About 445 Attila murdered his brother Bleda and in 447, for unknown reasons, made his second great attack on the Eastern Roman Empire. He devastated the Balkans and drove south into Greece as far as Thermopylae.

In 451 Attila invaded Gaul but was defeated by Roman and Visigothic forces at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, or, according to some authorities, of Maurica. This was Attila's first and only defeat. And what is even more incredible is that Romans and Germans were united against the Huns. I guess that is what it took to win even one battle against them. In 452 the Huns invaded Italy and sacked several cities, but a sudden outbreak of dysentery compelled them to leave. In 453 Attila died. His many sons divided up his empire and at once began quarreling among themselves. At this point in time, many of the tribes which were part of the Hunish confederacy, wanted to go their own way. Attila's sons then began a series of costly struggles with their subjects and were finally routed in 455 by a combination of Gepidae, Ostrogoths, Heruli, and others in a great battle on the unidentified river Nedao in Pannonia.

Historians often say that the Huns ceased to play any significant part in history after that. In some ways that is true but in other ways it is completely wrong. The confederacy definitely fell apart. But at least some of the tribes which had made up that confederacy went on to create great empires of their own. The Bulgars are one of those tribes and they created not one but three great empires -- Great Bulgaria, Volga Bulgaria, and Bulgaria. Hungary, created by the Magyars and other Hunish tribes, is also alive and well.

The Hunnish-Bulgarian association existed throughout the period between 377-453 AD - the time of the Hunnish hegemony in Europe.

The mythical predecessor of Khan Kubrat - Avitohol, who according to The name list of Bulgarian Khans lived for 300 years, probably refers to Attila. {In the Niebelungen saga known as Etzel.} According to legend, Avitohol was nurtured by a doe after he was left in the deep woods to die. Deer show up all the time in Skythian and Sarmatian art, they have a powerful religious significance. Avitohol's son Ernich probably refer's to Attila's youngest son Ernas. He is followed by Gostun and he in turn by Kubrat.

After 455, the association between Bulgars and Huns was definitely over. The Bulgars retreated to the steppes of eastern Europe, north of the Danube, and went on with their marry ways. The Slavs who also lived on these lands, had been living with nomads for millennia and in that respect the Bulgars were no different. The Slavs and Bulgars got along splendidly.

In the mean time, Ostrogoths had invaded the East Roman empire {Byzantine}. The Ostrogoths had settled in Thrace, the Thracians couldn't care less, but it made the Romans very nervous. Romans are easily scared by barbarians and the Ostrogoths being Germanic barbarians, were very unsettling to the Byzantines. Now what?s a Roman to do with a problem like that? I personally imagine a meeting in a castle, in Constantinople, that went something like this:

Emperor: What do we do about the Ostrogoths?

Some general: I dunno know!

Some other guy: Hey, let's get the Barbarian's barbarians to fight the Ostrogoths!

Emperor: What?!?

The guy: Well, remember how the Huns beat up the Germans? Let's pay them to do it again!

Emperor: Hmmm.... that just might work!!!

Thus in 480 AD Byzantium signed its first agreement with the Bulgars. That turned out to be a very smart move because the respect the Bulgarian troops enjoyed in those days can be felt in the enthusiastic eulogy by the Ostrogothic poet Enodius. It is about an Ostrogothic leader who was only slightly wounded by a Bulgarian commander in a battle. This laudation describes the Bulgarians as supermen and as invincible in war. The Bulgar army consisted of all physically strong and battle-fit men but, in critical times, young women were also known to have been recruited.

So in 482 Zeno, Emperor of the Byzantines, called the Bulgars to aid him in the fight against the Goths. Apparently Enodius wasn't kidding, the Ostrogoths were ravaged by the Bulgars and in 488 AD the Goths were forced by the Byzantines and the Bulgars to move away from the Balkan Peninsula for good.

