The Glagolitic script ( ; , ) is the oldest-known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating Greek liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Cyril, a Christian monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Methodius were sent by the Byzantine Emperor to Great Moravia as missionaries. After the deaths of Cyril and Methodius, their disciples were expelled from Moravia, and they moved to the First Bulgarian Empire instead. The Early Cyrillic alphabet, which was developed gradually in the Preslav Literary School by scribes who incorporated some Glagolitic letters when writing in the Greek alphabet, gradually replaced Glagolitic in that region. Glagolitic remained in use alongside the Cyrillic; ; ; : : and Latin script in the Kingdom of Croatia and Dalmatia and alongside Cyrillic until the 14th century in the Second Bulgarian Empire and the Serbian Empire; in later periods, its use in its eastern range was mainly for cryptographic purposes.
Name and etymology The word glagolitic comes from Neo-Latin and Croatian , ultimately deriving from the Old Church Slavonic word (glagolŭ), meaning 'utterance' or 'word'. The name / glagolitsa is thought to have developed in Croatia around the 14th century from the word glagolity, which referred to those who used the Slavonic liturgy. The Croatian language portal (based on the work of Vladimir Anić) notes the etymology of today's word as , that has a historical meaning of celebrating mass in Old Church Slavonic.
In the languages now spoken in the places where Glagolitic script was once used, the script is known as (romanized as glagolitsa or glagolica, depending on which language) in Bulgarian, Macedonian and Russian; (глагољица) in Croatian and Serbian; (hlaholytsia) in Ukrainian; (hlaholitsa) in Belarusian; in Czech; in Slovak; in Polish; and in Slovene and Sorbian.
History Glagolitic had spread as far as the Kievan Rus' and the Kingdom of Bohemia. Although its use declined there in the 12th century, some manuscripts in the territory of the former retained Glagolitic inclusions for centuries. It had also spread to Duklja and Zachlumia in the Western Balkans, from where it reached the March of Verona. There, the Investiture Controversy afforded it refuge from the opposition of Latinizing prelates and allowed it to entrench itself in Istria, from which place it spread to nearby lands. It survived there and as far south as Dalmatia without interruption into the 20th century for Church Slavonic in addition to its use as a secular script in parts of its range, which at times extended into Bosnia, Slavonia, and Carniola, in addition to 14th–15th century exclaves in Prague and Kraków, and a 16th-century exclave in Putna.
Its authorship by Cyril was forgotten, having been replaced with an attribution to St. Jerome by the early Benedictine adopters of Istria in a bid to secure the approval of the papacy. The bid was ultimately successful, though sporadic restrictions and repressions from individual bishops continued even after its official recognition by Pope Innocent IV. These had little effect on the vitality of the script, which evolved from its original Rounded Glagolitic form into an Angular Glagolitic form, in addition to a cursive form developed for notary purposes.
The Ottoman conquests left the script without most of its continental population, and as a result of the Counter-Reformation its use was restricted in Istria and the Diocese of Zagreb, and the only active printing press with a Glagolitic type was confiscated, leading to a shift towards Latinic and Cyrillic literacy when coupled with the Tridentine requirement that priests be educated at seminaries. The result was its gradual death as a written script in most of its continental range, but also the unusually late survival of medieval scribal tradition for the reproduction of Glagolitic texts in isolated areas like the island of Krk and the Zadar Archipelago. Although the Propaganda Fide would eventually resume printing Glagolitic books, very few titles were published, so the majority of Glagolitic literary works continued to be written and copied by hand well into the 18th century.
In the early 19th century, the policies of the First French Empire and Austrian Empire left the script without legal status, and its last remaining centers of education were abolished, concurrent with the weakening of the script in the few remaining seminaries that used the cursive form in instruction, resulting in a rapid decline. But when the Slavicists discovered the script and established it as the original script devised by Cyril, Glagolitic gained new niche applications in certain intellectual circles, while a small number of priests fought to keep its liturgical use alive, encountering difficulties but eventually succeeding to the point that its area expanded in the early 20th century.
Latinic translations and transliterations of the matter of the missal in this period led to its decline in the decades before Vatican II, whose promulgation of the vernacular confined regular use of Glagolitic to a few monasteries and academic institutions, in addition to a small population of enthusiasts, whose numbers grew and shrank with the prevalence of the script in literature, but grew exponentially in pious and nationalist circles in the years leading up to and following the Independence of Croatia, and again more broadly with the Internet.
