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• in a later age when language was used to unify a political nation, intellectuals or politicians standardized a dialect somewhere between the ends of a dialect continuum, that could become a modern literary language understood by tens of millions of people. That in effect was what Martin Luther unwittingly accomplished by translating the Bible into ...
• From the early Middle Ages, we thus witness the rise of Polish, Bulgarian, Serb, Bosnian, Croat, and Hungarian kingdoms. The ninth century also saw a greater Moravian empire, in which West Slavic chieftains ruled over parts of the lands that would become the modern Czech and Slovak republics. (Moravia is now a region in the Czech Republic).
• To bolster their pretensions to rule over people across vast spaces, the early kings fostered the spread of Christianity: they supported the emergent church hierarchy, and the church proclaimed their rule to be legitimate. We date the mass baptisms of Croats, Serbs, Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, and Hungarians from the ninth and tenth centuries. In Eu...
• 1054, when the patriarch of Constantinople and the bishop of Rome excommunicated each other and Christendom divided into eastern and western churches.