Early Slavs

The early Slavs were Indo-European peoples and speakers of the Indo-European dialects

who lived during the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages (approximately from the 5th to the 10th centuries AD) in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe and established the foundations for the Slavic nations through the Slavic states of the Early and High Middle Ages. The Slavs' original homeland is still a matter of debate due to a lack of historical records, but scholars generally place it in Eastern Europe, with Polesia being the most commonly accepted location.

It is generally agreed that ancient Roman writers referred to the ancestors of Slavs as Venedi. The proto-Slavic term Slav shares roots with Slavic terms for speech, word, and perhaps was used by early Slavic people themselves to denote other people who spoke languages similar to theirs.

The first written use of the name "Slavs" dates to the 6th century, when the Slavic tribes inhabited a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe. By then, the nomadic Iranian-speaking peoples living in the European Pontic Steppe (the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, etc.) had been absorbed by the region's Slavic-speaking population. Over the next two centuries, the Slavs expanded westwards (to the Elbe river and into the Alps) and southwards (into the Balkans, absorbing Illyrian and Thracian peoples in the process), and also moved eastwards (in the direction of the Volga River). Between the sixth and seventh centuries, large parts of Europe came to be controlled or occupied by Slavs, a process less understood and documented than that of the Germanic ethnogenesis in the west. Yet the effects of Slavicization were far more profound.

Beginning in the 7th century, the Slavs were gradually Christianized by the Church (both western and eastern parts, before the Great Schism of 1054).