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Rh as lately as the eighteenth century; today, all that remains of the Slavs in Prussia and Saxony are the Lusatians or Sorbs.

This Germanising tendency was checked by Bohemia, which was able to resist the Holy Roman Empire—a continuation, in Teutonic garb, of the Roman Empire. Charles the Great joined hands with the Church, thus forming the strong organization of the mediaval theocracy; and Pangerman writers are full of praise for Rome and its Church, in that it helped the Emperors to Germanize the Slavs.

The revived empire organized its eastern outposts as Marches, notably those of the East (Ostmark, Oesterreich), and later Brandenburg—the foundations of Austria and Prussia. The Slavs of Bohemia and the other Bohemian countries (Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia) organized their State in a region where there were no effective remains of the Roman Empire; and even Christianity was brought to them from Constantinople. The Great Moravian Empire (830–894), comprising the Bohemian countries and extending south of the Danube in Hungary to the river Drave, was Christianized by the Slav apostles Cyril and Methodius. But the German Church, penetrating into Bohemia from Regensburg, succeeded in ousting the Slav Church of Moravia, while the Maygars, having settled in the wide plains of Hungary, made an end of the Moravian Empire. Slovakia was incorporated in Hungary early in the tenth century.

The invasion and settlement of the Magyars, a people of Mongolian origin, had, and has, a fatal significance for the Bohemians and Slovaks; it interrupted the unity of the Slav peoples, being a wedge driven between the northern and southern groups. The Magyars ceased to be nomads and accepted Christianity, but they have always remained antagonistic to the Slovaks and Southern Slavs.

After the fall of the Great Moravian Empire Bohemia soon became a strong State under native princes, and, in 1068, was acknowledged as a kingdom. The Kings of Bo-