Svatopluk I - Legacy

Legacy

Following Svatopluk's death, Moravia, which had achieved its maximum territorial extension, and exercised its greatest influence in his reign, ceased to be a political factor in Central Europe. Among the conquered peoples, the Czechs were the first to withdraw already in 895. Although, at least according to the testimony of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Svatopluk had made a deathbed request to his sons that they remain united, after his death internal disagreements between his sons, Mojmír II and Svatopluk II were fostered by Arnulf. Finally Moravia collapsed in the first decade of the 10th century due to the invasion of the Hungarians.

The prince of Moravia, Sphendoplokos, was valiant and terrible to the nations that were his neighbors. This same Sphendoplokos had three sons, and when he was dying he divided his country into three parts and left a share apiece to his three sons, leaving the ledest to be great prince and the other two to be under the command of the eldest son. He exhorted them not to fall out with one another, giving them this example by way of illustration: he brought three wands and bound them together and gave them to the first son to break them, and when he was not strong enough, handed them on to the second, and in like manner to the third, and then separated the three wands and gave one each to the three of them; when they had taken them and were bidden to break them, they broke them through at once. By means of this illustration he exhorted them and said: "If you remain undivided in concord and love, you shall be unconquered by your adversaries and invincible; but if strife and rivalry come among you and you divide yourselves into three governments, not subject to the eldest brother, you shall be both destroyed by one another and brought to utter ruin by the enemies who are your neighbors." —Constantine Porphyrogenitus: On Administering the Empire, Chapter 41

According to Hungarian legends, the Hungarians purchased the country from Svatopluk in a symbolic act of exchange: they sent a white horse with saddler to Svatopluk in return for some earth, water and grass, supposed to represent his country itself. Svatopluk allegedly disavowed this "contract" and then drowned in the Danube in flight from the Hungarians. The legend, in fact, seems to merely describe a common pagan rite of concluding alliances which might refer to Svatopluk's alliance with the Hungarians in 894.

Nevertheless, in 1722 Michael Bencsik, a professor of Hungarian law at the University of Trnava, suggested that the nobility and the whole population of Trenčín county within the Kingdom of Hungary were "the remnants of Svatopluk who sold his country to the Hungarians, and thus the Slovak people, into eternal serfdom". In response, Ján Baltazár Magin, the Roman Catholic parisher of Dubnica wrote the oldest known defense of the Slovak nation in 1728. Next another Catholic priest, Juraj Fándly completed a history in Latin entitled Compendiata historia gentis Slavae ("A Brief History of the Slovak Nation") in which he depicted Moravia as a state of Slovaks and Svatopluk as their king. In 1833 the poet Ján Hollý published a poem entitled Svätopluk, the first of a series of epic poems dealing with the past of the Slovak people.