Transcript History of southmoravian region

History of Moravian region
History of the region
• Moravia, traditional region in central Europe
that served as the centre of a major medieval
kingdom, known as Great Moravia, before it
was incorporated into the kingdom
of Bohemia in the 11th century.
• Moravia was inhabited from the 4th
century BC by Celtic and then Germanic tribes.
Venus of Vestonice
• In the 6th and 7th centuries the Avars dominated the
area, which was settled by Slavic tribes by the late 8th
century. The Slavs, who took the name Moravians from
the Morava River, developed a political community that
emerged under Prince Mojmír I (reigned 830–846) as a
united kingdom that included a part of western
Slovakia. Mojmír’s successors, Rostislav (reigned 846–
870) and his nephew Svatopluk (reigned 870–894),
extended their territory to include all of Bohemia, the
southern part of modern Poland, and the western part
of modern Hungary, thereby creating the state of Great
Moravia.
Morava River
• Rostislav also invited the Byzantine
missionaries Cyril and Methodius (who arrived
in 863) to spread Christianity in Bohemia and
Moravia on the basis of their Slavonic
translation of the chief liturgical texts. After
Svatopluk died (894), however, Great Moravia
disintegrated and was finally destroyed by a
Magyar attack in 906.
Cyril and Methodius
• The territories of Great Moravia were then
contested by Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia. In
1029 Moravia (i.e., the western portion of Great
Moravia) was incorporated as a distinct province
into the Bohemian kingdom, and thereafter it
generally remained closely attached to Bohemia.
In 1526 Moravia, with Bohemia and Silesia, was
claimed through inheritance by Ferdinand of
Austria, the future Holy Roman emperor
Ferdinand I, and thus came under the rule of
the Habsburgs.
Emblem of Habsburgs
• Unlike Bohemia, Moravia accepted the hereditary right of the
Austrian Habsburgs to rule over it and therefore suffered less in the
religious and civil struggles that followed. Religious toleration
resulted in a flowering of Protestantism in Moravia under Ferdinand
and his son Maximilian II, and there was generally less friction
between Slavs and Germans there than there was in Bohemia,
partly because the Moravian Slavs were more backward and
therefore were slower to make nationalist demands. Their language
was the same as that of the Bohemian Slavs, or Czechs, but they
were not directly involved in Bohemia’s struggle with the Habsburg
dynasty. Administratively detached from Bohemia, the margraviate
of Moravia was merged late in the 18th century with what
remained of Austrian Silesia, and, following the Revolution of 1848,
the Habsburgs made Moravia a separate Austrian crown land.
Revolution in 1848
• In 1918 that crown land became a province of the new state
of Czechoslovakia and, although it was annexed by Germany just
before the outbreak of World War II, it was restored to the
reconstituted state of Czechoslovakia after the war. On Jan. 1, 1949,
however, the Czechoslovak government dissolved Moravia into a
number of smaller administrative units. In 1960 another
administrative reorganization created the South Moravian
(Jihomoravský) and North Moravian (Severomoravský) regions on
the territory formerly known as Moravia-Silesia. These lands were
included in the Czech Socialist Republic when it was
administratively created in 1968 within federal Czechoslovakia, and
they remained part of the Czech Republic when the latter became
an independent nation in 1993.