The emergence of written Slavonic (c.860–c.880): where and why?

ABSTRACT Slavonic is one of the languages that was first written in the ninth century, or perhaps at the beginning of the tenth. The Moravian kingdom of Dukes Ratiz (846–70) and Svatopluk (870–94), within the framework of the missionary activities of Sts Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, is generally proposed as the context for this initiative. However, this proposition is based only on the hagiographic corpus which concerns those two saints and the value of these texts seems particularly weak. As a result, even if Slavic texts were circulating in Moravia, it is unlikely that they were the oldest steps in this linguistic innovation. It is therefore necessary to review the sources in order to contextualise the birth of the written Slavonic language; then new interpretations can be put forward to explain this novelty and its success.