Rostislav of Moravia

Prince of Great Moravia

Rostislav became prince in 846, on the death of his uncle Mojmír I, the founder of the Moravian principality — installed, in fact, by Louis the German, who assumed that a nephew raised under Frankish patronage would be a dependable client. He proved to be nothing of the kind. Within a decade he was resisting Frankish overlordship openly; the campaign Louis launched against him in 855 broke on the Moravian fortresses, and Rostislav counter-raided into the East Frankish marches. Over the next fifteen years he built Great Moravia into the first substantial Slavonic state north of the Danube, holding Moravia, Slovakia and dependencies reaching towards Pannonia and Bohemia.

Christianity had reached his people already, and from several directions at once — missionaries from the Greek East, from the Balkans and from Aquileia, but above all from Bavaria, from the great see of Passau and the archbishopric of Salzburg. Rostislav was himself a Christian. His difficulty was not with the faith but with its carriers: the Frankish and Bavarian clergy in his territory were, in effect, an arm of East Frankish policy, they served in Latin, a language his people could not understand, and their bishops answered to the metropolitan of a hostile power. Ecclesiastical dependence on Passau meant political dependence on Regensburg.

The embassy to Constantinople

Rostislav's remedy was a decision of extraordinary intelligence, and everything that follows in Slavonic Christian history follows from it. He sought clergy who would teach and serve his people in their own tongue and who would owe nothing to the Franks. He asked Rome first: the Life of Methodius and the Frankish sources agree that he petitioned Pope Nicholas I for Slavonic-speaking teachers and received no answer — Rome had no such teachers, and no interest in disturbing its Bavarian hierarchy.

He then turned east. In 862 he sent an embassy to the Emperor Michael III at Constantinople with the request preserved almost verbatim in the Life of Constantine-Cyril: that his people, having renounced paganism and holding to the Christian law, had no teacher who could explain the true faith to them in their own language, so that other lands, seeing them, might do likewise; and would the emperor send such a bishop and teacher, "for from you good law goes forth to all lands." The emperor took counsel with the Patriarch Photius and sent the two brothers from Thessalonica — Constantine the Philosopher, who would die as the monk Cyril, and his elder brother Methodius — men of the Greek schools who had grown up within earshot of Slavonic and had already served on missions to the Arabs and the Khazars. Before departing, Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet, and began the translation of the Gospel.

The Moravian mission under his protection

The brothers reached Moravia in 863. Rostislav received them, gave them pupils, and put the resources of his state behind them: the Lives speak of the prince gathering students for them, of the founding of schools, and of the provision of books, vessels and icons for the new Slavonic churches. In the some forty months of their first Moravian period the brothers translated the Gospel lectionary, the Psalter, the Epistles and the offices, and trained a native clergy — the work out of which the whole Slavonic liturgical and literary tradition grew.

The Frankish clergy fought it. Their argument, which Cyril demolished in disputation and which the Lives call the "trilingual heresy," was that God may be praised only in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Rostislav's protection is what made the four decisive years possible; and it was to obtain canonical standing for the Slavonic mission, over Frankish objection, that the brothers went to Rome, where Adrian II received them, blessed the Slavonic books upon the altar of Santa Maria Maggiore, and approved the Slavonic liturgy.

Betrayal, blinding and death

Rostislav's fall came from within his own house. His nephew Svatopluk, who held an appanage in the Moravian lands, made terms with Carloman, son of Louis the German, and in 870 handed his uncle over in exchange for the rule of Moravia. Rostislav was taken to Bavaria, tried before a Frankish assembly, condemned to death, and then — by Louis's commutation — blinded and shut in a monastery prison, in the tradition at Regensburg, where he died; the year is usually given as 870 and nothing certain is known of him afterwards. The Frankish annals, which report the blinding coolly as a mercy, are the only witnesses to his end.

His work outlived him. Methodius, made archbishop of the restored see of Pannonia-Moravia, laboured on for fifteen years; and when the Slavonic clergy were finally expelled from Moravia after Methodius's death in 885, they carried the Slavonic books to Bulgaria, where the letters and the liturgy took permanent root and whence they passed to Serbia and to Rus'. The Slavonic Orthodoxy of a hundred million people descends, at one remove, from a Moravian prince's request for teachers who could speak to his people.

Veneration

Rostislav had no medieval cultus: Moravia's Slavonic Church was destroyed within a generation of his death, and the Latin Church of the region had no motive to venerate a prince whom its own hierarchy had helped to destroy. His glorification came only in the twentieth century, with the revival of Orthodoxy in his own lands: the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia canonised him in October 1994 at Prešov, with the title Equal-to-the-Apostles, for having opened the Slavonic peoples to the Gospel in their own tongue. His commemoration was fixed to May 11, the joint feast of the brothers he had summoned, and he is also honoured on the Czech and Slovak national observance of the Slav-apostles. The OCA calendar lists him for May 11.