Great for the Romans, right? Not quite, during the year-long campaign against the Goths, the Bulgars being Byzantium allies, had been eligible to walking freely across Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia and they had evidently grown to like these lands. That's easy to understand, these lands were great, fertile, rich, etc. Bulgarians still love these lands today, it was love at first sight :-)

Only five years after the Goths had been driven out, the Bulgarian troops invaded Thrace, defeated the Byzantine army and killed their leader, Julian. Outch! Byzantium could sense the new frightful danger and emperor Anastasius I manifested unprecedented activity in the construction of fortresses. But in 499 AD a new attack of the Bulgars led up to another humiliating rout - the whole Illyrian army perished in the battle by the river Zurta. In 502 AD the Bulgarians conquered and plundered all of Thrace. From 513 AD onwards the Bulgarian raids against the European possessions of the empire became annual, but from 540 AD a basically new feature became apparent: the Bulgarians were no longer satisfied whit only looting and taking away the population from the rural areas, but adopted besiege techniques and started conquering the forts, too. Thus, only during the year quoted, in the region of Illyricum alone, they managed to seize 32 of these forts and to carry away their population together with abundant loot. Ouch, again! It sucks to be Roman right now.

After the Kutrigur {or Kutriguri} Bulgar attack of 540, Emperor Justinian worked to extend a system of fortifications that ran in three zones through the Balkans and as far south as the Pass of Thermopylae. Fortresses, strongholds, and watchtowers were not, however, enough. The Slavs plundered Thrace in 545 and returned in 548 to menace Dyrrhachium; in 550 the Sclaveni, a Slavic people, reached a point about 40 miles (65 kilometers) from Constantinople. The major invasion came in 559, when the Kutrigur Bulgars, led by Khagan Zabergan, accompanied by Sclaveni, crossed the Danube and divided their force into three columns. One column reached Thermopylae; the second gained a foothold on the Gallipoli Peninsula near Constantinople; and the third advanced as far as the suburbs of Constantinople itself, which the aged Belisarius had to defend with an unlikely force of civilians, demesmen, and a few veterans. Worried by Roman naval action on the Danube, which seemed to menace the escape route home, the Kutrigurs broke off the attack, returned north, and found themselves under attack from the Utigurs - another Bulgar tribe. The reason for the attack was Byzantine diplomacy. And the Bulgarians would get to know this hallmark of Byzantine diplomacy very well over the centuries to follow. In fact, today in Bulgaria the term 'Byzantine' means back stabbing and two-faced. Byzantine diplomacy would take a heavy toll on Bulgaria in the coming millennia, with the final blow being an attack of Ottoman Turks, hired by the Byzantines to fight the Bulgars. And this would also be the Byzantine's last act of diplomacy as it backfired even worse then the hiring of the Bulgars in 482, the Ottomans sacked Constantinople and brutally ruled Greece for 400 years. But more on all of that, later on.

The millions upon millions of Slavs now spilled south. Covering the area between Italy and the Black Sea. This Slavic invasion reached as far south as Greece proper, but those Slavs were eventually completely absorbed by the Greeks. The rest co-existed with the Thracians and opposed the Roman empire.

The Avar Khagnate had weakened as a consequence of the internal skirmishes for the throne, the Bulgars had gained strength and in 632 the Utigurs {or Unogonduri, or Unogondurs} broke loose from the Avar khanate. Khan Kubrat, who was from the Dulo {or Dub, or Dubo} clan, belonged to the Utigurs tribe. Attila himself was also from House of Dub, in fact the Dulo clan was a very highly regarded family among all the nomads. Kubrat was now the Khan of the newly independent Unogondur Bulgars, and all the other Bulgar tribes of that region.

