The Expulsion and the Ohrid School

After Methodius died in 885 the Frankish party in Moravia moved at once to destroy his work: his chosen successor Gorazd was set aside, the Slavonic clergy were imprisoned and then expelled — some, the sources say, sold into slavery — and Latin worship was restored under the Pope’s authority and the bishop Wiching’s direction. The exiled disciples, led by Clement, Naum, and Angelar, made their way to Bulgaria, where Prince Boris received them; there, in the southwest at Ohrid and in the capital at Preslav, they founded the schools that gave Slavonic Christianity its permanent home. This file sets out the collapse in Moravia and the transplantation to Bulgaria.

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

The Collapse in Moravia

Methodius died on 6 April 885, naming as his preferred successor the Moravian-born disciple Gorazd, a man fit to lead the Slavonic Church (Vita Methodii 17; trans. Kantor 1983; Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs, 1970, ch. 6). But the succession did not hold. The Frankish party, led by Methodius’s old enemy the Swabian bishop Wiching, gained the ear of Prince Svatopluk and of the Papacy; the new pope, Stephen V, did not confirm Gorazd, and in letters and through legates the Slavonic liturgy was now condemned and forbidden in Moravia (Dvornik 1970, ch. 6; Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 10). The reversal of Roman policy was decisive: the see that under Hadrian II and John VIII had protected the Slavonic mission now, under Stephen V and amid renewed Frankish influence, turned against it (Dvornik 1970, ch. 6).

What followed was persecution. The leading disciples were seized, imprisoned, and maltreated; the sources — above all the Vita Clementis, the Greek Life of St. Clement of Ohrid attributed to the eleventh-century archbishop Theophylact — report that the Slavonic clergy were driven out of Moravia, that some were sold as slaves to Jewish merchants (and a number later redeemed at Venice by a Byzantine official), and that the survivors fled south and east toward the Slavic lands of the Balkans (Vita Clementis; discussed in Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, ch. 4, and Six Byzantine Portraits, 1988; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 10). Within a year or two of Methodius’s death the Slavonic Church in Moravia was effectively destroyed, and the Latin clergy and the Latin rite were restored (Dvornik 1970, ch. 6; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2). The mission had failed at its source.

Refuge in Bulgaria

Deliverance came from Bulgaria. The First Bulgarian Empire, ruled by Khan/Prince Boris (Boris-Michael, ruled 852–889), had accepted Christianity in the 860s and was at that very moment seeking to build a native Church and to escape dependence on Greek-speaking Byzantine clergy — a need that made the arrival of trained Slavonic churchmen a providential gift (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Vlasto 1970, ch. 3; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 10). When the chief disciples — Clement, Naum, Angelar, and others — reached Bulgarian territory, Boris welcomed them, recognizing in them the instrument of exactly the Slavonic Church he wanted (Vlasto 1970, ch. 3; Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Vita Clementis). Bulgaria, not Moravia, became the land where the Cyrillo-Methodian inheritance struck permanent root — and, crucially, a land within the Byzantine, Orthodox sphere, so that the Slavonic Christianity that flourished there was Eastern, not Western (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4).

Clement and Naum and the School of Ohrid

Boris settled the most important of the disciples in the southwest of his realm, in the region of Ohrid and Devol (in present-day North Macedonia and Albania), and there St. Clement of Ohrid (d. 916) — the foremost of the disciples, later consecrated the first Slavic-speaking bishop in Bulgaria — established a school of extraordinary fruitfulness (Vita Clementis; Obolensky 1971, ch. 4 and Six Byzantine Portraits, 1988; Vlasto 1970, ch. 3). The Vita Clementis reports that Clement trained an enormous number of pupils — the figure of some three thousand is given — for the clergy and for teaching, and that he labored prodigiously at preaching, teaching, and the further translation and composition of Slavonic ecclesiastical literature (Vita Clementis; Obolensky 1988; Vlasto 1970, ch. 3). His companion St. Naum worked alongside him and later founded the monastery on Lake Ohrid that still bears his name (Vlasto 1970, ch. 3; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 10). The Ohrid school preserved and propagated the Glagolitic tradition and produced a body of Slavonic homiletic, hymnographic, and hagiographic writing — including, the tradition holds, the earliest Lives and offices of Cyril and Methodius themselves (Obolensky 1988; Vlasto 1970, ch. 3; see Sources and Modern Reception).

The Preslav School and the Birth of Cyrillic

A second center grew up in the east, at the Bulgarian capital. Under Boris and especially under his son Symeon (ruled 893–927), himself a scholar educated at Constantinople, the school of Preslav became a great workshop of Slavonic learning, translation, and literary composition — the heart of what is called the Golden Age of Old Bulgarian letters (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Vlasto 1970, ch. 3; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 11). It was in this eastern Bulgarian milieu, where Greek influence was strong and many scribes were already Greek-literate, that the Cyrillic alphabet — the Greek-based script that would eventually supersede Glagolitic — most plausibly took shape, named for St. Cyril though it was the work of his disciples’ generation (Vlasto 1970, chs. 2–3; Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; see Glagolitic vs Cyrillic). The two schools together — Glagolitic Ohrid in the west, increasingly Cyrillic Preslav in the east — consolidated Slavonic Christianity in Bulgaria and produced the manuscripts and the literary tradition from which the whole later Slavic Orthodox world would draw (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Vlasto 1970, ch. 3).

The Meaning of the Reversal

The expulsion from Moravia and the reception in Bulgaria together form the great hinge of the Cyrillo-Methodian story. Had the disciples found no refuge, the brothers’ work might have perished with their Moravian Church, remembered only as a failed experiment. Instead, driven out of the Latin West, the Slavonic tradition found a home in the Orthodox East, where it was wanted, protected, and made to flourish — and where it became, not a tolerated novelty under suspicious Frankish bishops, but the very foundation of a national Church and a national literature (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Vlasto 1970, ch. 3). The transplantation also fixed the confessional character of the inheritance: the Slavonic Christianity that would spread to Serbia and Rus was the Bulgarian, Orthodox form, carrying the Byzantine rite and the communion of Constantinople (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; see The Spread to the Slavs). The failure in Moravia was, in the providence the Vitae would see in it, the price of a far greater success.

References

Vita Methodii (Life of Methodius), chapter 17. Trans. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.
Vita Clementis (Life of St. Clement of Ohrid), attributed to Theophylact of Ohrid. Discussed in Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970, ch. 6.
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, ch. 4; and Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 (on Clement of Ohrid).
Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, chs. 2–3.
Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, chs. 10–11.