Svatopluk betrayed his uncle, then outplayed the Franks too
Warned that his uncle planned to kill him at a banquet, the Moravian prince Svatopluk seized him first and handed him to the Franks. Within a year the Franks locked Svatopluk up as well. Freed to lead a rebellion, he beat them, and under his rule Great Moravia grew to its largest size.
Svatopluk was probably born around 840, the nephew of Rastislav, who is the second Great Moravian ruler on record. Who his father was is murky: one late chronicle, long regarded as mixing fact and fiction, names Svetimir, while other traditions offer Bogislav or a Polish prince called Morot. By 869 he governed his own realm within Moravia, generally identified as the Duchy of Nitra, though historians still argue over where his court at Rastislav's old city stood.
Earlier, uncle and nephew had jointly asked the Byzantine emperor Michael III for teachers who could preach in a Slavic tongue. Michael sent the brothers Cyril and Methodius, fluent in the Slavic speech of the Thessaloniki region, who arrived in 863; their Old Church Slavonic liturgy won approval from Pope Hadrian II in 867.
In 869 Frankish armies under two sons of Louis the German raided Moravia. Svatopluk quietly agreed to place himself under Carloman, the eldest. Rastislav reportedly responded with the banquet trap, and after Svatopluk turned the tables, Rastislav was taken under guard to Bavaria. Then the Franks imprisoned Svatopluk too, until a Moravian revolt led to his release; he promptly led the rebels to victory. A peace agreed at Forchheim in 874 bound him to pay tribute to East Francia, but he kept expanding beyond Frankish reach and in 882 even invaded the March of Pannonia.
His state, a loose collection of principalities and conquered lands, took in parts of today's Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. The papacy placed him and his people under its protection in 880, and Pope Stephen V addressed him as king in 885. Yet after Methodius died, Svatopluk expelled his disciples in 886, apparently to please German clergy hostile to Slavonic worship. He died in 894, and Great Moravia soon collapsed amid feuding sons and Hungarian raids. Since the Slovak national awakening of the 18th century, writers have sometimes cast him as a Slovak king.
Source: Svatopluk I of Moravia
