| powers or domination by foreign nations. In this respect, Slavic literatures differ greatly from such major European literatures as English, French, and German, all of which had long centuries of continuous growth and were never catastrophically disturbed. |
| As mentioned above, and as the reader will see in the present survey, the Slavs at the dawn of their history sustained the impact of two major divisions of European culture: the eastern Christian or Byzantine, which was primarily Greek in its essence, and western Europe, which had its roots in the civilization of the Roman Empire and later was influenced by the Church of Rome. |
| All of the Slavic literatures came into being after Christianization, which took place in the late ninth and tenth centuries. The first Slavic nation that became converted to Christianity was the Great Moravian state, located in the territory of present-day Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Two Greek brothers from Salonika, Constantine, who later became a monk and took the name Cyril, and Methodius came to Great Moravia in 863 at the invitation of the Moravian Prince Rostislav. They organized there the first Slavic Christian church, created an alphabet adapted to the Slavic sound system, and translated the most important liturgical books into a Slavic language, now usually called Church Slavonic, which was a Macedonian dialect familiar to the missionaries. This Byzantine mission remained in Great Moravia for only a few decades and was soon forced to leave the country under pressure from the German princes and German Roman Catholic clergy. |
| In 865 the Bulgarian ruler Boris accepted Christianity from Byzantium. From Bulgaria, the Greek Orthodox faith, as well as Byzantine civilization and Byzantine literary patterns, spread to most of the Balkan Slavs, who accepted the language used by Cyril and Methodius for liturgical and literary purposes. Another century and a quarter later, in 988 or 989, the eastern or Russian Slavs also became converted by their prince, Vladimir, to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. While most of the eastern and southern Slavs became Christianized under the Byzantine rite, Czechs and Slovaks recognized the authority of Rome; consequently, their evolution was profoundly influenced by the western church and culture. This western religious and cultural influence also penetrated from the confines of the German Empire into the northwestern Balkans, where the Slovenians and Croatians accepted the Roman rites: In this way, the southern Slavs became culturally split into two distinct groups, despite the fact that Croatians and Serbians spoke the same language. |
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