These Southern Slavs did not display the same genius for organization
as the Germanic peoples or the Magyars at the period of their
respective migrations. In communities of brethren (or _bratsva_, from
the word _brat_, a brother) they had not raised up a king; but as a
compensation they possessed a lofty moral code, a religion inspired by
the worship of nature and by the principle of the immortality of the
soul. Occupying themselves with agriculture and the rearing of cattle,
it was not until they came into contact, that is to say hostile
contact, with their more organized neighbours that they were compelled
to join together under the authority of a prince, a _knez_. The bad
result of this profoundly democratic spirit was that the Slavs, not
knowing how to keep united, fell under the yoke of other nations. From
the interesting series of documents, Latin, Arabic, Byzantine and
others, which have been collected in _Monimenta Sclavenica_ by
Miroslav Premrou, notary public at Caporetto, and published in 1919 at
Ljubljana (Laibach), we can see that the Slovenes occupied a much
greater extent of territory than do their descendants of our day--"ab
ortu Vistulae ... per immensa spatia ..." (cf. _Jordanis de orig.
Goth._ c. 5)--to beyond the Tagliamento, and from the Piave (cf.
Ibrahim Ibn-Jakub[5]) to the Adriatic, the AEgean and the Black Sea.
One of the earliest of the above-named Slovene princes was Samo, a
Slovene by adoption, who struggled in Pannonia against the Avars in
the first half of the seventh century; it happened also in the year
626 that other Slovenes, as well as the Avars, attacked
Constantinople. Both of them withdrew, the former being defeated at
sea and the latter failing under the city walls. The Avars, having
thus shown that they were vulnerable, had to bear an attack on a grand
scale made upon them by the Slovenes, this attack being more shrewdly
organized than any other transaction in which the Slovenes had as yet
engaged. And they still appeared to be reluctant to form even a
loosely knit State; they roamed about the Balkans and the adjacent
countries to the north-west, seeking for lands that were adapted to
their patriarchal organization. Not until the ninth century did they
set up what might be called Governments on the Adriatic littoral,
where they had no hostility to fear from the last remaining Romans,
who were refugees in certain towns and islands.