Pannonia

Pannonia, a province of the ancient Roman empire, bounded on the N. and E. by the Danube, on the W. by the mountains of Noricum, and on the S. reaching a little way across the Save; it thus included part of modern Hungary, Slavonia, parts of Bosnia, of Croatia, and of Carniola, Styria, and Lower Austria. It received its name from the Pannonians, a race of doubtful origin, but who at first dwelt in the country between the Dalmatian Mountains and the Save, in modern Bosnia, and afterwards more to the south-east in Mœsia. The Roman arms were first turned against them and their neighbours, the Iapydes, by Augustus in 35 B.C. After repeated defeats the Pannonians settled about 8 A.D. in the more northern countries, which received their name, and of which the former inhabitants, the Celtic Boii, had been in great part destroyed in Cæsar's time. The country was now formed into a Roman province. Great numbers of the Pannonian youth were drafted into the Roman legions. In the 5th century it was transferred from the Western to the Eastern Empire, and afterwards given up to the Huns. After Attila's death, in 453, the Ostrogoths obtained possession of it. The Longobards under Alboin made themselves masters of it in 527, and relinquished it to the Avari upon commencing their expedition to Italy. Slavonian tribes also settled in the south. Charlemagne brought it under his sceptre. In the reigns of his successors the Slavonians spread northward, and the country became a part of the great Moravian kingdom, till the Magyars or Hungarians took it in the end of the 9th century.