Rastislav and the Request

In 862 Rastislav, prince of Great Moravia, sent an embassy to the emperor Michael III in Constantinople asking for teachers who could give his Christian people instruction and worship in their own Slavic tongue. The request was at once religious and political: Moravia had been evangelized by Frankish clergy who worked in Latin under Bavarian bishops, and Rastislav, locked in conflict with the East Frankish king Louis the German, wanted an ecclesiastical foundation independent of his Frankish overlords. The emperor sent Constantine and Methodius, who reached Moravia in 863 with the new Slavic letters. This file sets out the appeal, its geopolitics, and the mission’s beginning.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles)

Great Moravia

Great Moravia was a Slavic principality of the ninth century, centered on the valleys of the Morava and Middle Danube in what is now the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and adjacent lands — a polity that had risen under princes of the house later called the Mojmírids to become the strongest of the western Slavic states (Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, 1970, ch. 2; Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs, 1970, ch. 4). Its precise extent and even its core location are debated by archaeologists and historians, but its political significance is not: it stood directly on the eastern frontier of the East Frankish kingdom and was the object of repeated Carolingian pressure (Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, ch. 4).

By the time of Rastislav (ruled c. 846–870) Moravia was nominally Christian. The faith had come from the West, carried by missionaries from the Bavarian sees — above all Passau, whose bishop claimed the territory as his missionary preserve — and conducted in Latin by German-speaking clergy who answered to the Frankish hierarchy and, through it, to the Frankish crown (Vlasto 1970, chs. 2, 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 4). The Christianization was real but shallow and, crucially, foreign: the priests preached and worshipped in a language the people did not understand, and the Church was an arm of the very power Rastislav was struggling to throw off (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 4).

The Geopolitics of the Appeal

Rastislav’s reign was dominated by his contest with Louis the German, king of the East Franks, who regarded Moravia as a tributary and repeatedly campaigned to bring it to heel (Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; Dvornik 1970, ch. 4). In that struggle the Church was an instrument of power: so long as Moravia’s clergy were Bavarian and its ecclesiastical organization dependent on Passau and Salzburg, the prince’s spiritual life lay in the hands of his political enemy. Rastislav’s solution was to seek an alternative — a Church staffed by men loyal to Moravia, teaching in the Slavic language, and organized independently of the Frankish bishops (Dvornik 1970, ch. 4; Obolensky 1971, ch. 4).

The sources indicate that he tried Rome first. According to the tradition, Rastislav appealed to the Pope for teachers and a bishop and, receiving no satisfaction, turned then to Constantinople — a plausible sequence given that an independent hierarchy was what he wanted and that Rome was unlikely to override the established Bavarian claims (Dvornik 1970, ch. 4; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2). The Vita Constantini gives Rastislav’s message to the emperor in memorable terms: his people, he says, having rejected paganism and observed the Christian law, had no teacher who could explain to them the true faith “in our own tongue,” so that other peoples seeing this might imitate them; and he asks the emperor to send “such a man as will instruct us in all justice” (Vita Constantini 14; trans. Kantor 1983). The Vita Methodii records the same request more briefly (Vita Methodii 5; Kantor 1983). However the brothers’ biographers have shaped Rastislav’s words, the substance is coherent with his known policy: a bid for a vernacular, Moravian-loyal Church (Dvornik 1970, ch. 4; Obolensky 1971, ch. 4).

For Constantinople the appeal was an opportunity. To plant a Byzantine-derived, Slavonic-worshipping Church in central Europe was to extend the reach of New Rome into a region the Franks regarded as their own — a move in the same contest for the Slavs that ran through the Bulgarian question and the wider rivalry of the two Christian worlds (see The Photian Age). The emperor’s decision to answer Rastislav favorably was thus a calculated step in Byzantine policy as well as an act of mission (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 4).

The Choice of the Brothers

The emperor chose Constantine and Methodius for the task — the obvious choice given Constantine’s learning, the brothers’ proven service on the Khazar embassy, and their Thessalonian command of Slavic speech (Vita Constantini 14; Vita Methodii 5; Kantor 1983; Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 5). The Vita Constantini presents the emperor pressing Constantine despite the latter’s protest that the work would be hard without letters for the language, and Constantine answering that he would undertake it if the Slavs had a script — which prompts the creation of the alphabet (Vita Constantini 14; Kantor 1983; see The Invention of the Alphabet). Whatever the precise sequence, the brothers set out for Moravia equipped with the new Slavic letters and the first translations — the Gospel lectionary and the liturgical texts needed for worship — already begun (Dvornik 1970, ch. 4; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2).

Arrival in Moravia, 863

The brothers reached Moravia in 863 (the conventional date on the reconstructed chronology) and were received by Rastislav (Vita Constantini 15; Vita Methodii 5; Kantor 1983; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 5). They set about the work that justified the whole mission: gathering and teaching disciples, establishing the Slavonic liturgy, and continuing the translation of the books needed for the Church’s life. The Vita Constantini reports that Constantine quickly trained pupils and taught them the whole ecclesiastical office in Slavonic — Matins, the Hours, Vespers, Compline, and the Liturgy (Vita Constantini 15; Kantor 1983). This was something genuinely new in the Latin sphere: not a foreign clergy ministering in an unintelligible tongue, but the formation of a native Slavic clergy worshipping and teaching in the people’s own language (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 4). The mission’s early success — and the loyalty it won among the Moravians — is the measure of how real the people’s hunger for an intelligible faith had been (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 5).

That very success made conflict inevitable. The Frankish clergy already in Moravia, displaced and affronted by a rival mission that worshipped in Slavonic and owed nothing to the Bavarian bishops, soon raised the objection that would dominate the next phase of the brothers’ work: that to celebrate the sacred mysteries in a “barbarian” tongue was illegitimate, since God might be praised only in the three languages of the cross’s inscription — Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (see Liturgy in the Slavonic Tongue and The Trilingual Dispute). Rastislav had asked for a Church in his people’s tongue; the brothers had given it; and the giving had begun a struggle that would carry them to Venice, to Rome, and — in Methodius’s case — to a Bavarian prison.

See Also

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, chs. 2, 4.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, ch. 4.
  • Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, ch. 5.