Could the Danube River have become the center of a new empire after the fall of Rome?

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Could the Danube River have become the main artery of trade and travel for a new empire after the fall of the western Roman Empire?

How does the navigability of the Danube compare to the Dnieper River that allowed the Kievan Rus to raid the Black Sea?

What could create a river-based empire in the region? Perhaps there could be a sort of frontier company founded by the Eastern Roman Empire, which sails along the Danube and establishes outposts against Avar and Slavic raids. Maybe the frontier company survives, but the eastern Roman Empire itself doesn't, after Sassanid Persia or the Umayyads take down Constantinople.
 
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I would say no, at least to the Empire part. The Gepids could have expanded East, from what I've read they seemed like a hard bunch. If You get their train rolling properly you might get an entity stretching out the breadth of Carpathia, maybe even control both sides of the Danube, but having their political center in the way Egypt or Mesopotamia or China center around their respective rivers would be harder as any Gepid Kingdom would have to deal with military conflicts on either side of the river and any benefits to having the river would either be rendered moot by the threat of raids from the south or the need to respond to incursion in the north, away from the river and in the mountains. Bad recipe for a river oriented society. Carpathia after the Dacians became a crossroads for migrating peoples and any people that manage to hold onto it for any considerable amount of time are going to have their efforts put toward warfare, not trade or even expansion. It would have been quite irrelevant for anything beyond a defensive barrier.

As to the idea of a Roman successor state, I don't think that idea would work out. Moesia wasn't very wealthy and the necessaries of surviving in that reduced state requires infrastructure, a tax base, hell just having enough people to bring into the army would have been hard to do. The Balkans weren't as much of an urban center by the time the West started to crumble.
 
WI the Magyars had been defeated a bit more thoroughly, being totally destroyed or forced to flee all the way to the Crimea or thereabouts, rather than settling in the Hungarian Plain. Then you may well get German settlers spreading down the Danube, setting up a kingdom there, and Slovaks and Rumanians and maybe others get Germanised rather as Silesia and Pomerania were. That could extend the German-speaking area all the way to Transylvania and maybe further. This might well form the basis for a Danubian Empire of some sort.
 
The Danube's probably too close to the Steppes at one end and Alps at the other for any united classical military force. Horse archers are always going to dominate the one end and prove incapable of holding the other. It's hard to imagine a cohesive system that would incorporate both enough to be secure doing either, long term. Any force divided to do both separately would almost inevitably end up divided politically. It's not impossible, but it would require something militarily (or politically) exceptional.
 
Huns, Gepids, Avars...

What would be needed for any of them to build up a more successful sedentary state? OTL Hungarians only succeeded in 10th...11th century. WI a 7-8th century Avar Empire with large farming population and cities, or 6th Century Gepid Kingdom, or late 5th century Hunnic Empire makes a better success in running the Roman cities they conquered, rather than leave them in ruins?
 
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