Great Moravia
( 833 - 906 )

 

830 - 836 Birth of the Empire of Great Moravia	For nearly 160 years afterwards, written accounts of the Czech lands more or less fell silent. Again at the beginning of the fourth decade of the 9th century does the voice of the sources become more lucid. At the lower course of the Morava was formed at that time the cares of a state formation for which historians most frequently choose the name of the Great Moravian Empire. This is a later, contrived designation, however: contemporaneous authors merely spoke of Moravia and Moravians.	770 - 960 The "Roman" Emperor Charlemagne annexed Bavaria, uprooted the Avar dominion and established East Mark (Austria).
830 - 846 Mojmir I.	The first known sovereign of Great Moravia was Mojmír I, who after 833 adjoined the Nitra region in South cm Slovakia to his territory. In these times, Christian missions already existed n the Mojmír Empire, arriving there above all from Bavaria and Salzburg. Most of all, the princes, their relatives and suites of warriors accepted the new religion, while the majority of the vulgar continued worshipping pagan deities. Great Moravia achieved its greatest territorial span under the Mojmírian successors, when in addition to its original centre and Southern Slovakia it also brought under its sovereignty Slavic tribes in Bohemia, in Panonia and in the vicinity of the river Visla (Vistula) on present-day Polish territory. The centres of political, cultural and religious life were the Southern Moravian fortified settlements of Mikulcice and Staré Mesto (Old Town) (near present-day Uherské Hradište).
846 - 870 Rostislav I	Mojmír's successor, Rostislav, endeavoured to create a counterbalance to the influence of the Eastern Franconia Empire in Central Europe, and therefore systematically oriented himself towards Byzantium. He also requested from the Byzantine emperor the dispatch of a Christian mission, at whose head stood the brothers Constantine (who later took on the monastic name Cyril) and Methodius, originally Greeks from Salonica.	Rastislav asked for priests in Roma, but received no answer. Then asked in Constantinopolis.
863	de They arrived in Moravia in 863 and began promoting the Slavonic liturgy, which was intelligible to the entire population. For this purpose, Constantine formed an artificial Slavic language (Old Slavic/Old Church Slavonic) on the basis of a South Slavic dialect and invented a separate script (Glagolitic). Then together with his brother, they translated text of worship and the New Testament to Old Church Slavonic, and it is not dismissed that they succeeded in translating the entire Bible, although direct proof of this is lacking. They were denounced to the Pope. They had to travel to Rome and defend there their Slavonic liturgy. Constantin (Cyril) died in Rome. Methodius was appointed Arcibishop of Pannonia and Great Moravia. His place of residence was the church at Velehrad (evidently the present-day Sady at Uherské Hradište, where archaeologists uncovered the foundations of a large sanctuary). However, he was captured by Bavarians and released only after the interventions of the Pope and the new Moravian Prince Svatopluk, who immediately started to christianize and annex the neighbouring Slavonic territories (Cracow region, Silesia, Bohemia, Lusatania, Pannonia). Svatopluk sent Methodius to Rome to ask for direct protection independent of the Frankish Empire. The Pope agreed and sent Svatopluk a letter entitled "Industrie tue". After Methodius died in 885, no new arcibishop was immediately appointed and the new Pope demanded abolition of the Slavonic liturgy. Both Salonican brothers were later proclaimed as saints.	Two missionaries, brothers Constantin and Methodius were sent.
870 - 894 Svatopluk	After Methodius death (6/4/885), Prince Svatopluk, Rostislav's successor, drove out the devotees of the Slavonic liturgy and inclined back to the Latin rite. After the pupils of Methodius were expelled from the country in 886, a high-rank papal delegation failed to find suitable candidates for higher church posts. Not long before his demise, however, Methodius managed to baptize Czech prince Borivoj and his wife Ludmila. The Slavonic liturgy, nevertheless, did not fall as a consequence, of Methodius' death. Methodius' disciples worked in Bohemia and in South-Slavic regions, and ultimately the Slavonic liturgy planted its roots in Kievian Russia. A new script, so-called Cyrillic, contributed to this, from which the Russian alphabet developed.
	After Svatopluk's death in 894 his son Mojmír II assumed the reign, but the general situation essentially worsened: at the turn of the 10th century, the nomadic Magyars {Hungarian's) invaded into Central Europe. A number of tribal princes made use of the external danger to Moravia in order to disentangle themselves from Moravian thrall. In 895, soon after Svatopluk's death, the Czech princes paid vassal's tribute to Eastern Franconia king Arnulph, among them also Borivoj's son Spytihnev. After years of battles, the Great Moravia ceased to exist in 906 and Bavarians lost the battle of Bratislava in 907. This enabled Magyars to attack various parts of Europe (sometimes as mercenaries) before they were heavily beaten near Augsburg in 955 by Otto I. The policy of direct agreement with Rome avoiding the dependence on the East Frankish Empire was successfully applied by many Hungarian and Polish kings thanks to an early establishment of arcibishoprics in their countries, which remained a dream of Czech dukes and kings from the ruling Premyslid dynasty. After the collapse of the Slavonic mission in Moravia, the Slavonic culture spread to Bulgaria and Russia, where the original Cyrilic script has been further developed and is presently used by more than 200 million of people. With this ended the period of the Migration of Nations in Europe. Great Moravia left behind it a remarkable cultural heritage which the world came to know of through archaeological discoveries after 1945. Of course, the Great Moravian Empire was not the first joint state of the Czech and Slavic nation, as is occasionally affirmed, but rather a state formation of more or less voluntarily united Slavic tribes speaking related dialects. The process of the formation of nations and nation-states began in Central Europe only after its dissolution.
	A newly-arisen Czech state inherited a range of Great Moravian cultural stimuli. The ongoing discussion of whether one or more Slavic tribes lived in Czech territory in the 9th century is not important. European intellectuals termed all the inhabitants of Bohemia by the comprehensive designation Bohemians (Bohemii), thus entirely in the spirit of the Roman tradition. The Slavic name Czechs (Ceši, Cechové) did not appear until perhaps the end of the 9th century, and at first plainly indicated a group of people surrounding a ruling prince and sharing in the political power. Progressively, the designation Ceši was assigned to the entire Slavic ethnicity which resided n Bohemia, who communicated in the Czech language and created the Czech nation of the middle ages. The rise of the Czech state and the rise of the Czech nation of the middle ages were thus closely related.