ABSTRACT
The state of Moravia (Fig. 13.1), in the territory of modern Czechoslovakia, became known in historiography under the name of Great Moravia, although the term did not appear until the work of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII about the middle of the 10th century.1 He applied the term to the late 9thcentury empire of King Swentopluk, or, to be more precise, to his domain on the northern and northeastern side of the Danube, including the region around the river Tisa and its tributaries. However, Byzantine historians called countries ‘great’ provided that they had been the earlier homes of migratory peoples; examples are Great Bulgaria and Great Croatia. The Moravians were first recorded in central Europe after the campaigns of Charlemagne against the Avar Khaganate, when the Franconians became acquainted with the situation in that part of Europe. Recent discoveries in the fields of archaeology, historiography, anthropology, art history, linguistics and literary history enable us to draw a more precise image of Moravia’s history, its political and cultural relations with other states, and its rôle and importance in European development in the early Middle Ages.
