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9th-century Slavic state
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Great Moravia, or simply Moravia, was the first major state that was predominantly West Slavic to emerge in the area of Central Europe, possibly including territories which are today part of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine and Slovenia. The formations preceding it in these territories were Samo's tribal union (631–658) and the Pannonian Avar state (567–822).
Centered on the Morava River – which gave the realm its name – the core encompassed today’s Moravia in the eastern Czech Republic and adjacent western Slovakia. The kingdom saw the rise of the first-ever Slavic literary culture in the Old Church Slavonic language as well as the expansion of Christianity, first via missionaries from East Francia, and later after the arrival of Saints Cyril and Methodius in 863 and the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet dedicated to a Slavic language. Glagolitic was subsequently replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet created in the First Bulgarian Empire.
Although the borders of this empire cannot be exactly determined, Moravia reached its largest territorial extent under Prince Svatopluk I (Slovak: Svätopluk), who ruled from 870 to 894. Separatism and internal conflicts emerging after Svatopluk's death contributed to the fall of Great Moravia, which was overrun by the Hungarians, who then included the territory of present-day Slovakia in their domains. The exact date of Moravia's collapse is unknown, but it occurred between 902 and 907.
Moravia experienced significant cultural development under King Rastislav, with the arrival in 863 of the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius. After his request for missionaries had been refused in Rome, Rastislav asked the Byzantine emperor to send a "teacher" (učiteľ) to introduce literacy and a legal system (pravьda) to Great Moravia. The request was granted. The missionary brothers Cyril and Methodius introduced a system of writing (the Glagolitic alphabet) and Slavonic liturgy, the latter eventually formally approved by Pope Adrian II. The Glagolitic script was probably invented by Cyril himself and the language he used for his translations of religious texts and his original literary creation was based on the Eastern South Slavic dialect he and his brother Methodius knew from their native Thessaloniki. Old Church Slavonic, therefore, differed somewhat from the local Slavic dialect of Great Moravia which was the ancestral idiom to the later dialects spoken in Moravia and western Slovakia. Later, the disciples of Cyril and Methodius were expelled from Great Moravia by King Svatopluk I, who re-oriented the Empire to Western Christianity.
The meaning of the name of Great Moravia has been subject to debate. The designation "Great Moravia"—Megale Moravia (Μεγάλη Μοραβία) in Greek—stems from the work De Administrando Imperio written by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos around 950. The emperor only used the adjective megale in connection with the polity when referring to events that occurred after its fall, implying that it should rather be translated as "old" instead of "great". According to a third theory, the megale adjective refers to a territory located beyond the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Finally, the historian Lubomír E. Havlík writes that Byzantine scholars used this adjective when referring to homelands of nomadic peoples, as demonstrated by the term "Great Bulgaria".
[There] is Belgrade, in which is the tower of the holy and great Constantine, the emperor; then, again, at the running back of the river, is the renowned Sirmium by name, a journey of two days from Belgrade; and beyond lies great Moravia, the unbaptized, which the [Hungarians] have blotted out, but over which in former days [Svatopluk] used to rule. Such are the landmarks and names along the Danube river [...].
The work of Porphyrogenitos is the only nearly contemporaneous source using the adjective "great" in connection with Moravia. Other documents from the 9th and 10th centuries never used the term in this context. Instead they mention the polity as "Moravian realm" or "realm of Moravians" (regnum Marahensium, terra Marahensium, regnum Marahavorum, regnum Marauorum, terra Marauorum or regnum Margorum in Latin, and Moravьska oblastь in Old Church Slavonic), simply "Moravia" (Marawa, Marauia, and Maraha in Latin, Morava, Marava, or Murava in Old Church Slavonic, and M.ŕawa.t in Arabic), also regnum Sclavorum (realm of Slavs) or alternate regnum Rastizi (realm of Rastislav) or regnum Zuentibaldi (realm of Svatopluk).
