Date of the final attested Avar army?

[Tim]

After their conquest by the Franks/Slavs, independent Avar forces seem to disappear.  Eventually the Avar become subsumed within the forces of one or more empires.  Do we know the last date at which an independent Avar army or allied force is attested?

[Patrick Waterson]

For an independent force, I would be inclined to suggest the army that lost to Pepin of Italy in AD 796, alternatively the revolt in AD 799.

For the last allied contingent, probably any time up to AD 871, when the Balaton Principality (of Christianised Avars) was divided between the Carinthian and Eastern marches.

The above is simply culled from Wikipedia; our more knowledgeable members may have something to add.

[Duncan Head]

I would suggest that the last independent Avar force was probably that which unsuccessfully resisted Krum's Bulgarian incursions in 805, after which the Avar khagan Theodore petitioned Charlemagne to relocate the remains of his people further West.

[Tim]

Thank you both.

[Dangun]

Funny this question came up, because only yesterday I was reading the Royal Frankish Annals on the flight from Madrid.

In the entry for 826 it describes, Count Baldrich and Gerold as, "the guards of the Avar border." This would be an odd turn of phrase, if there wasn't also an Avar army to guard it from.

Perhaps not definitive...  But I think we can point to something solid in 811:

"After peace had been made with Hemming (King of the Danes) and the general assembly held at Aachen.. the emperor sent into three parts of his kingdom an equal number of armies... the second went into Pannonia to end the disputes among the Huns and the Slavs."

A little later after the emperor returns to Aachen from Boulogne...

"Envoys had also arrived at Aachen from Pannonia and awaited for him, namely the canizauci, prince of the Avars and the tudon and other nobles and leaders of the Slavs who live along the Danube. They had been ordered to come before the prince by the commanders of the troops dispatched into Pannonia."

Putting this together, it seems pretty clear that the source says an Avar army has been fighting some Slavs in Pannonia in 811. As Duncan pointed out, the Slavs and Avars had form for this kind of behaviour, as per the entry for 805.

Caveat: this is the only literary source I've read on the topic, so I might be missing something obvious.