March of Moravia

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The March or Margraviate of Moravia, sometimes called the Bohemian march within the Holy Roman Empire, was a marcher state, sometimes de facto independent and varyingly within the power of the Empire or the Duchy and later Kingdom of Bohemia. It comprised the region called Moravia within the modern Czech Republic.

The march was originally established, like its fellow marches — Austria, Styria, Carniola, and Carinthia — in the first half of the tenth century on land that had formerly been part of Great Moravia, a Slav state, by the Germans. It was intended to provide a buffer against the attacks of the Magyars.^[1]

When the Magyar threat disappeared in the second half of the 900s, it was replaced to the north of Moravia by a new threat: that of the Bohemians. In 955, the Bohemian duke Boleslaus I allied with the Emperor Otto I to defeat the Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld. Following the victory, Boleslaus received Moravia. Boleslaus I of Poland annexed Moravia in 999 and ruled it until 1019, when the Bohemian prince Bretislaus recaptured it. Upon his father's death in 1035, Bretislaus also became the ruler of Bohemia. In 1054, Bretislaus decreed that the Bohemian and Moravian lands would be inherited together by primogeniture, although he also provided that his younger sons should govern parts of Moravia as vassals to his oldest son. After that date, the march of Moravia was a Bohemian possession bestowed as a quasi-independent appanage on the younger sons of the Bohemian sovereigns. This appanage was usually held by dukes.

Because, of course, there were multiple younger sons at any given moment, the Duchy of Moravia was usually divided into two (varyingly) independent duchies (marches): Brno and Olomouc. Sometimes Znojmo too was the centre of a duchy. Because Bohemia was a vassal of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1182 Frederick Barbarossa intervened in Bohemian affairs to prevent any succession disputed by elevating Moravia to the status of a margraviate subject directly to the emperor. This status was short-lived: in 1197, Vladislaus III of Bohemia resolved the succession dispute between him and his brother Ottokar by abdicating from the Bohemian throne and accepting the margraviate of Moravia as a vassal of Bohemia.

[edit] Sources

• Semple, Ellen Churchill. "The Barrier Boundary of the Mediterranean Basin and Its Northern Breaches as Factors in History." Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 5. (1915), pp 27-59.
• Foundation for Medieval Genealogy: Moravia.

[edit] Notes