The First Kingdom: Samo, the Wends, and the Birth of the Slavic World

In the early seventh century, the Slavic peoples of Central Europe had no kings, no written laws, no armies, and no political voice. They were subjects of the Avar Khaganate — farming its fields, fighting its wars as expendable shock troops, and watching in silence as Avar warriors wintered in their homes. Then, around 623 CE, a Frankish merchant named Samo crossed the eastern frontier with a load of iron and an uncommon talent for reading dangerous situations.

What happened next astonished the early medieval world. Samo organised the Slavic Wends into a confederation that shattered Avar domination, held its territory for thirty-five years, and in 631 CE inflicted on the army of King Dagobert I — the most powerful Frankish monarch of the century — one of the most consequential military defeats in the history of early medieval Europe.

The First Kingdom is the full narrative history of Samo's remarkable realm: its origins in the brutal logic of Avar exploitation, its constitutional architecture of marriage and kinship, its battles, its diplomacy, and its ultimate dissolution. Drawing on chronicle sources, Byzantine diplomatic records, and the latest archaeological evidence, Felix Roe-Hall reconstructs a forgotten world and recovers a figure whose achievement reshaped the political map of Central Europe for generations.