Cyril and Methodius brought Slavic letters to Morava’s realm
Great Moravia was the first major predominantly West Slavic state in Central Europe, centered on the Morava River across today’s eastern Czech lands and western Slovakia. Under Rastislav, Saints Cyril and Methodius arrived in 863 after Rome refused teachers, launching Old Church Slavonic literacy.
Great Moravia was the first large, mainly West Slavic state in Central Europe. Its predecessors in the region were Samo's tribal union of 631 to 658 and the Pannonian Avar state that lasted from 567 to 822. The realm took its name from the Morava River, and its heartland was today's Moravia in the eastern Czech Republic plus neighbouring western Slovakia, though at its widest it may have reached into lands now in Hungary, Austria, Poland, Serbia and several other countries. Exact borders cannot be drawn.
Christianity came first through missionaries from East Francia. Prince Rastislav, rebuffed when he asked Rome for teachers, turned to the Byzantine emperor for someone to bring literacy and a legal code. The answer, in 863, was the brothers Cyril and Methodius from Thessaloniki. Cyril probably devised the Glagolitic alphabet, the first script made for a Slavic tongue, and the pair introduced a Slavonic liturgy that Pope Adrian II later formally approved. Their literary language rested on the Eastern South Slavic speech of their home city, so Old Church Slavonic sounded somewhat foreign to local Moravians. Glagolitic was eventually displaced by Cyrillic, which emerged in the First Bulgarian Empire.
The state reached its peak under Svatopluk I, who ruled from 870 to 894. After his death, separatism and feuding weakened it, and Hungarians overran it sometime between 902 and 907, folding present-day Slovakia into their lands.
Even the adjective is debated. The label Great Moravia comes from Emperor Constantine VII's De Administrando Imperio of about 950, the only near-contemporary text to use it; he describes an unbaptized great Moravia beyond Sirmium, wiped out by the Hungarians, where Svatopluk once reigned. Because he applied the word only after the state's fall, some read it as old rather than great; others think it meant lying outside Byzantine borders, and Lubomír Havlík notes Byzantine writers used it for nomad homelands, as in Great Bulgaria. Ninth- and tenth-century documents instead speak of the Moravian realm, the realm of the Slavs, or the realms of Rastislav and Svatopluk.
Source: Great Moravia
