Great Moravian Empire



A Slavic state centered in modern Moravia; in 833 Moravia's Prince Mojmir conquered and annexed the state of Pribina around the city of Nitra in western Slovakia. Prince Rastislav (846-870) frequently was at war with the Franks; to avoid coming under Frankish influence, he requested missionaries from Byzantium; Cyril and Methodius were dispatched in 863, they developed church Slavonic and the Glagolithic alphabet. Both were not to take root in Greater Moravia, for Rastislav was ousted in a coup by his nephew Svatopluk (870-894), who leaned on the Eastern Frankish Kingdom. In 874 Svatopluk took it upon himself to pay tribute to the East Frankish King.
Methodius was appointed Moravian archbishop in 880; he died in 885. Frankish missionaries came into the country, challenged the work of the Byzantine missionaries, and prevailed.
In 895 the Magyars arrived in the Pannonian basin; the Great Moravian state collapsed under their blows (906); the Moravian state perished.






EXTERNAL
LINKS 		Czech History : How it all began, from Radio Prague
DOCUMENTS
REFERENCE Peter A. Toma, Dusan Kovac, Slovakia - from Samo to Dzurinda, Stanford : Hoover Institution Press 2001


This page is part of World History at KMLA
First posted in 2000, last revised on November 12th 2004

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