Who Were Cyril and Methodius?
Cyril and Methodius were the ninth-century Byzantine missionaries who created the Slavic alphabet and translated scripture and liturgy into the Slavic tongue.
Short answer
Cyril (c. 826–869) and Methodius (c. 815–885) were brothers from Thessalonica, born into a Byzantine family of Greek and Slavic origin. They were missionaries to the Slavic peoples, especially the Great Moravian state, and they are credited with the creation of the first Slavic alphabet (the Glagolitic script, traditionally attributed to Cyril) and the translation of the Christian scriptures and the liturgy into Old Church Slavonic. Their mission, the Cyrillo-Methodian mission, was the foundation of the Slavic literary and religious tradition that shaped the Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Russians, and the other Orthodox Slavic peoples for the rest of the Middle Ages. Both brothers were declared saints, and the Eastern Orthodox church celebrates them on 11 May; Pope John Paul II added them to the universal Roman calendar in 1980.
The Background
The brothers Constantine (later Cyril) and Methodius were born in Thessalonica, the second city of the Byzantine empire, into a family that was, on the mother’s side, of Slavic origin. Constantine took the monastic name Cyril shortly before his death; he was a brilliant scholar, fluent in Greek and Latin, and probably in Slavic, and had already made a name for himself in the Byzantine empire for his intellectual work. Methodius, the older brother, was a successful administrator, who had served as governor of a Slavic district in the Balkans before he joined his brother in the monastic life.
The first major mission of the two brothers was to the Khazars, the Turkic people of the lower Volga and the Caucasus, where they worked in the early 860s. The mission was not, in the end, a great success in Christian terms (the Khazars eventually converted to Judaism, in part in response to the missionary pressures of the Byzantines and the Arabs), but it gave the brothers valuable experience in the work of translating Christian texts into a non-Greek language and in dealing with non-Christian religious authorities.
The Moravian Mission
The mission for which Cyril and Methodius are most famous was the mission to the Great Moravian state, a powerful Slavic polity in the basin of the middle Danube that was, in the 860s, on the verge of Christianization. Prince Rastislav of Moravia, who had been trying to free his church from the political control of the Frankish bishopric of Passau, asked the Byzantine emperor Michael III to send missionaries who would preach in the Slavic language. The emperor sent Constantine and Methodius, who arrived in Moravia in 863.
The brothers worked in Moravia for about four years. The principal work of the mission was the translation of the Christian scriptures, the liturgy, and a body of canon law into the Slavic language of the region. For this purpose, Constantine is traditionally credited with the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet, a script based partly on Greek and partly on the South Slavic dialects. The Glagolitic script was later replaced, in most Slavic lands, by the Cyrillic alphabet, named after St. Cyril, but the missionary work of the brothers laid the foundation of Slavic Christian literature.
The mission of Cyril and Methodius in Moravia was controversial. The Frankish clergy, who had a long-standing claim on the Christianization of the central European Slavs, objected to the use of a Slavic language in the liturgy, and especially to the use of a Slavic translation of the bible, on the grounds that the biblical text was properly read in the three sacred languages of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The brothers were summoned to Rome, where Pope Nicholas I received them favorably; his successor, Pope Adrian II, approved the Slavic liturgy and the Slavic translation of the bible. Constantine, who had been ill, died in Rome in 869, and was buried in the church of San Clemente.
The Mission in Pannonia and the Expulsion
After Constantine’s death, Methodius returned to the central European Slavic lands, working in Pannonia and Moravia, and was consecrated bishop of Sirmium by the pope. The mission in Moravia continued for some years, but the Frankish ecclesiastical opposition to the Slavic liturgy was unrelenting. In 880, Pope John VIII confirmed the use of the Slavic liturgy in the central European Slavic lands, but the political influence of the Frankish clergy was too great. After the death of the Moravian prince Svatopluk in 894, and especially after the dissolution of the Great Moravian state by the Magyars in 906, the Moravian mission collapsed.
The followers of Methodius, deprived of their political support, were expelled from Moravia in 886 by a coalition of Frankish and local ecclesiastical opponents, and they took refuge in Bulgaria. In Bulgaria, they continued the work of the mission: they developed the Cyrillic alphabet (an adaptation of the Greek uncial), they continued the translation of the Christian scriptures and the liturgy, and they founded a Slavic literary culture that would, in the next generation, be the foundation of the Bulgarian literary tradition. The Old Church Slavonic language, in the form given it by the disciples of Methodius, became the literary language of the Orthodox Slavic world.
The Long-Term Legacy
The mission of Cyril and Methodius was decisive for the formation of medieval Slavic culture. The Slavic alphabet, in its Cyrillic form, became the script of the Orthodox Slavic peoples: the Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, and the other East and South Slavic peoples. The Old Church Slavonic language, in the form given it by the disciples of Methodius, became the literary and liturgical language of the Orthodox Slavic churches. The Slavic translation of the bible, the Slavic translation of the liturgy, and the Slavic translation of the corpus of canon law were the foundation of the religious and legal life of the Orthodox Slavic world for centuries.
The mission was also important in the religious history of the central European Slavic peoples. The disciples of Methodius, who had been expelled from Moravia, took refuge in Bohemia and Poland, where the Slavic liturgical tradition continued, in modified form, until the eleventh century. The Czech and Slovak churches retained the use of the Glagolitic script and the Slavic liturgy until the late tenth century, when they were replaced by the Latin rite and the Latin alphabet. The Roman Catholic church in Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary would always retain some memory of the Slavic liturgical tradition.
The two brothers were declared saints, and their cult has been one of the most important in Slavic Christianity. The Eastern Orthodox church celebrates them on 11 May; the Roman Catholic church, after 1980, celebrates them on 14 February; the two churches agree that the brothers were the founders of Slavic Christian civilization. Their work is also the foundation of the modern study of the Slavic languages, and the Old Church Slavonic text, the Codex Marianus, the Codex Zographensis, and the other manuscripts of the early Slavic literary tradition, are among the most important documents in the study of the early medieval Slavic world.