[7] A new material culture characterized by handmade pottery, cremation burials and small, square, sunken huts that typically featured a corner stone oven appeared in the plains along the Middle Danube around that time.

[9] According to Barford, a report by the Byzantine historian Procopius is the first certain reference to Early Slav groups inhabiting parts of present-day Slovakia.

[16] According to the Chronicle of Fredegar, the "Slavs who are known as Wends" rebelled against the Avars and elected a Frankish trader named Samo as their king in the early 7th century.

According to Curta, swords and other items of the "Blatnica-Mikulčice horizon" show "a shift from the mounted combat tactics typical of nomadic warfare to heavy cavalry equipment",[22] and the development of a local elite in the regions to the north of the river Danube and the Great Hungarian Plain in the early 9th century.

[25] The main source of information about the polity now known as the Principality of Nitra is the Conversion of the Bavarians and Carantanians, a document compiled around 870 to promote the interests of the Archdiocese of Salzburg in Pannonia.

[26][27][28] The manuscripts state that "one Pribina", who had been "driven across the Danube by Mojmir, duke of the Moravians",[29] fled to Radbod, Margrave of Pannonia (c. 833–856) in East Francia around 833.

[29][31][32][33] According to a sentence in three of the eleven extant manuscripts of the Conversion, Archbishop Adalram of Salzburg (r. 821–836) consecrated a church for Pribina "on his estate at a place over the Danube called Nitrava"[29] at an unspecified date.

[49] Charles Bowlus also rejects the identification of Nitrava with Nitra, because the latter town was only annexed by Moravia during the reign of Svatopluk, years after Pribina's expulsion, according to a letter that Archbishop Theotmar of Salzburg and his suffragans wrote around 900.

[50] According to Třeštík, the content of the letter can be explained as a reasonable mistake of its compilators who knew that the territory was in the past a separate realm different from Moravia.

[51] The Duchy or Ducatus is the denomination for territories occasionally governed separately by members (dukes) of the Árpád dynasty within the Kingdom of Hungary in the 11th-12th centuries.

Modern historians do not share a consensual view on the origins of the Duchy or territorial units administered by members of the royal family within the medieval Kingdom of Hungary.

György Györffy writes that the Ducatus or "Duchy" developed from the command over the Kabars and other ethnic groups which joined the federation of the Hungarian tribes.

On the other hand, Gyula Kristó, who rejected Györffy's theory, writes that the Duchy only came into being when King Andrew I granted one-third of his kingdom to his younger brother, Béla around 1048.

[52] When Béla died in 1063, his sons Géza, Ladislaus and Lampert had to flee from the Kingdom of Hungary, because their cousin, Solomon (who had already been crowned in 1057) returned followed by the troops his brother-in-law, Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor provided him.

Under the agreement, the three brothers: Géza, Ladislaus and Lampert accepted the rule of their cousin, King Solomon who conceded them their father's former duchy (the Ducatus).

In 1105, Duke Álmos rebelled against his brother and sought military assistance from the Holy Roman Empire and Poland, but his troops were defeated by the king shortly afterwards.

In 1107, Duke Álmos made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and taking advantage of his absence, King Coloman occupied the territories of the Duchy.