Great Moravia - Legacy

Legacy

Destruction of the Great Moravian Empire was rather gradual. Since excavations of Great Moravian castles show continuity of their settlement and architectural style after the alleged disintegration of the Empire, local political structures must have remained untouched by the disaster. Another reason is that the originally nomad old Magyars lacked siege engines to conquer Great Moravian fortifications, although this did not hinder them from conquering strong fortresses, documented by primary written sources (e.g., Blatnograd, Bratislava Castle). Nevertheless, the core of Great Moravia was finally integrated into the newly established states of Duchy of Bohemia (later kingdom) and the Kingdom of Hungary.

Great Moravian centers (e.g., Bratislava (Pozsony, Pressburg), Nitra (Nyitra), Tekov (Bars), and Zemplín (Zemplén)) also retained their functions afterwards, although the identification of Bratislava (Pozsony,Pressburg ), Tekov (Bars) and Zemplín (Zemplén) as Great Moravian castles is not generally accepted. Since the same castles became the seats of early Hungarian administrative units (counties), historians posit that the administrative division of Great Moravia was just adopted by new rulers. On the other hand, several sources suggest that the Hungarian rulers followed the contemporary German or Bulgar patents when they established the new administrative system in their kingdom, or they introduced a new system.

Social differentiation in Great Moravia reached the state of early feudalism, creating the social basis for development of later medieval states in the region. The question what happened to Great Moravian noble families after 907 is still under debate. On the one hand, recent research indicates that a significant part of the local aristocracy remained more or less undisturbed by the fall of Great Moravia and their descendants became nobles in the newly formed Kingdom of Hungary. The most prominent example are the powerful families of Hunt and Pázmán. On the other hand, both Anonymous and Simon of Kéza, two chroniclers of the early history of Hungary, recorded that the prominent noble families of the kingdom descended either from leaders of the Magyar tribes or from immigrants, and they did not connect any of them to Great Moravia. For example, the ancestors of the clan Hunt-Pázmán (Hont-Pázmány), whose Great Moravian origin has been advanced by modern scholars, were mentioned by Simon of Kéza to have arrived from the Duchy of Swabia to the kingdom in the late 10th century.

Many Slavic words related to politics, law, and agriculture were taken into the Hungarian language. Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a certain word was borrowed from which Slavic language; e.g., the Hungarian word for county ("megye") was borrowed from a South Slavic language, but it may have taken either from the Slovene or from the Serbo-Croatian.

The territories mentioned as "Tercia pars regni" (literally "one-third part of the Kingdom of Hungary") in the medieval sources are referred to as the "Duchy" in Hungarian scholarly works and as the "Principality of Nitra" in Slovak academic sources. These territories were ruled autonomously by members of the Árpád dynasty residing in Bihar (today Biharea in Romania) or in Nitra - a practice reminiscent of the Great Moravian appanage system, but also similar to that of some other dynasties in the Early Middle Ages (e.g., the Ruriks in the Kievan Rus'). The existence of an autonomous political unit centered around Nitra is often considered by Slovak scholars an example of political continuity from the Great Moravian period.

There are also documents indicating that the Church organization survived the invasion of the pagan Magyars at least to some degree. For example, continuity of the formal Church organization is confirmed by an uninterrupted list of Moravian bishops from the 14th century.

Neither the demographic change was dramatic. As far as the graves can tell, there had been no influx of the Magyars into the core of former Great Moravia before 955. Afterwards, Magyar settlers appear in some regions of Southern Slovakia, but graves indicate a kind of cultural symbiosis (resulting in the common Belobrdo culture), not domination. Due to cultural changes, archaeologists are not able to identify the ethnicity of graves after the half of the 11th century. This is also why integration of central, eastern, and northern territories of present-day Slovakia into the Hungarian Kingdom is difficult to be documented by archeology, and written sources have to be used.

The Byzantine double-cross thought to have been brought by Cyril and Methodius is part of the symbol of Slovakia until today and the Constitution of Slovakia refers to Great Moravia in its preamble. Interest about that period rose as a result of the national revival in the 19th century. Great Moravian history has been regarded as a cultural root of several Slavic nations in Central Europe (especially the Slovaks, as it was the only significant Slavic state Slovakia had ever been a part of) and it was employed in vain attempts to create a single Czechoslovak identity in the 20th century.