There are lots of examples.

It was a standard feature of Byzantine diplomacy. For most of their history, the Byzantines paid yearly subsidies to their neighbors to guarantee peace (or the gold would stop and you had to fight harder for it). Sometimes the money would come in the form of granting titles and offices, which had annual salaries that could double as tribute. In theory, the Byzantines saw it as giving gifts to their barbarian neighbors, and most neighbors by accepting the "gifts" acknowledged some sort of Byzantine imperial superiority (as "the" emperors). Sometimes the Byzantines would essentially declare war by terminating a subsidy, not always to great results (In 806, for example, Nikephoros I ended a subsidy to Caliph Harun al-Rashid and suffered an ignominious defeat and as part of the peace terms actually had to pay the jizya tax to Harun!).

Danegeld is a particularly infamous example of this phenomenon whereby Europeans would pay huge sums to the vikings to keep them from attacking.

Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same name pointed out that it had the perverse effect of simply encouraging further and larger raids and spelling the ruination of any country that pays.

I'm not sure if there has ever been any analysis as to whether or not that depiction is accurate but it's certainly a widely held conclusion.