Chapter One: Some Tribes, and Some Oppression

In the early years of what would one day become the Czech Republic, various tribes settled here and passed their time by drawing pictures on walls of caves.  They also did a fair amount of making pots, smashing them to pieces and burying them.  Every few hundred years, their lease on the land would run out, and in this way the Celts, Marcomans, and Quades (who were more in Slovakia than anywhere else) passed through.  The Romans also spent their holidays here for a time.

When the invasion of the Goths in, oh, let’s say, around the fifth century, came, there was another people group which came riding in on their coattails (or whatever it was that Goths had).  These were the Slavs, and they drifted into Bohemia and Moravia (the two areas that make up the current Czech Republic), looked around for a bit, and decided to stay.  It appears that they didn’t have to fight for the land, which had been abandoned earlier by Germanic tribes.  Historians have speculated on why these Germanic tribes left without being forced to, and the current consensus is that they were starting a family and needed a little more space.

When the Slavs arrived in their new home, they quickly became dependent on the Avars.  It is not clear how long it took for the Slavs to be subjugated, but it was perhaps a couple of weeks or more.  Thus begins an important theme in the history of the Slavs in Bohemia and Moravia: they have, since the beginning, been trying to free themselves from oppressors.  The identity of the oppressor doing the oppressing is not important, and we shall see that several different groups have had their chance to beat up on the Slavs over the years.  The important thing is that oppression was always going on.

Since there was so much oppression, the natural result has been that there have also always been Slavs who were willing to fight against the oppressive regimes of neighbors, and the first of these was Samo.  There is not much reliable information about Samo, but, considering the times and circumstances under which he labored to free the Slavs, he was most likely a guy you wouldn’t want to mess with.

Charlemagne helped the Slavs get rid of the Avars once and for all, and the Slavs took this opportunity to begin to unify.  Until then, they had been too preoccupied with throwing off the yoke to bother with the formation of any culture, and so they decided that they ought to band together while the banding was good, and before some other oppressor came along.  The Great Moravian Empire was formed.  In the Europe of this time, you were frowned upon as a people group if you were not Christian, and so the king of the Great Moravian Empire (Rostislav; his name will be on the test) sent to Byzantium for some missionaries.  Byzantium responded by sending Cyril and Methodius, who are still popular enough in the area to warrant a statue on the Charles Bridge in Prague (more on that later).  They arrived in the 860s and set about converting the populace and making the language literary enough for the liturgy.

Shortly after Cyril and Methodius, a lot of succumbing went on in Bohemia and Moravia.  The Great Moravian Empire succumbed to the Eastern Franks, who in turn succumbed to the Magyars.  After 80 years, the Great Moravian Empire was finished, and the oppression started.  Again.