Thus were first cemented those peculiar relations between the Sclaves and Byzantium which are still of supreme importance in considering ‘the Eastern Question.’ The Byzantine government saw itself so capable of dealing with the Sclaves, that when the Avar nomads, at the beginning of the seventh century, devastated Illyricum, massacring alike Sclavonic settler and Roman provincial, and sacking even the coast cities of Dalmatia, Heraclius, as a masterstroke of policy, called in two new Sclavonic tribes from beyond the Danube as a counterpoise to the Avars; and the corner of the Balkan peninsula between the Save, the Morava, and the Adriatic, was divided among the Sclavonic tribes, the Serbs, and the Croats, who still throughout this area form the bulk of the population. The account given of this settlement by Constantine Porphyrogenitus[2] is so mixed up with mythical elements that we can only accept the general outlines. As might be expected from the analogy of our own history of the conquest of Britain, the Sclavonic sagas, which seem to form the basis of the Byzantine version, bring into the field certain leaders with eponymic names;[3] but the old family life of the Sclaves asserts itself even in these legends, and we read that the Croats were led to the conquest of the Avars by a family of brothers and sisters. The Croatian settlement seems to have been the earlier. The Croats came from the countries beyond the Carpathians, and colonized the countries now known as Austrian and Turkish Croatia, and the northern part of Dalmatia. The Save formed a rough boundary to the Croatian nationality on the north, the Verbas on the east, and to the south the Cetina. The Serbs, then inhabiting a part of what is now Galicia, hastened to imitate the example of the Croats, and took for their share the lands to the east and south of that occupied by their brother race. They occupied the whole, or nearly the whole, of the area now occupied by Free Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Old Serbia, and the northern half of Albania, and stretched themselves along the Adriatic coasts from the neighbourhood of Spalato, where the river Cetina runs into the sea, to Durazzo, then still Dyrrhachium. Thus, with the exception of the barren corner called the Kraina, or Turkish Croatia, the whole of what is now known as Bosnia, with which we have particularly to deal, belongs to the Serbian branch of the Sclaves.