I grew up with a Mediterranean-centric view of history, so I’m fascinated by stories of Central and Eastern Europe. Learning them for the first time is part of the fun. Weaving the thread of history through the ages is incredible.
This article describes the Great Moravian Empire which existed in antiquity.
Many people are familiar with the Roman Empire. The Romans considered the warring tribes from the north to be savages. The names that the Romans used for them – like ‘Vandals’ – still mean someone who goes around damaging things. This is all I knew about non-Roman Europe from those times.
You could split Czechia almost 50:50 between Bohemia in the west and Moravia in the east. I’d never heard of Moravia before living here, so I decided to look into its earliest history.
Pre-history to antiquity
Humans have roamed over Europe for millennia. We know little about them because there are few records of these peoples.
What little we do know comes from remains they left behind, and the art they developed.
Slavic tribes migrated westwards over the centuries leading up to the fall of Rome. Slavic people lived in Europe from east Germany to Kazakhstan, and from Siberia to south-eastern Europe1.
This is a huge area and it’s not like this was one single country or tribe. The Slavs then split into 3 distinct groups1:
- The West Slavs (The ancestors of modern Poles, Czechs and Slovaks)
- The East Slavs (The ancestors of modern Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Russians)
- The southern Slavs (The ancestors of modern Serbs, Croats and Bosnians)
Once these people migrated to their present location, they started to organise themselves. They started to put together what we would recognise as a state.
This was around the year 600.
Great Moravia
The Great Moravian Empire was the first major West Slavic state, emerging in the year 8302. It’s centre was the Morava river, which is where the name comes from2. The river was important as it was a trade route from the Baltic sea in the north to the Adriatic sea in the south3.
Moravian Prince Mojmir I expanded his empire to include Bohemia, Slovakia, southern Poland and western Hungary2. This put Moravia at a crossroads between the Germanic people in the west and Byzantium in the east.
Mojmir’s successor, Rostislav, worried about Germanic influence from the west. His main concern was Latin-speaking Frankish-clergy3.
Rostislav invited the Byzantine emperor to send someone to spread Eastern Christianity2. The two missionaries who arrived in 863 where Macedonians3, Cyril and Methodius2. They preached and created a new alphabet to be able to encode the Slavic language2. This is the Cyrillic script, and explains the name too.
When the two missionaries died, the Western Slavs adopted Roman Catholicism, and started to use the Latin alphabet2. Eastern Slavs continued using the Cyrillic alphabet.
Rostislav’s successor was the wily-politician Svatopluk3. When Charlemagne’s grandson, Louis, died, Svatopluk eyed Louis’ Empire of East Francia. It didn’t take long for him to combine regions containing Slavic speaking people into Greater Moravia3. By the end of this expansion, Greater Moravia included3:
- All Bohemia
- The southern part of modern-day Poland
- The western part of modern-day Hungary
The end of Empire
In 890, Svatopluk made an enemy of the East Frankish King Arnulf3. When Arnulf formed an alliance with the Magyars of Hungary, it proved fatal for Moravia3.
By 906, the Empire collapsed2 3.
Moravia exists today as the eastern half of Czechia, but it’s not visible on any map. It exists because people still think of that part of the country as being somehow different.
PS: Recent news shows descendants of the Great Moravians live amongst us today4.
- Slav; Encyclopedia Britannica; 2019-10-01[↩][↩]
- Czech history; My Czech Republic; (Retrieved 2020-05-12) [↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩]
- Czechoslovak history; Encyclopedia Britannica; 2016-03-07[↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩]
- DNA test traces direct descendants of Great Moravian noblemen; Ruth Fraňková; Radio Prague International; 2019-03-19[↩]