Origins
The creation of the characters is popularly attributed to Saints Cyril and Methodius, who may have created them to facilitate the introduction of Christianity.Alan Timberlake, A Reference Grammar of Russian, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 14 Florin Curta & Paul Stephenson, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1250 , Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 125Simon Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 93: "East Christian Slays used two alphabets, Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Just to confuse matters, the script devised by Cyril was probably Glagolitic, while Cyrillic—which came to predominate, emerged somewhat later."Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 40Jean W. Sedlar,East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500, University of Washington Press, 1994, p. 144 It is believed that the original letters were fitted to Slavic dialects in geographical Macedonia specifically (the Byzantine theme of Thessalonica).Paul Cubberley (1996) "The Slavic Alphabets" . In The words of that language could not be easily written by using either the Greek or Latin alphabets.
The number of letters in the original Glagolitic alphabet is not known, but it might have been close to its presumed Greek model. The 41 letters known today include letters for non-Greek sounds, which might have been added by Saint Cyril, as well as ligatures added in the 12th century under the influence of Cyrillic, as Glagolitic lost its dominance. In later centuries, the number of letters dropped dramatically, to fewer than 30 in modern Croatian and Czech recensions of the Church Slavic language. Twenty-four of the 41 original Glagolitic letters (see table below) probably derive from graphemes of the medieval cursive Greek small alphabet but have been given an ornamental design.
The source of the other consonantal letters is unknown. If they were added by Cyril, it is likely that they were taken from an alphabet used for Christian scripture. It is frequently proposed that the letters sha , tsi , and cherv were taken from the letters shin ש and tsadi צ of the Hebrew alphabet, and that zhivete derives from Coptic janja . However, Cubberley suggests that if a single prototype were presumed, the most likely source would be Armenian. Several other scripts have been proposed as such single prototypes of the Glagolitic alphabet. A different set of hypotheses assumes that Cyril designed the letters from scratch on the basis of a common principle. Most notably, Georg Tschernochvostoff argued that all the Glagolitic letters were constructed from the Christian symbols cross, circle and triangle.Tschernochvostoff, Georg. 1995. Zum Ursprung der Glagolica. Studia Slavica Finlandensia 12. 141–150. A widely accepted example of deliberate construction are the symmetric letters i and slovo , which together form the abbreviation of the nomen sacrum Isusъ ‘Jesus’, but a general design principle like in the Canadian syllabics could not be proven. A plausible hypothesis is that “Cyril freely invented the Glagolitic letters, sometimes being inspired by theological ideas […] and sometimes using associations with other scripts he knew”.Bunčić, Daniel. 2024. Scripts. In Šipka, Danko & Browne, Wayles (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Slavic linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (DOI: 10.1017/9781108973021), 675–696, here: 678.
For writing numbers, the Glagolitic numerals use letters with a numerical value assigned to each based on their native alphabetic order. This differs from Cyrillic numerals, which inherited their numeric value from the corresponding Greek letter (see Greek numerals).
The two brothers from Thessaloniki, who were later canonized as Saints Cyril and Methodius, were sent to Great Moravia in 862 by the Byzantine emperor at the request of Prince Rastislav, who wanted to weaken the dependence of his country on East Frankish priests. The Glagolitic alphabet, however it originated, was used between 863 and 885 for government and religious documents and books and at the Great Moravian Academy (Veľkomoravské učilište) founded by the missionaries, where their followers were educated. The Kiev Missal, found in the 19th century in Jerusalem, was dated to the 10th century.
In 885, Pope Stephen V issued a papal bull to restrict spreading and reading Christian services in languages other than Latin or Greek. Around the same time, Svatopluk I, following the interests of the Frankish Empire and its clergy, persecuted the students of Cyril and Methodius, imprisoned and expelled them from Great Moravia.
In 886, an East Frankish bishop of Nitra named Wiching banned the script and jailed 200 followers of Methodius, mostly students of the original academy. They were then dispersed or, according to some sources, sold as slaves by the Franks. However, many of them, including Saints Naum, Clement, Angelar, Sava and Gorazd, reached the First Bulgarian Empire and were commissioned by Boris I of Bulgaria to teach and instruct the future clergy of the state in the Slavic language. After the adoption of Christianity in Bulgaria in 865, religious ceremonies and Divine Liturgy were conducted in Greek by clergy sent from the Byzantine Empire, using the Byzantine rite. Fearing growing Byzantine influence and weakening of the state, Boris viewed the introduction of the Slavic alphabet and language into church use as a way to preserve the independence of the Bulgarian Empire from Byzantine Constantinople. As a result of Boris' measures, two academies, one in Ohrid and one in Preslav, were founded.
Spread of the script