Religion split the Slavs by alphabet: Latin letters west, Cyrillic east
Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Sorbs and Kashubians share West Slavic languages and, since the ninth century, mostly Roman Catholicism. That conversion brought the Latin alphabet and tied them to western European culture, while East Slavs took Orthodox Christianity and Cyrillic script. The divide began with tribes that reached Central Europe around the seventh century.
The Slavic expansion began in the fifth century, and by the sixth the ancestors of the western, eastern and southern branches had probably drifted apart. West Slavs broke from the common group around the seventh century and set up their own polities in Central Europe by the eighth and ninth. Their languages took their recorded shapes between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. Linguists divide them into three families: Lechitic, which includes Polish, Silesian, Kashubian and the vanished Polabian and Pomeranian; Sorbian, spoken in Lusatia; and Czecho-Slovak.
Early medieval writers sometimes called Slavs Wends, a name probably borrowed from the Roman-era Veneti, but chroniclers such as Fredegar and Paul the Deacon used such terms loosely, and scholars still argue whether they meant Slavs, earlier peoples or simply a region. Archaeology offers other clues: West Slavic pagan sanctuaries were long and enclosed, while eastern ones were usually round and open.
Several early states are claimed. Historians in 1777 and 1827 hailed Samo's realm as the first independent Slavic state, though the historian Florin Curta has warned that Fredegar's account is not so simple. The principalities of Moravia and Nitra lasted until 833, when Great Moravia emerged, stretching from today's eastern Germany to western Romania until the Magyars arrived in the 890s. A Bavarian list from 845 records West Slavic tribes across lands that are now Poland, Czechia, Germany and Denmark.
Settled along the eastern edge of the Carolingian Empire, many tribes, including the Obodrites, Rani and Pomeranians, were later pushed east by German settlement and fell under the Holy Roman Empire after the Wendish Crusade.
Source: West Slavs