"Morava" is the Czech and Slovak name for both the river and the country, presumably the river name being primary and giving name to the surrounding country. The ending -ava, as in many other Czech and Slovak rivers, is most often regarded as Slavicization of the originally Germanic -ahwa (= modern German "Au" or "-a"), cognate to Latin aqua. Some scholars again link it, via Celtic -ab, to Indo-European PIE *apa/*opa ("water, sea"). The root mor- might be also connected with other Indo-European words with the meaning of water, lake or sea (sea: Slavic more, Latin mare, Welsh môr, German Meer; humidity: English and German Moor, Slavic mokr-). Compare also the names of the rivers of Mur in Austria and Morava in Serbia, all relatively nearby.
After the fall of Great Moravia, its central territory was gradually divided into the newly ascending Kingdom of Bohemia and the Hungarian Kingdom. The frontier was originally settled on the Morava river. However, from the 12th century, the Czech kings managed to gain more and more of the region on the eastern bank, eventually gaining the whole stretch of the eastern territory from Uherské Hradiště down to Strážnice along the White Carpathians. The original core territory of Great Moravia, nowadays forming the eastern part of Moravia and situated between the White Carpathians and the Chřiby mountains, has retained its non-Czech identity in its designation "Slovácko" which shows common origins with the name of the neighbouring Slovakia—a token of a past shared identity in Great Moravian times. This core region of Great Moravia along the river has retained a unique culture with a rich folklore tradition: the above-mentioned Slovácko stretches, to the south (where the Morava river forms the Czech-Slovak frontier), into two regions—the Podluží region on the Morava's western (Czech) bank and Záhorie on its eastern (Slovak) bank. Záhorie also boasts the only surviving building from Great Moravian times, the chapel at Kopčany just across the Morava from the archaeological site of Mikulčice (these two important Great Moravian places are now connected by a bridge). The core of Great Moravia was extended, according to annals, in the early 830s, when Mojmir I of Moravia conquered the neighbouring principality of Nitra (present-day western Slovakia). The former principality of Nitra was used as what is termed in Slovak údelné kniežatsvo, or the territory given to and ruled by the successor to the throne, traditionally the ruling kъnendzь (Prince)'s sister's son.
Nevertheless, the extent, and even the very location of Great Moravia (historiographical terms, as its original formal name is unknown) are a subject of debate. Rival theories place its centre south of the Danube (the Morava in Serbia) or on the Great Hungarian Plain. The exact date when the Moravian state was founded is also disputed, but it probably occurred in the early 830s under Prince Mojmír I (r. 820s/830s–846), the first known ruler of the united Moravia. Mojmír and his successor, Rastislav ("Rostislav" in Czech), who ruled from 846 to 870, initially acknowledged the suzerainty of the Carolingian monarchs, but the Moravian fight for independence caused a series of armed conflicts with East Francia from the 840s.
According to most historians, the core territories of Moravia were located in the valley of the river Morava, today in present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia. Archaeological findings of large early medieval fortresses and the significant cluster of settlements growing around them suggest that an important centre of power emerged in this region in the 9th century. Early sources (Alfred the Great's contemporaneous translation of Orosius's History of the World, which mentioned Moravia's neighbours, and the description of the travel of Cyril and Methodius from Moravia to Venice through Pannonia in the Life of Cyril) also substantiate the traditional view.
These Maroara have to the west of them the Thyringas and some Behemas and half the Begware, and south them on the other side of the Danube river is the land Carendre extending south as far as the mountains called the Alps. ... To the east of the land Carendre, beyond the uninhabited district, is the land of the Pulgare, and east of that is the land of Greeks. To the east of the land of Maroara is the land of the Vistula, and east of that are those Datia who were formerly Goths.
The borders of Moravia cannot exactly be determined because of the lack of accurate contemporaneous sources. For instance, the monks writing the Annals of Fulda in the 9th century obviously had limited knowledge of the geography of distant regions of Central Europe. Furthermore, Moravian monarchs adopted an expansionist policy in the 830s, thus the borders of their realm often changed.
