The Early Medieval Era · c. 863-916 · Moravia, Bulgaria, Ohrid
Cyrillo-Methodian Slavic Christianity
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About This Movement
In 863 two brothers from Thessaloniki — Constantine, better known by his monastic name Cyril, and Methodius — were sent from Constantinople to Moravia at its ruler's request, and did something unusual for their day: rather than teach in Greek or Latin, they devised an alphabet for the Slavic language and translated the Scriptures and the liturgy into it. The idea was fought hard, by clergy who held that God could properly be worshipped only in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and the brothers travelled to Rome to argue the case, where the pope approved the Slavonic books. After Methodius died in 885 their disciples were driven out of Moravia and carried the work south, where Clement and Naum built schools at Ohrid and Preslav that turned it into a permanent literature. And where the alphabet now called Cyrillic took the shape it still has. A monk writing under the name Hrabar defended the new letters in a short, sharp treatise: a rare case of a tradition arguing publicly, in its own words, that its language was fit for worship.
Sources
- Life of Constantine and Life of Methodius (trans. Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes, Michigan Slavic Translations 5, 1983) (primary) — The two vitas — the mission's own memory of itself; facing-page Old Church Slavonic and English, full text free online (kroraina.com/promacedonia.org).
- Chernorizets Hrabar, On the Letters (O pismenech) (primary) — The first-generation defense of the Slavic alphabet against the 'trilingual' objection — the mission's program argued from inside. English in K. Petkov, The Voices of Medieval Bulgaria (Brill, 2008).
- The earliest Slavonic liturgical/biblical manuscripts (e.g. Kiev Folia) as direct evidence of the translation program (primary)
- A. P. Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom (Cambridge, 1970) (secondary) — Standard English survey of Slavic Christianization with full Cyrillo-Methodian coverage.
- Francis Dvornik, Byzantine Missions among the Slavs (1970) (secondary) — The classic study of the mission in its Byzantine and papal politics.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 6: 'Slav Christianities, 800-1100' (Jonathan Shepard) (reference)