06 — Methodius, Archbishop of Pannonia
After Cyril’s death, Methodius returned to the Slavs not as a simple missionary but as the Papacy’s archbishop — consecrated by Rome to a revived see of Sirmium/Pannonia with jurisdiction over the Moravian and Pannonian Slavs, directly across the path of the Bavarian Church that claimed those lands. The Frankish bishops, seeing their jurisdiction usurped and their trilingual cause overruled, moved against him: they seized him, tried him before a synod, and held him prisoner for some two and a half years until Pope John VIII forced his release. This section treats the archiepiscopate and the conflict, and the imprisonment and its resolution.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles)
The years of Methodius’s archiepiscopate are the story of a man holding a Roman commission and a Slavonic liturgy against the implacable hostility of a neighboring hierarchy backed by the most powerful kingdom in the West. He won and lost ground by turns: approved at Rome, imprisoned in Bavaria, freed by papal command, his liturgy now permitted and now suspended, his authority now upheld and now undercut. That the Slavonic Church survived these years at all is owed to Methodius’s endurance and to the repeated, if inconsistent, protection of the Roman see. These files set out the conflict with the Franks and the central ordeal of the imprisonment.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Archbishop and the Frankish Conflict | Methodius consecrated archbishop of the renewed see of Sirmium/Pannonia; the revived jurisdiction and its collision with Salzburg and Passau; the Conversio and the Bavarian case; the political setting after Rastislav’s fall. |
| The Imprisonment | The seizure and trial of Methodius before a Frankish synod (c. 870); his imprisonment for some two and a half years in Swabia; the intervention of Pope John VIII and his release (873); the aftermath. |
See Also
- To Rome and the Death of Cyril — the Roman approval and Cyril’s charge that bound Methodius to the work
- The Trilingual Dispute — the doctrine the Frankish bishops continued to press
- The Expulsion and the Ohrid School — the collapse of the mission in Moravia after Methodius’s death
- The Byzantine Church — the Eastern Church from which Methodius came
References
- Vita Methodii (Life of Methodius), chapters 8–10. Trans. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.
- Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum (c. 870). Discussed in Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, and Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs.
- Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970, ch. 6.
- Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, ch. 8.
- Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, chs. 2, 4.