aking themselves understood. The emperor
had in his dominions many Slavonians; hence the application, on the
assumption that there must be, among the Greek priests, many who were
acquainted with the languages of the Slavonic tribes. In answer to this
appeal, the Emperor Michael dispatched to Moravia two learned monks,
Kyrill and Methody, together with several other ecclesiastics, in the
year 863.

Kyrill and Methody were the sons of a grandee, who resided in the chief
town of Macedonia, which was surrounded by Slavonic colonies. The elder
brother, Methody, had been a military man, and the governor of a
province containing Slavonians. The younger, Kyrill, had received a
brilliant education at the imperial court, in company with the Emperor
Michael, and had been a pupil of the celebrated Photius (afterwards
Patriarch), and librarian of St. Sophia, after becoming a monk. Later
on, the brothers had led the life of itinerant missionaries, and had
devoted themselves to preaching the Gospel to Jews and Mohammedans. Thus
they were in every way eminently qualified for their new task.

The Slavonians in the Byzantine empire, and the cognate tribes who dwelt
nearer the Danube, like the Moravians, had long been in sore need of a
Slavonic translation of the Scriptures and the Church books, since they
understood neither Greek nor Latin; and for the lack of such a
translation many relapsed into heathendom. Kyrill first busied himself
with inventing an alphabet which should accurately reproduce all the
varied sounds of the Slavonic tongues. Tradition asserts that he
accomplished this task in the year 855, founding it upon the Greek
alphabet, appropriating from the Hebrew, Armenian, and Coptic characters
for the sounds which the Greek characters did not represent, and
devising new ones for the nasal sounds. The characters in this alphabet
were thirty-eight in number. Kyrill, with the aid of his brother
Methody, then proceeded to make his translations of the Church Service
books. The Bulgarians became Christians in the year 861, and these books
were adopted by them. But the greatest activity of the brothers was
during the four and a half years beginning with the year 862, when they
translated the holy Scriptures, taught the Slavonians their new system
of reading and writing, and struggled with heathendom and with the
German priests of the Roman Church. These German ecclesiastics are said
to have sent petition after petition to Rome, to