Slavs mysteriously emerged in the 5.-6. century. Archeology for a long time searches where they came from and what was their original homeland, but the results are contradictory. And so they aren’t known until they began to expand and take over new lands.

At the end of  the 5th century and in the first half of the 6th century Slavs were settled in the north of Danube and in the lower reaches of the river, and from there they attacked Byzantine provinces. The oldest record of it is from 493. In the first half of the 6th century it was mostly about stealing. Slavs took rich loot and returned to Danube. In the second half of the 6th century and in the beginning of the 7th century they gradually settled on the whole Balkan Peninsula. The ancestors of Serbs settled during the 6th century in the south of the lower and middle reaches of Sava. Slavs conquered and populated in the second half of the 6th century part of Thrace, Macedonia and Thessaly. In the 580s they already expanded to Greece and the Peloponnese. At the turn of the 6th and 7th century Slavs took over present-day Slovenia, Croatia and Dalmatia and settled in the east part of present-day Austria. They gradually expanded further to the west to Bavaria. In the 6th, 7th and 8th century Slavs settled in the west and northwest, east and northeast. They gradually divided into three language groups: west, east and south Slavs.

Translated from BERANOVÁ, Magdalena. Slované. Dotisk druhého vydání. Praha: Libri, 2022. Historická řada (Libri). ISBN 978-80-7277-538-5.