MIGRATION CAN BEEN defined as “permanent or long-term dislocation of the place of residence, both by individuals and by groups of any size.” The earlier research focus on medieval phenomena of mass migration has been complemented with an attention on the mobility of smaller groups and its possible impacts for cultural change. Several forms of and motivations for the “dislocation of the place of residence” across various scales, both in terms of group size and of duration, will be described on the following pages. These will range from the single Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, whose almost twenty years of sojourn in India qualify for migration under the above-cited definition, to thousands of Slav prisoners of war deported from the Balkans to Anatolia. The spatial focus will be on Afro-Eurasia in general, especially beyond western Europe, and on migrations between more distanced regions (in contrast to frequent movements between nearby places).

The “End” of the Period of “Barbarian Invasions” around 600 CE

The decades before 600 CE have been identified as the end of the period of “Barbarian invasions” into the (former) Roman sphere. The Lombard advance into Italy in 568— at the cost of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had “re-conquered” these territories in a devastating war during the thirty years before— is often interpreted as the “last” of the Germanic migrations of late antiquity. Around the same time, the Avars established themselves as heirs of the steppe empire of the Huns in the Carpathian Basin, but their arrival in the steppes to the north of the Black Sea in 557 also indicates more far-reaching political upheavals beyond Europe. Most probably (although this identification is still contested), a core element of the people now emerging as the Avars was constituted by groups of the Rouran, whose empire in the steppes north of China had been crashed in 552 by a new alliance of tribes under the leadership of the Gök Türks. The Türks in turn achieved dominance in the vast areas between China and the Caspian Sea, allying themselves also with the Persian empire of the Sasanians in 560 to conquer the realms of the Hephthalites, the last empire of what has been called the “Iranian Huns.”