The suggestion that the Slavs' adoption of the Iranian name Croats (horvatu) resulted not from the process of the multiethnical synthesis but from the intensive political interaction having influenced strongly the Slavonic peoples in the turbulent epoch of the Great Migration seems the most probable.
The important role played by the Alans in the Slavic wars with the Goths and the overthrowing of their power resulted in the spreading of the name Croats among the Dniester Slavs. Having become the allies of the Huns, the Alans-Tanaites appeared the main force of their army acting against the Goths in the south of Eastern Europe.
The decisive battle of the river Erax (localized in the basin of the Dniester) where the Goths were finally defeated by the joined Slavs and Alans acting as the part of the Huns' army and forced out off Eastern Europe was undoubtedly the turning-point in the ancient Slavic history.
It is naturally to propose the Slavic inhabitants of the Dniester-Carpathian region to be strongly influenced just the same as the Slavs of the Ants group by the Alans and be governed by the chiefs of the Alans who apparently represented the Huns' authority. Just as the Ants — the union of the Alans and the Slavs — had formed on the ground of the prolonged ethnic synthesis of the Slavs and the Iranians so did the Croatian group form on the ground of the previous centuries-long interaction of the Slavs and the Sarmathians in the Dniester region.
The Alanian Croats must have ruled the Dniester Slavic lands for some time. They could have married some of the local Slavic chiefs to make their authority legal. The name Croats gained among the Slavs the sacral importance since it was connected with the victory over the Goths and their yoke shaken off.
The Upper Dniester region together with the nearby territories between the Dniester and the Pruth are considered to be the primary territory the ancient Slavic tribal formation appeared at. Afterwards it gradually extended and covered both sides of the Carpathians. For example the Croats inhabited the upper current of the Tyssa river behind the Carpathians.
In the last quarter of the 4th — middle of the 5th cc. the Croats probably reached the Upper Vistula and settled in Smaller Poland (however, it could have happened later) . Still the region of the Upper Vistula (unlike the territories to the East of the Carpathians) cannot be the initial territory of the Croatian ethnogenesis — the premotherland of the Croats, afterwards called "Great Croatia". The Slavonic population of Smaller Poland identified themselves as
