White Serbia, called also Boiki, is the name applied to the assumed homeland of the White Serbs, a tribal subgroup of Wends, a mixed and the westernmost group of Early Slavs. They are the ancestors of the modern Serbs and Sorbs. Boiki is mentioned in De Administrando Imperio, a 10th-century work by Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII. According to it, the "White Serbs" lived on the "other side of Turkey", in the area that they called "Boiki". The area adjacent to it was known as White Croatia, from where the White Croats trace their origin.
Location
Dispute
Theories on the location of the so-called "Boiki" and "White" Serbs have been disputed, but it is generally established to have been around the region of Bohemia and Saxony. Since the 19th century, two most prominent theories were of Bohemia, and the land of the Boykos in Eastern Galicia in the Carpathians. The latter was mostly argued by 19th-century scholars, like Pavel Jozef Šafárik and Henry Hoyle Howorth, who also included the White Serbs among the Polabian Slavs. Rather than relating Boiki and Bohemia, which in turn derived from ethnonym of the Celtic tribeBoii, they related the toponym to the much younger ethnonym of the Rusynssub-ethnic group Boykos. Béni Kállay noted that many historians assumed that Serbian territory was identical to the Czech lands based on DAI's account and the name Bojka, but he also supported Šafárik's thesis. Other scholars who had a similar opinion were Vladimir Ćorović, and Ljubivoje Cerović. However, most scholars like Borivoje Drobnjaković, Andreas Stratos, Sima Ćirković, and Relja Novaković located them to the West in the area between the Elbe and Saale rivers, roughly between Bohemia and East Germany. According to Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Gerard Labuda, Gyula Moravcsik, Jaroslav Rudnyckyj and Henryk Łowmiański unlike Croats, there is no proof that Serbs ever lived within Bohemia or in Eastern Galicia, only that they lived near Bohemia, and the connection between Boiki and Boykos is considered to be scholarly outdated and rejected. According to archaeologist :ru:Седов, Валентин Васильевич|V. V. Sedov, the 32nd chapter of De Administrando Imperio indicates it was located in the Lower Lusatia territory where were located the Sorbs, but the 33rd chapter about Zachlumia caused confusion which resulted with several hypotheses. The first group of scholars argued the homeland existed between rivers Elbe and Saale, the second in the upper course of rivers Vistula and Oder, and the third from Elbe and Saale to the upper course of Vistula. However, Sedov concluded that the archaeological data does not confirm any of these hypotheses, and most plausible is the consideration by Lubor Niederle that there's no evidence that White Serbia ever existed and Constantine VII most probably made up NorthernGreat Serbia only according to the analogy with Great Croatia, which by other historians also did not exist. According to Tibor Živković, the structure and content of the subchapter about the family of Michael of Zahumlje indicates that this account was likely told by Michael himself. He is not noted as being of Serbian origin. Živković thought Michael's family may have preserved the memory of their tribal origin.
