Bayan I - Wars With Byzantium

Wars With Byzantium

After ten years of uneasy, undocumented peace, Bayan again marched against Sirmium, wresting it from Byzantine hands after a two-year siege, then took also Singidunum, evicting the Byzantines from the inner Balkans and opening the area to an unstoppable influx of Slavs, that in five years at most flooded all the semi-abandoned region down to the Peloponnesus. It was the year 582: Bayan was now able to attack the Byzantines in Thrace, and when Tiberius II Constantine, who had failed in stopping him, was succeeded in Constantinople by his son-in-law Maurice, he managed to extract a huge tribute in gold: 100,000 gold coins, or some 1,000 lbs, per year.

In later times Avars and Slavs still raided the remaining Byzantine lands as Maurice was hard pressed to defend his native Cappadocia and Armenia from the mighty Sassanians of Persia. By 592 the Byzantine ruler, once he defeated the Persian menace, was bent on revenge and counterattacked in full force, soon reverting the roles (see Maurice's Balkan campaigns). Repeated, massive defeats shook the Avaro-Slavic hordes as strong organized Byzantine armies penetrated north of the Danube into Wallachia, and eventually, under general Priscus, crushed the enemy along the river Tisza in the very heart of Pannonia. It was Phocas' rebellion against Mauricein 602 what ultimately saved the Avars and almost terminated, on the other hand, the Byzantine empire. In the same year Khagan Bayan died, his empire now safe and firmly established.