the Pannonic Slavi.  We have shown above, in the history of the Old Slavonic language, that Moravia, then for a short period a powerful kingdom, was the principal theatre of Methodius’ exertions.[6] As at this time Christianity had been already introduced into these regions, and the kings Rostislav and Svatopluk, as well as most of their subjects, were already baptized, it is very probable that they were induced by motives of policy to send to Constantinople for a Christian teacher.  Oppressed by the Germans, the usurpations of whose emperors were in a certain measure sanctioned by the chair of Rome, they desired to secure for themselves in the Byzantine court a powerful ally.  After the dissolution of the Moravian kingdom in A.D. 1029, the present Moravia fell to Bohemia; was separated from it repeatedly in the course of the following centuries; and at length, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, became together with this kingdom an ingredient part of the Austrian states.

The Moravians were among the earliest Slavic tribes converted to Christianity.  As early as the seventeenth century a considerable portion of them were baptized by German priests.  It was however not before the first half of the ninth century, that the first Christian missionaries entered Bohemia.  In the year 845, fourteen Bohemian princes were baptized at Ratisbon.  In the year 894 the duke Borzivog, the head of the nation, received baptism; but his successors went back to idolatry, and with them the greatest part of the people.  Christianity was not firmly established in these regions until the second half of the tenth century.  At this time the Slavic liturgy introduced by Methodius into Moravia was already, in some measure, by the indefatigable exertions of the Romish German priesthood, superseded by the Latin worship.  Thus it never was fully established in Bohemia with the exception of a few churches, attached to convents founded expressly in memory of the Slavic saints, Jerome, Cyril, and Methodius.  Their inmates however were expelled in favour of German-Bohemian monks, or they died; and with them disappeared every vestige of the innovations of Cyril and Methodius.  Hence the Old Slavic language, and the noble translation of the Bible extant in it, have exercised only an inconsiderable influence on the Bohemian idiom.[7]

Bohemia, under the sovereignty of her dukes, and from A.D. 1198, under that of kings, was independent of the German empire, or at least did not belong to its circles; it recognized however a kind of sovereignty in that powerful neighbour, and the kings of Bohemia deemed it an honour to belong to the seven Electors, who chose the worldly head of Christianity.  In the year 1306, the last male descendant of Perzmislas was murdered.  His house had reigned in Bohemia in uninterrupted succession; although the kingdom was properly not hereditary, but elective, like Germany, Hungary, and Poland.  After a short interval, the crown of Bohemia fell by succession to the house