The word "Slav" stems from the Latin word "sclav" which means slave. According to historians the Romans brought, in order to control the Illyrians, from the Carpathian slaves and settled them across Illyrian lands.
There they were inhabited and they mixed with the Illyrians and so the Illyrians, fragmented and demographically weakened due to forced war on the side of the Romans, over time assimilated and took the Slavic language. Settlement of the Slavs by large circumvented Sandžak, Bosnia and Dalmatia, where according to genetic research the Illyrian gene was most notable, but with time the Slav groups managed to settle in those areas as well.
Because of the fact that the Slavs circled the Illyrians from all sides in large numbers, the Illyrians didn't manage to keep their ethnic independence, but despite that, they had a larger religious influence on Slavs then they had on the Illyrians, which is best witnessed by the snake cult, but also other segments of Illyrian beliefs.
Successors of Slavs in our region are Serbs, Montenegrins and to a smaller extent Croats, and the successors of the Roman empire are the Byzantines. The thing that is easily recognisable today and what clearly confirms their slave origin is the great pains that numerous historians of these people go through to create fiction and myths about an ancient and glorious past, all the while trying find their non-existent roots for centuries across Europe and the entire world, making up various theories in which they give themselves a lot of praiseworthy imagination: in one fantasy they are descendants of the Atlántida's, in another of Jesus Christ, in the third they come from Summery, Babylon ... and when that is not enough they turn to space to find their home planet. All of this is a psychological example of serious complexes because of their own identity and at the same time the biggest issue of the Serbs - impossibility of facing reality. Another recognisable complex is ascribing or better yet stealing others cultural heritage, since they apparently have the right to it as a people who are at least ten thousand years old. As in old Yugoslavia, also in a more distant past, usually the ethnologists and anthropologists were Serbs, they used this to assimilate numerous cultural customs of smaller nations or minorities and dub them as their own, in order to show that all neighbouring people actually stem from them, so they can practice hegemony over them. Today when you analyze "Serb cultural heritage" (if it even exists), you will find numerous parts of culture of surrounding people from Bosnia, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo,...
All of this is very similar, almost identical, with the history of the Jews who were slaves for many centuries and that's why they created a myth about themselves as "heavenly people" and they appropriated Syrian, Afghan, Egyptian and Persian religious and cultural elements in creating their religion and identity which stems, like the Serb one, on the idea that they are the oldest people in the world and that everything belongs to them. Both people nurture nationalism which long past turned into Nazism, idea of superiority over others, and as such has caused wars and genocide like the one over the Palestinians and Bosnians. There are a lot more parallels between these two people with the identity complex but most impressive is arrogance, hatred and despise which they alone use to view other nations and people.
But, let's return to the past and data about the origin of the Serbs i.e. slaves from the Carpathian. Serbs are people who are mentioned for the first time in the 7th century. The word "Serb" according to numerous historians, stems from the Greek word "servus" which also means slave. The evidence are as follows:
King Constantine Porphyrogenitus in his work "De Administrando Imperio" around 950 wrote the following about the origin of their name: "Serbs in Byzantine language is a word that denotes slaves and in that language usually with the word "serbula" denotes footwear of the slaves, and the word "serboulianous" denotes those that wear cheap, peasant clothes. The Serbs got that name since they became slaves of the Byzantine emperor."
Similarly archbishop Giljeljmo Tirski (1139-1186) in his document called "Monumenta Montenegrina" wrote: "...and all of these people have the origin from those that live in that region, sent and brought into exile, punished to cut marble and dig ores, and that's where their name comes from slavery - "servitutis"..."
As Constantine Porphyrogenitus describes, Serbs were slaves in the Byzantine empire. They requested from the emperor to let them go back into their lands into the far north. So he wrote:
"After some time, those same Serbs decided to go back to their homes (go back to Carpathia), and the emperor allowed it. But when they crossed the river Danube (Danoubin) they changed their minds and they sent a plea to emperor Heraclitus, through a military commander which was at the time in Belegradon, to offer them another land for them to inhabit.
And since the thing that is Serbia and Pagany today and the so called land Zahloumon and Terbounia and land Kanalita, was under the rule of the Byzantine emperor, the mentioned lands were ravaged by Avars, the emperor inhabited the same slaves (Serbs) in those lands so they can be obedient to the Byzantine emperor. In order to subjugate them completely the emperor brought priests from Roma and christened them and though them how to do penance and thought them Christian doctrine".
Here lies the answer to the question why the Byzantine favoured Slavic occupation of the Balkan which was shown in 668 when over 30 000 Slavs were recruited to fight the Muslim khalifa.