And so, when they had crossed the Danube River, they changed their minds and sent a request to the emperor Heraclius, through the military governor then holding Belgrade that he would grant them other land to settle.
And the emperor brought priests from Rome and baptized them and taught them fairly to perform works of piety and expounded to them the faith of the Christians, at the time when Bulgaria was under the rule of the Romans.
[6]According to the accounts in DAI the first Christianization of the Serbs should be dated to 632–638; this could be interpreted at first glance as Porphyrogenitus' invention, or might have actually taken place, encompassing a limited group of chiefs and then very poorly received by the wider layers of the tribe.
[7] In early historical assessment like that of German historian Ludwig Albrecht Gebhardi (1735–1802), the Serb archon was a son of Dervan, who was the Duke (dux) of the Surbi, east of the Saale.
[13] D. Dzino (2010) considers that the story of the migration from White Serbia after the invitation of Heraclius as a means of explanation of the settlement of the Serbs is a form of rationalization of the social and cultural change which the Balkans had undergone via the misinterpretation of historical events placed in late antiquity.