Chance was on the side of Prince Boris in his struggle against the Byzantine danger. In 855 the brothers Cyril and Methodius evolved the Slav alphabet. They were born in Salonika of a Slav mother. Their father was a high- ranking Byzantine functionary. For some time the elder brother, Methodius, had been an administrator of a dis- crict with a predominantly Slav population. Later he became Father Superior of a big monastery in Asia Minor. Cyril got a brilliant education in one of the best schools at the time – the Magnaura School in Constantinople. After graduation, he started teaching there and in a surprisingly short time became one of the most eminent representatives of the early Mediaeval philosophy and literature. The Byzantine government sent the two brothers more than once as Christian missionaries to the Khazars and the Arabs, but their mission to Great Moravia left indelible traces in the history of the Slav peoples.

Prince of Great Moravia

Rostislav, Prince of Great Moravia, had the same sort of problems with the systematic and massive attempts at assimilation on the part of the German clergy, as Boris had had with the Byzantine priests. In his desperate struggle against the Germanization of the Slavs in his state, he requested in 862 from the Byzantine Emperor missionaries who would preach Christianity in a language comprehensible to the people and who would train Slav clergymen to replace the German ones. The Emperor's choice naturally fell on the two brothers, who had already composed the Slav alphabet, which was based on the ver-nacular of the Slavs in the environs of Salonika.

In Great Moravia, however, Cyril and Methodius revealed themselves not so much as ordinary Byzantine missionaries and agents, as apostles of Slav culture and education, with Slav blood running in their veins. In less than two years they succeeded in setting up a Slav Church, independent from the German bishops, and trained scores of disciples. Their activities acquired the character of a grandiose ideological, popular and political struggle which had wide-ranging international repercussions.

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