Moravia reached the peak of its territorial expansion under Svatopluk I (r. 870–894). Lesser Poland, Pannonia and other regions were forced to accept, at least formally and often only for a short period, his suzerainty. On the other hand, the existence of the archaeologically attested shared cultural zones between Moravia, Lesser Poland and Silesia do not prove that the northern boundaries of Moravia were located over these territories. According to archaeologist Béla Miklós Szőke, the comitatus of Mosaburg in Pannonia was never part of Moravia. Neither archaeological finds nor written sources substantiate the traditional view of the permanent annexation of huge territories in his reign. Other scholars warn that it's a mistake to draw the boundaries of core territories because Moravia did not reach that development level.
In 1784, Slovak historian Juraj Sklenár disputed the traditional view on the location of Moravia and placed its core region in the region of Syrmia, stating that it spread from that location to the north to present-day Slovakia, Moravia and Bohemia. Similarly, in the 1820s, Friedrich Blumenerger placed Great Moravia to the south on the borders of Pannonia and Moesia. Their views remained isolated until the 1970s, when Imre Boba again published a theory that Moravia's core territory must have been located around Sirmium, near the river Great Morava. Péter Püspöki-Nagy proposed the existence of two Moravias: a "Great" Moravia at the southern Morava river in present-day Serbia, and another Moravia on the northern Morava river in present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia. A similar theory was also published by Toru Senga. In the 1990s, the southern thesis was further developed by Charles Bowlus, who wrote that Moravia emerged in the region of the "confluences of the Drava, Sava, Drina, Tisza and southern Morava rivers with the Danube". Bowlus emphasized that the orientation of the Frankish marcher organization was focused on the south-east territories, which also supports Great Moravia's southern position. Martin Eggers suggested the original location of Moravia was centered around modern Banat at the confluence of the rivers Tisza and Mureș ('Moriš' in Serbian), with further expansions extending to the territories in present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The earliest possible reference to Slavic tribes living in the valley of the northern Morava river was made by the Byzantine historian Procopius. He wrote of a group of Germanic Heruli who "passed through the territory of all of the Sclavenes" while moving towards Denmark in 512. Archaeological sites have yielded hand-made ceramics, and closely analogous objects in southern Poland and western Ukraine appeared at the confluence of the northern Morava River and the Middle Danube, dated to around 550.
Large territories in the Pannonian Basin were conquered after 568 by the nomadic Avars who had arrived from the Eurasian Steppes. The Slavs were forced to pay tribute to the Avars and to participate in their raids against the Byzantine Empire, the Franks and the Lombards. Even though the Avar settlement area stabilized on the Danube river in the early period of the khaganate (southern border of present-day Slovakia), a smaller (southernmost) part came under their direct military control after the fall of Samo's empire. In the late period of the khaganate, the Avars had already inclined to a more settled lifestyle and their co-existence with the local Slavs can be already characterized as some kind of cultural symbiosis.
In the 7th and 8th centuries, the development of the local Slavs accelerated. The first Slavic fortified settlements were built in present-day Moravia as early as the last decades of the 7th century. From the end of the 7th century, it is possible to register the rise of a new social elite in Moravia, Slovakia and Bohemia—the warrior horsemen. The social organization of the local Slavs continued to grow during the 8th century, which can be documented by further building and development of fortified settlements. In Moravia, they unambiguously concentrate around the river Morava. In Slovakia, the oldest Slavic fortified settlements are documented for the last decades of the 8th century. They were exclusively in areas which were not under direct Avar influence, but probably not built only as protection against them, because some of them are also found in northern territories (Orava, Spiš). Variation in pottery implies the existence of at least three tribes inhabiting the wider region of the northern Morava river in the early 9th century. Settlement complexes from the period were unearthed, for instance, near modern Bratislava, Brno and Olomouc. Fortresses erected at Bratislava, Rajhrad, Staré Město and other places around 800 evidence the development of local centres of power in the same regions.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Great Moravia”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.