Their early Slavic component, Antes, mixed or absorbed Iranians, and later received influence from the Khazars and Vikings. The East Slavs trace their national origins to the tribal unions of Kievan Rus’ and Rus’ Khaganate, beginning in the 10th century.

Scholars often divide the Germanic languages into three groups: West Germanic, including English, German, and Netherlandic (Dutch); North Germanic, including Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese; and East Germanic, now extinct, comprising only Gothic and the languages of the Vandals, Burgundians, and a …

Language families The vast majority of EU languages belong to the Indo-European family: the three dominant subfamilies are the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic.

Scandinavian languages, also called North Germanic languages, group of Germanic languages consisting of modern standard Danish, Swedish, Norwegian (Dano-Norwegian and New Norwegian), Icelandic, and Faroese. …

All of the Slavic languages are closely related to each other, but they are also related to the Romance and Germanic languages, including English, and to others in the Indo-European family.

Old Church Slavonic

Czech

Polish

Today there are 12 Slavic languages: Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian (see Ukrainian language), Czech, Lower Sorbian, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian, Upper Sorbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbo-Croatian.

Russian is the most natural gateway into the world of slavic languages. Not all slavic languages are closely related to Russian. Bulgarian and Ukrainian are the closest, with Polish and Serbo-Croatian having a largely similar vocabulary. Czech is more distant.

Slavs appear in chronicles As mentioned, it has origins in Latin, and the latter derives its meaning from the medieval Greek of the Byzantine Empire which started to use a form of “Slavs” in the 6th century, long before Otto the Great’s reign.

Slavic languages belong to the Indo-European family. Customarily, Slavs are subdivided into East Slavs (chiefly Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians), West Slavs (chiefly Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Wends, or Sorbs), and South Slavs (chiefly Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins).

Mongols. The Mongol invasions and conquests in the 13th century added a new force in the slave trade. The Mongols enslaved skilled individuals, women and children and marched them to Karakorum or Sarai, whence they were sold throughout Eurasia.

The Mongol Empire

In 1271 Nogai Khan led a successful raid against the country, which was a vassal of the Golden Horde until the early 14th century. Bulgaria was again raided by the Tatars in 1274, 1280 and 1285. In 1278 and 1279 Tsar Ivailo lead the Bulgarian army and crushed the Mongol raids before being surrounded at Silistra.

Background. This Mongol campaign had killed perhaps as many as 200,000 soldiers of various nations and never lost a major battle. The Mongol commanders also realized the quality of their army and were not impressed by the mere size of the opposing forces of their enemies.

40 million people

Decline in the 14th Century and After The Yuan Dynasty fell in 1368, overthrown by the Chinese rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang, who established the Ming Dynasty and became known as the Hongwu emperor. The most enduring part of the Mongol Empire proved to be the Golden Horde.

A folk legend claimed that Subutai wished to die by his son Uriyangkhadai by the banks of the Danube river. Subutai’s descendants such as Uriyangkhadai and Aju would serve the Great Khans for the next three decades as commanders.

Because of this brutality, which left millions dead, he is considered by many to have been a brutal ruler. Before Genghis Khan died, he assigned Ögedei Khan as his successor. Later his grandsons split his empire into khanates. Genghis Khan died in 1227 after defeating the Western Xia.

Mongol raiders in Poland defeated a European army containing much-feted Christian knights from the military orders of the Teutonic Knights, the Hospitallers, and the Templars.

At its peak, it covered some 9 million square miles (23 million square km) of territory, making it the largest contiguous land empire in world history. Mongol empire Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.