The Avars are a proto-Mongol people of nomadic horsemen led by a Khâgan, sometimes identified with the Ruanruan, who threatened China in the 3rd century.
They are from Tartary, from the family of the Huns. In the 5th century, Chö-louen, khan of the Jouan Jouan, founded a nomadic empire from Korea to Irtych. This empire is administered by two governors, east and west. The population is organized around the army. They camp in mobile tents, and will never have any other towns than their immense camps which, arranged in the form of concentric circles, hence take the name of rings or rings. Their leader was called khan or khagan.
The Jouan Jouan (Avars) are nomads, breeders and hunters, and will not cultivate the land until around the 6th century. They practiced barter and carried out intense trade with Wei China in times of peace. The art of metalwork reached a very high level in the Avar Empire. The Jouan Jouan have no original writing, but wooden plaques engraved with numbers have been found. The aristocrats and the administration use the Chinese language and script. Chinese chronicles report that the Jouan Jouan brought doctors, astrologers and craftsmen from China. In the 6th century, the Jouan Jouan will be in contact with Buddhism.
They were established in the vicinity of Altai, when they were attacked and driven from their territory by an invasion of the Chinese in 552.
Those who escape head towards Europe, and migrate west while absorbing small Turco-Mongol tribes, and reach the Volga in the 6th century where they build a kingdom based essentially on looting, demands for tribute and ransoms. They crossed the Volga and the Don in 557, and soon came to settle on the banks of the Danube. Under their Khâgan (“Khân des Khâns”) Bayan, allied to the Byzantine Empire, they were responsible with the Lombards for driving the Gepids out of Pannonia around 567 and fighting against the Slavic tribes and the Bulgarians. They make war on the Greek emperors, and take Dacia and Pannonia from them (582), from where they spread into Germania north of the Danube, and as far as Italy.
They end up controlling an area extending from the Volga and the Elbe to the Baltic Sea, harass the Byzantine territories south of the Danube, plunder the Balkans, threaten the imperial capital and Lombard Italy. The boundaries of the Avar Empire varied greatly. At the time of its greatest extension (590-630), it embraced the immense solitudes to the north of the Danube from Lusatia to beyond the Don; at the end of the 7th century, it was tightened in the North and West by the Lèkhes, the Vendes and the Czechs (today Poland, Silesia, Brandenburg, Bohemia); in the east by the Khazars who lived between the Bug and the Dnieper.
From 610 things changed when they turned west and decided to attack Bavaria and Italy. They put Friuli to fire and blood and fight the Lombard king Agilolf. In 626, at their peak, they turned against Byzantium and decided to attack the capital with 80,000 cavalry and infantry (a figure certainly exaggerated by the chroniclers of the time), including Avars, Slavic tribes, Asians, and Germanic. While allying with the Persians, sworn enemies of the Byzantines, they besieged the city and demanded a heavy tribute. Their leader Baian, an ally of Khosro II, was defeated there by Emperor Heraclius. However, they failed and were pushed back to Illyria by a Bulgarian-Byzantine coalition. From the end of the 7th century, the Avars gradually lost their hegemony and, isolated on all sides, had to face the pressures in particular of the Serbs of the Prince of Serbia White and the Bulgarians.
From the year 791, the Franks of Charlemagne and his son Pepin of Italy, decided to put an end to these pagans, fought them violently and relentlessly with their Frankish, Bavarian and Lombard troops. Their entrenched camp, the Ring Avar, was taken in 795 with a considerable treasure, the fruit of several centuries of pillage (see Capture of the Ring Avar). After its destruction in 799, Charlemagne kept only the western part, located between the Theiss and the Inn, and made it under the name of Avarie a march of the Frankish Empire. The rest was occupied by the Magyars or Hungarians.
The Avars are exterminated; those who submit are converted to Christianity willingly but very often by force, and the last rebels are defeated in 805. A Frankish law orders that no arms be sold to the Avars, however reduced, and their existence as a distinct people stops the. A very last expedition in 811 destroyed the last resistants. Some, few in number, took refuge in the mountains of Transylvania and mixed with other Slavic, Asian and Germanic tribes; the Szeklers can be considered as their descendants. Those who remained in Pannonia were harassed and totally exterminated by the Slavs, formerly persecuted by these same Avars. We will not hear more about them from the years 822.
In the 19th century, the Avars occupied part of Circassia on the northern slopes of the Caucasus, between the Aksai and Mount Cherdagh. They then formed about 12,000 families, obeying a particular khan; they live by hunting and plunder. They were then vassals of Russia, whose authority they formally recognized in 1859.