friuli, the A. also intervened directly as parties interested in the conquests of the Lombards, by reason of the pact concluded with them, according to which they were to restore the occupied Pannonia, should Alboin have been unable to maintain himself in Italy.
While the Lombards began their dominion over the peninsula, the A. established their supremacy in the boundless Danubian plain, and held Bulgars, Gepids and Slavs under their control. From Bohemia to Dalmatia, including present-day Austria and Hungary, extended the vast kingdom that was, as appears from the sparse sources and, more, from historical tradition, one of terror for the neighboring or subject populations. Their raids devastated the entire Balkan peninsula, and with them was prepared the process of decline leading to the Slavization that would gradually embrace the formerly Roman territories. The Peloponnese was devastated several times; a terrible siege of Thessalonica was ended only by the plague that mowed down the besiegers; in 619 the A. camped before Constantinople, and again in 626; but they were forced to fall back by an incursion of Serbs and Croats.
As rapid as their rise, so rapid was their decline. The foundation of a Slavic kingdom in Bohemia was the first blow. Then came the founding of the Bulgarian kingdom. Then bitter border struggles: with the Bavarians first, then, finally, always with the Franks. The understanding with the Saxons and even with the Muslims of Spain did not suffice to save the A., already in open decline, from ruin, under the Frankish onslaught. The wars from 791 to 796, carried by the Carolingian troops onto their own soil, proved fatal to the A., who disappeared from history.
The survivors sought refuge among the Bulgars, later converted to Christianity, and finally merged with the Hungarians.