Then probably in the period of 632-635 Khan Kubrat succeeds in putting under his rule the Kutrigurs. And now the two most powerful Bulgar tribes are free and united. Then quickly he also succeeds in integrating the Bulgar Kotrags who lived to the west of the river Don. And so Khan Kubrat creates the biggest Bulgarian country ever. To the east it reached out to the river Kuban, to the west to the river Dnepr, to the north to the river Donetsk, and to the south to the Azov and the Black Sea. The capital was the magnificent Fanagoria on the Taman Peninsula.

This newly created union of Bulgarian tribes was called Great Bulgaria.

Kubrat became Khana Subigi {or Suvigi, or any dammed spelling} i.e. Khan of Khans, the second man in the administrative hierarchy, was the Kavkhan. The third man was the Ichirguboyl. Both of them were high-ranking officers in the administration and in the chain of command. In time of war they were in charge of large army units. The practice of combining administrative and military responsibilities was applied to all ranks down the hierarchy ladder, too. Kubrat maintained peaceful relations with the East Roman {Byzantine} empire and was honored with the title of patrician by the Roman Emperor. Upon the death of the emperor in 642 AD, Khan Kubrat supported his widow Martina and their children to whom he had been strongly attached, in their battle for the emperor's throne. According to the Ethiopian chronicler Joan Niciusky, just the news of khan Kubrat backing up Martina and her children had risen in arms in their support the people and the army of Constantinople under a certain Jutalius, the son of Constantine.

Kubrat died in 651 AD. In 1912 an exceptionally rich burial was discovered in the sand dunes of the Vorskla river near the Ukrainian village of Malaya Pereshchepina, 13 km away from the town of Poltava. The deceased was buried in a wooden coffin, set with 250 rectangular gold plates, 6.5x5.5 cm each. A considerable number of utensils made of precious metals (20 silver and 17 gold), arms inlaid with precious metal, a gold horn and a gold spoon - symbols of authority, 69 gold coins, a gold buckle weighing almost half a kilogram, gold rings, etc. were arranged around the body. The find obviously made its first researchers specify the burial as the last abode of not only a rich or high-born chieftain, but also the head of state of any one of the barbarian formations which had possessed those lands for any length of time. The utensils were of no great importance for determining the precise 'age' of the treasure since they had obviously been collected over a 200-year period. However, the 'youngest' coins of emperor Constantine II of Byzantium were dated 647 AD. This gave clear proof that the burial had taken place after that date. The above facts alone lead to the conclusion that of all possible potentates who had ruled tribes or states in those times, khan Kubrat was the one corresponding to the archeological findings concerning the burial near Malaya Pereshchepina. In 1983 Dr W. Seibt of the Byzantine Studies Institute in Vienna managed to puzzle out the monograms on the two gold signet rings as Kkubratu, and Khubratu Patrichiu. There was no further doubt that in 1912 the Russian archeologists had discovered the tomb of khan Kubrat, the founder of Great Bulgaria.And one last attempt:

Kubrat had five sons, but only one of them could become Khan of Khans. The transition from the great ruler Kubrat to who ever would be the new ruler of all Bulgars could lead to infighting amongst prominent clans and/or tribes. If all of that wasn't enough, there were the Khazars too. Yet another one of the ex-Hunish tribes, which broke away from the Avars at about the same time the Bulgars did. The lands of Great Bulgaria were all plains offering no natural shelters, perfect ground for every nomad and damn near impossible to defend. Kubrat's sons were aware that their lands occupied a strategic position at the major junction of routes called the Great Road of the peoples migrating from Asia and Europe, and that even if the Khazar raids against them were stopped and the Khazars completely destroyed, other peoples would soon rush to take their place at lightning speed. And so the sons of Kubrat agreed to split up. The Bulgars split up into many parts, but two Bulgar hordes managed to create states worthy of Great Bulgaria's legacy. Kubrat's son Kotrag, led his Bulgars up the Volga. Asparuh {or Isperikh} led his Bulgars to that land they had liked so much. The one between the great river Danube, the Black Sea and the great mountain that stretched from the river all the way to the sea - the Balkan(see detailed animation).

And one last attempt: