Ethnically belonged to the Turkic tribes

The policy of assimilation adopted by the Byzantine Emperors with regard to the immigrants in-fluenced the regions where the Slavs were not the predominant power (Central and Southern Greece, Asia Minor), but in Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia the Slavs were the masters of the situation. Too weak to oppose on their own the powerful pressure of Byzantium, the Slav tribes began to unite into tribal unions (the beginning of a state) and courageously to defend their independence. In their struggle against the Byzantine Empire during the last decades of the 7th century, they suddenly acquired a peerless ally in the Proto-Bulgarians.

The Proto-Bulgarians ethnically belonged to the Turkic tribes which inhabited the steppes of Central Asia. Their origin and name have to this day not been positively established. It is known that early in our era they had settled in the northern part of the foot of the Caucasus. Those lands had been populated from time immemorial by the Sabiri and Alani. It is probable that the Alani gave the Proto-Bulgarians their name, for in the language of that tribe ‘bulgaron’ meant ‘people living at the fpot of the mountain’.

At the end of the 4th and the first half of the 5th century A. D. the Proto-Bulgarians became members of the motley conglomerate of peoples called ‘Hunnish tribal union’ and took part in the horror-sowing Hunnish raids in Central and Western Europe. After the Union disintegrated, part of the Proto-Bulgarians settled in Italy, others went back to their former places – along the northern Black Sea coast. For several decades they formed part of the powerful Avar Khaganate and numerous Proto-Bulgarian contingents again went as far as Pan- nonia and, after the internecine wars within the Khaganate during the middle of the 7th century, part of them went to settle in Italy, and another part, a more numerous one, led by Kouber, penetrated deep into the Balkan Peninsula and settled in the Bitola Plain in Macedonia.