St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, Italy (about 1100 AD) During the fall of the Roman Empire, in the 400s AD, people who lived along the north-east coast of Italy didn't feel safe. Central Asian people like the Huns and Germanic people like the Ostrogoths were invading over and over again. Some people abandoned their homes and moved to wetlands and [...]
Ukrainian landscape In 500 BC, we might have called the people living in Russia Scythians. But then between about 300 and 800 AD, a lot of people passed through Russia. Most of them were moving from Central Asia towards Europe, from east to west. One after another, the Ostrogoths, the Avars, the Huns, and the Magyars all passed through Russia. But all [...]
Ural mountains In the Early Middle Ages, Turkic and Mongol people in Central Asia were moving westward, pushing out Indo-European people - and other people - who had been living there. The Magyars, who were probably distant cousins of the Turkic people, had been living in the Ural Mountains. But the Gokturks and other Turkic people like the Khazars pushed [...]
Lombard Christian altar (700s AD) (University of Alabama) In 568 AD, a Turkic people, the Avars, pushed the Indo-European Lombards out of their home in Central Europe. This was the westernmost edge of a general tendency for Turkic people to take over more of Asia around this time. The Lombards moved south into northern Italy, and conquered it from [...]
Who was Charlemagne? This is Charlemagne, or possibly his grandson (now in the Louvre Museum) What's Charlemagne's real name? Charlemagne's name is really Charles le Magne, or Charles the Great. In German they call him Karl der Grosse, which also means Charles the Great. How did Charlemagne get into power? Charlemagne's father, Pippin, left Charlemagne his [...]
Grasslands of Central Asia - the steppe homeland of the Avars Ruled by the Rouran The Avars were a mostly Turkic group of people. We first hear of them living in Central Asia under the rule of the Rouran, in the 400s AD. Who were the Rouran? The Early Middle Ages All our Central Asia articles The Chinese, [...]
Tomb of a Rouran princess, Yujiulu Chidilian, and her Chinese husband Xu Xianxiu, 550 AD. Yujiulu Chidilian died when she was 13 years old. About 300 AD, a group of Turkic or Mongol people called the Rouran formed a kingdom in Central Asia. They called their leader the Khan. The Rouran included people [...]
The Mongol court (1200s AD) Starting around 300 AD the Indo-Europeans in Central Asia began to lose ground to the Altaic people. The Altaic people divided into the Mongols and the Turks. One mixed group of Mongols and Turks, the Rouran, formed an empire north and west of China (modern Mongolia and Uzbekistan). Their [...]
A Gokturk coin, about 576-600 AD (Kyrgyzstan museum) (compare to Sassanian and Byzantine coins of the same time) About 550 AD, Bumin Qaghan and his sons, with the help of the Chinese Wei kingdom, conquered the Rouran and took over as the main rulers of Central Asia. Today, historians call Bumin Qaghan's people [...]
