The Conversion of the Slavs
While the Empire was contracting, and the Byzantine Church becoming more conservative, a remarkable expansion of Orthodox Christianity was beginning. Slav tribes had moved into the Balkans from the sixth century.
From the seventh century they were gradually converted to Christianity in those areas where they had settled. The great apostles of the Slavs were two brothers, Greeks of Thessaloniki, Constantine and Methodius, who learnt the local Slav dialect. In 862 the Emperor Michael III sent them to Moravia, where they carried out extensive missionary work with the approval of both Constantinople and Rome. Constantine, by now the monk Cyril, died in Rome in 869. When Methodius died in 885 the Moravian mission collapsed. But the two brothers had laid the foundation of Slav Christianity by devising the Glagolitic alphabet for the Slav language, and translating the Bible and essential theological and liturgical texts into the Slav language.The Bulgarian Empire was the first Slav state to adopt Christianity as its official religion. From the eighth century the pagan Bulgar Khans were consolidating their rule over Slavic tribes which had settled within the Empire. By 852 when the Khan Boris began his reign an independent Bulgar state had emerged out of prolonged wars with the Empire. Byzantine culture exercised a powerful attraction on the Slavic peoples, even while they sought to conquer the Empire for themselves. Since Byzantine culture and Christianity were inseparable, they wished to be baptised. At the same time they had no intention of surrendering their national independence. Boris, baptised in 869 after a defeat inflicted on the Bulgars by the Empire, became a devout Christian who ended his life as a monk.
The Byzantine Empire saw the baptism of Boris as a means of keeping the Bulgar state within the Empire. Boris saw it rather as the first step towards an independent empire for himself and his people.
Another was the establishment of an independent church. After fruitless negotiations with both Rome and Constantinople for an independent archbishopric, he finally persuaded the latter to let him have a semi-autonomous archbishop. In the course of the next hundred years the work of Cyril and Methodius bore abundant fruit in the Bulgarian Empire. Under Tsar Simeon (892-927), who received the title of Emperor from Rome and whose archbishop became Patriarch of an autocephalous church, with his see first at Preslav and then at Ohrid, the Bulgarian Church took up and developed their work. The Glagolitic alphabet was replaced by the Cyrillic, closer to Greek, and many Christian writings were translated into Slavonic. Bulgarian Christianity was in fact Byzantine Christianity translated into Slavonic, and it was the source from which subsequent Slav Christianity derived.The first Bulgarian Empire came to an end in 972, defeated by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II ‘the Bulgar-Slayer’, and with it came to an end the effective independence of the Bulgarian Church. The empire revived towards the end of the twelfth century, and the patriarchate, suppressed by the Byzantines in 1018, was re-established at Trnovo in 1235. Under Simeon the Bulgarians had made their own the theocratic vision of Byzantium: Empire and Church, Emperor and Patriarch, went hand in hand. Orthodoxy and nationhood were inextricably linked. The quest for national independence led to war against Byzantium, and the Christianisation of the Slavs led paradoxically to the first civil war in the Orthodox world.
The characteristics of Bulgarian Orthodoxy were also those of the Serbian Church. In the ninth century Christianity in its Byzantine form took firm root among the Serbs. While Byzantium and Bulgaria fought, the Serbs, influenced now by the one, now by the other, grew into national self-consciousness. When Prince Mutimir (860-91) was baptised, Christianity was made the national religion. Like the Bulgarians, the Serbs maintained relations with both Rome and Constantinople, before finally adhering to the latter.
Under the Grand Zupan Nemanya at the end of the eleventh century, the Serbs were united in independence of Byzantium. In the reign of his son Stephen the First-Crowned, the Serbian Church gained recognition of its autonomy from the Byzantine emperor in Nicea. Stephen’s younger brother Rastko had become a monk with the name of Sava on Mount Athos in 1191. When his father Stephen Nemanya retired there in 1196, they founded the Serbian monastery of Hilandari, which became the centre of Serbian religious life and culture. Sava returned to Serbia to be abbot of Studenica, and in 1219 was consecrated by the Greek Patriarch in Nicea as the first archbishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church. From his seat at the monastery of Zica he established a complete church organisation in Serbia, and effected a thorough renewal of the nation’s religious life. In 1233 he retired from office. Since his death he has been venerated as the true founder of both Serbian Church and Serbian State.Under Stephen Dushan (1331-55) Serbia reached a peak of achievement. In 1346 Dushan was crowned as Emperor of the Serbs and the Greeks, and in the same year gave the archbishop the title of patriarch, with his seat at Pec. His aim was to unite Byzantines, Bulgarians and Serbs in a single empire, but he died in 1355 on the eve of a campaign against Constantinople. The Byzantines recognised the Patriarchate of Pec in 1375.
While the Bulgarians and the Serbs gained their ecclesiastical independence of Constantinople, the Church in the two Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, and the Romanian Orthodox in Transylvania, remained under Constantinople. Christianity had been brought to the Roman province of Dacia at least by the fourth century, and a Latin-speaking Church grew up among the Romanised Dacians. Little is known of its history in the Middle Ages, but by the fourteenth century it was firmly within the sphere of influence of Constantinople. Although the language of the people was derived from Latin, Slav influence had made Slavonic the language of worship. The Orthodox Church was the one organisation which united the Romanian people, politically divided, and as in Bulgaria and Serbia it became inseparable from the Romanian sense of nationhood.