Great Moravia

A nephew installed by Frankish spears

formationDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

The Morava valley's earlier history is as obscure as Bohemia's own, sharing what evidence there is of Avar conquest and, later, a share in the short-lived realm the Frankish merchant Samo built after freeing the Slavic tribes from Avar rule in the seventh century. Real documentation begins only in the ninth century, with a ruler named Mojmir governing Moravia with what the sources credit as genuine ability, uniting scattered tribes under a single dominion for the first time - the "real founder," in Lützow's own words, of a Moravian empire that would for a time include Bohemia as well.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Palickap · CC BY-SA 4.0

A puppet who would not stay one

Mojmir's success drew the attention of the Frankish king Louis "the German," who sent an army into Moravia in 846, deposed him, and installed his own nephew Rostislav as ruler in his place - a straightforward act of imperial engineering, meant to leave Moravia in Frankish hands through a client prince. The Germans then turned their army against Bohemia as well, but were defeated there, opening thirty years of intermittent war between Germany and the Bohemian lands that Lützow judges of little interest to English readers beyond the fact of its length. Rostislav proved a poor investment for his Frankish patrons: rather than governing as their instrument, he spent his own reign working to free Moravia from exactly the German supremacy that had put him on the throne, and the mission he would soon send to Constantinople was the clearest expression of that ambition.

Teachers who speak our own language

expansionDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

In 862 Rostislav sent envoys to Constantinople with a request to the Byzantine emperor Michael: "Our people have rejected paganism and already observe Christian law. But we have no teachers who can in our own language teach us the true Christian faith." The plea was sincere, but Lützow judges it carried an equally real political purpose - Rostislav and his uncle wanted a Moravian Church free of the Frankish hierarchy, since the German priests already active in Moravia served their own nation's interests as much as their faith's. Michael chose two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodius, native speakers of a Slavic dialect, and sent them to Moravia the following year.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

An alphabet and a liturgy

Constantine arrived with a Bible he had already translated into Slavic, written in a new alphabet of his own invention that would later take his monastic name, Cyril, as its own - the first time a Slavic language had been rendered in writing, and the point at which it took its place beside Latin and Greek as a language fit for worship. Churches multiplied and congregations came eagerly to services conducted in a tongue they could actually understand, and the brothers' reputation spread beyond Moravia's own borders into neighbouring Pannonia. German clergy, and especially the Archbishop of Salzburg whose own diocese the mission encroached on, denounced the brothers to Rome as heretics, made easier by their Eastern origins and their past association with the Byzantine Patriarch Photius - though both brothers had in fact sided consistently with Rome throughout. Constantine died in a Roman monastery in 869, but Methodius continued the work, eventually securing from the Pope himself the title Archbishop of Moravia and Pannonia and formal recognition of the new script.

Basilica of San Clemente, Rome · Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Betrayal repaid with betrayal

The religious contest ran alongside a political one that never really paused. German armies attacked Rostislav's domains again in 864 and 868, without lasting success, and the resulting truce did nothing to secure Rostislav's own position: his nephew Svatopluk, who governed the district of Neutra under his uncle's authority, allied himself with the Germans instead, captured Rostislav, and handed him over to the Frankish prince Carlomann in 870. Carlomann's forces then occupied the whole of Moravia, imprisoned Methodius and delivered him to hostile German bishops, and - mistrusting the loyalty of the man who had just delivered them their victory - arrested Svatopluk as well when a Moravian revolt broke out shortly after. Svatopluk would answer that betrayal in kind.

Uncontested lord of Moravia

peakDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

Appointed by the Germans to lead the army sent to crush the Moravian revolt he had himself, in effect, provoked, Svatopluk deserted his captors instead, put himself at the head of his own countrymen, and destroyed the German force in a battle that killed both of the Austrian margraves commanding it. The victory, in 871, left him uncontested lord of Moravia - a position he moved quickly to secure through an alliance with the Bohemian prince Bořivoj, sealed by a marriage to Bořivoj's own sister, and through renewed war against the Germans who were certain to come again. When Svatopluk carried that war directly into Germany the following year, attacking Carlomann on his own ground, Carlomann's father King Louis judged it wiser to negotiate, and the resulting Treaty of Forcheim in 874 secured Svatopluk's own conquests in northern Hungary, even if nominally still under German supremacy.

The empire at its widest

Peace with Germany let Methodius return from captivity, and one of his first acts was very likely the baptism of Bořivoj, the Bohemian prince whose own wife Ludmila was received into the Church alongside him - Christianity's decisive entry into Bohemia's own ruling house. Svatopluk himself used the years of relative peace to expand in every direction, becoming, in the source's own words, "the chief of a mighty Slavonic empire" whose exact borders no one can now specify with confidence: Kraków and the surrounding part of Poland, Silesia, a swath of northern Germany reaching as far as Magdeburg, and a large part of northern Bohemia had all, by one account, acknowledged his supremacy. After Bořivoj's own death Svatopluk went further still, reducing Bořivoj's sons Spytihněv and Vratislav to local chieftains under his own authority and ruling Bohemia directly himself - temporarily displacing the Přemyslid dynasty from the throne of the country it would otherwise hold without interruption.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Palickap · CC BY-SA 4.0

One more German war

Peace with Germany did not last through the reign. Svatopluk fought a major war against King Arnulf, an illegitimate son of Carlomann, beginning in 890, and two years later Arnulf brought in an unfamiliar ally to help him: the Magyars, a people recently arrived in Europe and at that time still settled somewhere near the lands the sources call Moldavia. Svatopluk held off these combined attacks for the rest of his reign, and the empire he had built reached, by his own death, the furthest extent it would ever hold.

The quarrel that let the Magyars in

endDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

"The greatness of the Moravian Empire ended with his death," Lützow writes of Svatopluk, who died in 894 leaving two sons, Mojmir and Svatopluk, whose quarrel over the inheritance did more damage than any outside enemy had managed in decades. The Bohemian prince Spytihněv saw his opening in that intestine struggle and used it to shake off Moravian overlordship entirely, restoring the Přemyslid dynasty's own independent rule over the whole of Bohemia - the first and largest piece of Svatopluk's empire to fall away, and one that would never return to Moravian hands. Seeking his own protection against a Moravia he had just broken from, Spytihněv turned to the same German power his predecessors had fought for two generations, appearing with his brother Vratislav at King Arnulf's own court at Regensburg to submit to German and ecclesiastical supremacy in exchange for support - a reversal that also brought Bohemia formally under the Latin liturgy, though the Slavonic rite Cyril and Methodius had planted continued alongside it for years after.

Pressburg

While Germans and Slavs wore each other down in their own recurring wars, the Magyars - the very people Arnulf had once called in against Svatopluk - grew steadily stronger on ground both powers had largely ignored. Germans and Slavs eventually made common cause against this shared threat, but their combined army was routed at the Battle of Pressburg, traditionally dated to 907 though the source stresses that "the exact date cannot be ascertained in the complete absence of contemporary evidence." In the aftermath the Magyars overran Moravia outright and held it for more than half a century afterward; only a small western district survived under Bohemian rule. Lützow, quoting the Czech historian Palacký, calls the Magyar conquest simply "the greatest misfortune that has befallen the Slavonic world during thousands of years" - the empire Rostislav had built to escape German supremacy, and Svatopluk had carried to Kraków and Magdeburg, ended not by the Germans at all, but by a people neither ruler had ever seriously had to reckon with until it was already too late.

National Széchényi Library, Budapest · Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown artist · Public domain