page_title: Alternative theories of the location of Great Moravia
section_title: Methodius's see
hierarchical_section_title: Alternative theories of the location of Great Moravia / Southern Moravia of Imre Boba / Methodius's see
caption_attribution_description: Slovenčina: Bronzová plastika sv. Cyrila a sv. Metoda
context_page_description: Alternative theories of the location of Great Moravia propose that the core territory of "Great Moravia", a 9th-century Slavic polity, was not located in the region of the northern Morava River. Moravia emerged after the fall of the Avar Khaganate in the early 9th century. It flourished during the reign of Svatopluk I in the second half of the century, but collapsed in the first decade of the 10th century. "Great Moravia" was regarded as an archetype of Czechoslovakia, the common state of the Czechs and Slovaks, in the 20th century, and its legacy is mentioned in the preamble to the Constitution of Slovakia.
  Several aspects of its history are the subject of scholarly disputes. A debate about the location of its core territory began in the second half of the 20th century. Imre Boba proposed that the center of Moravia was located near the southern Morava River. Most specialists rejected Boba's theory, but it was further developed by other historians, including Charles Bowlus and Martin Eggers.
context_section_description: Pope John VIII's letters identify Methodius's ecclesiastic province as diocesis Pannonica. The Life of Methodius also state that Methodius was "consecrated to the bishopric of Pannonia, to the seat of Saint Andronicus, an Apostle of the seventy". If Methodius was ordained bishop in accordance with the canons adopted at previous synods, he must have been consecrated to a cathedral in a town and could not be moved from his episcopal see, according to Boba. For instance, the Council of Chalcedon decreed in 451 that "No one ... who belongs to the ecclesiastical order, is to be ordained without title, unless the one ordained is specially assigned to a city or village church or to a martyr's shrine or a monastery".
  Maddalena Betti says that Boba's argumentation, which is based on canons from the 4th and 5th centuries, is "problematic". Methodius's career followed the pattern set up for earlier medieval missionaries, including Willibrord-Clement and Wynfrith-Boniface. Wynfrith-Boniface started his missions as a simple priest; he was then ordained a missionary bishop for the "people of Germany and to those east of the river Rhine", but his see was not specified; finally, he received a pallium in token of his right to organize a new ecclesiastical province. She argues that, in a similar fashion, Methodius returned from Rome to the domains of Koceľ as a simple monk, that he was subsequently consecrated as a missionary bishop and that, finally, he received a pallium.
  According to Boba, Latin and Old Church Slavonic records of Methodius's title show that he was ordained archbishop of the see in a town called Maraba or Morava. Boba associated Maraba or Morava with Sirmium, because Sirmium was the capital of the Roman province of Pannonia Secunda. To prove that Methodius had a fixed see, Boba suggested that a medieval church, excavated in Mačvanska Mitrovica in 1966, was identical with Methodius's cathedral. V. Popović, an archaeologist, soon refuted the identification, demonstrating that the church was built in the 11th century.
  The Forgeries of Lorch (a collection of papal documents forged for Piligrim, who was Bishop of Passau between 971 and 991) also contain references to Moravia. The documents show that late-10th-century clerics in Passau thought that Moravia had been located in Upper Pannonia and Moesia a century earlier. According to Alexandru Madgearu, a Romanian historian, Piligrim's forgeries prove that, by the time they were completed, the location of the former Roman province of Moesia had been forgotten and the clerics who completed the forgeries applied its name to Moravia.
  According to Maddalena Betti, Alfred the Great's translation of Orosius's History of the World, which was completed in the late 9th century, prove that Moravia was located to the north of the Danube. Alfred the Great listed the "Thyringas", "Behemas", the "half of the Begware" and the "land of the Vistula" among the neighbors of the "Maroara". Betti also notes that Constantine and Methodius crossed the Pannonian domains of Koceľ while travelling from Moravia to Venice, according to the Life of Constantine, which also shows that Moravia most plausibly lay north of Koceľ's domains.
caption: Bronze sculpture of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Bratislava, Slovakia
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