Sclaveni is the name applied by ancient historians to those SLAVS who migrated to the Balkan Peninsula from a homeland as yet undetermined, probably somewhere in the region bounded by the Lower Danube River on the southwest, the Ukraine on the east, and the Pripet Swamp on the north. Claims for a homeland in present-day Poland were based on unreliable dating of archaeological material; the Slavic material found there is now thought to be considerably later than that found along the north bank of the Danube and in the Ukraine.
The name Sclaveni dates at least to the sixth century C. E., when Jordanes, the historian of the GOTHS, as well as historians among the Byzantines, used it. The earlier name Venedi used by the ancient Greeks and Romans for people of much earlier times is probably the etymological source. (Slavs who settled to the west were called Wends by scholars who derived the name from Venedi, and those to the east as Antes, although the exact makeup and geographies of these classifications are uncertain).
Some of those peoples who became known in the sixth and seventh centuries as the Sclaveni, a general term applied by some writers to all the Slavs (and from which is derived the name Slavs), may have branched off from the groups originally referred to as Antes or Wends. It is believed that the Huns had Slavicspeaking peoples among them in their expansion westward in the fifth century. The “crystallization” of the Slavic ethnicity may have occurred during this time under Hunnic influence. Those groups identified as Balkan Slavs, Macedonian Slavs, and Pannonian Slavs relate to those peoples grouped as Sclaveni as do all the Southern Slavs. Their various Slavic dialects evolved into Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Slovenian.
World History
