We have no records of the arrival in what is now the United States of the first Slavic nationals. We don’t know from where they came or where they settled. But it seems certain that at an early date Slavs appeared in all of the various streams of colonization though primarily as individuals. We must remember that it was not until the nineteenth century that the world became seriously interested in the nationality and language of a person. The medieval period had thought only in terms of allegiance to a given monarch or to some supernational state which embraced persons of many tongues and origins, united in a common loyalty. This held true for the first two centuries of American settlement and we always have to take it into account. It may be well to glance briefly, then, at the political situation in the Slavic lands, from the discovery of America through the next century. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World less than a half century after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks and the liberation of Moscow from the Tatar yoke. Europe was filled then as now with homeless people, the Christians of the Byzantine Empire and of the Balkan Christian states, preferring the hardships of a wandering life to existence under the Mohammedan Turks. The armed forces of all countries were filled with adventurers who had been driven from their homes and were glad to fight as mercenaries. For example, there were Greek soldiers in the armies of Francisco de Pizarro in his conquest of Peru in 1532. Later these same men took sides with Diego de Almagro in his revolt against Pizarro and made for him the first cannon cast in the New World.[1] This intermixture of nationalities continued throughout the era of the discovery and the ensuing decades. This was the height of the Spanish power and it was under the flag of Spain that men of all nationalities, especially from the Mediterranean area, went to serve. At this time, the most powerful Slavic state was the Polish Republic, the _Rzeczpospolita Polska_. Yet this was far more than ethnographic Poland. It took in almost all Ukrainian and Byelorussian lands as well as ethnographic Lithuania and Latvia and a considerable part of eastern Germany. It maintained the closest connections with the Danubian principalities and even Hungary. Thus, a person known as a Pole could very easily have been one of several Slavic and even non-Slavic nationalities. The Czechs formed the nucleus of the Kingdom of Bohemia, itself a subsidiary of the Hapsburg domains, the Holy Roman Empire (which, to use the words of Voltaire, was already ceasing to be either Holy, Roman or an Empire). The Slovaks and the Carpathian Ukrainians were under the Crown of St. Stephen of Hungary as were the Croats, while the Slovenes were more particularly connected with Austria. Yet again, the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen were also part of the Empire.