04 — The Moravian Mission
In 862 Prince Rastislav of Great Moravia sent to Constantinople asking the emperor for teachers who would instruct his people in the Christian faith in their own language — an appeal driven as much by the wish to escape Frankish ecclesiastical and political tutelage as by piety. The emperor sent Constantine and Methodius, and their arrival in Moravia in 863 with the new Slavic letters and the first Slavonic translations inaugurated the mission for which they are remembered. This section treats the request and its geopolitics, and the meaning of the radical thing the brothers did there: celebrating the Liturgy and reading the Scriptures in the Slavic tongue.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles)
Great Moravia was a Slavic polity of central Europe, recently and incompletely Christianized by Frankish (Bavarian) clergy who worked in Latin and answered to German bishops and, behind them, to the East Frankish king. Rastislav’s turn to distant Constantinople was a calculated bid for a Church that would serve his people in their own language and owe nothing to his Frankish neighbors. The brothers’ response — a vernacular Scripture and Liturgy carried by a purpose-made alphabet — was unlike anything the Frankish mission had offered, and it set the terms of the conflict that would occupy the rest of their lives. These files set out the political and the liturgical dimensions of the mission’s beginning.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Rastislav and the Request | Great Moravia and Prince Rastislav; the appeal to Constantinople in 862; the Frankish-Byzantine-papal geopolitics behind it; the emperor’s choice of the two Thessalonians; the arrival in 863. |
| Liturgy in the Slavonic Tongue | What worship in Slavonic meant; the rite the brothers brought and translated; vernacular liturgy as pastoral principle and as provocation; the contrast with the Frankish Latin practice. |
See Also
- The Photian Age — the Byzantine-Frankish contest for central Europe that frames the mission
- The Invention of the Alphabet — the script the brothers brought to Moravia
- The Trilingual Dispute — the conflict the Slavonic liturgy provoked
- The Divine Liturgy — the rite the brothers rendered into Slavonic
References
- Vita Constantini (Life of Constantine), chapters 14–15. Trans. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.
- Vita Methodii (Life of Methodius), chapter 5. Trans. in Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives, 1983.
- Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970, ch. 4.
- Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, ch. 2.
- Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, ch. 4.