The oldest Glagolitic
manuscript known before 1830 was a Psalter of A.D. 1220; i.e. more
than three and a half centuries younger than the Cyrillic alphabet,
and evidently copied from a known manuscript written in this latter.
This, in connection with some other circumstances, induced the learned
Dobrovsky to declare the whole alphabet to be the result of a pious
fraud. It seems surprising that this view should have been generally
adopted,--at least for a certain time. It was explained by Dobrovsky
in the following way.
At a Synod held at Spalatro in Dalmatia, in A.D. 1060, Methodius,
notwithstanding he had been patronized by several popes, was declared
a heretic, nearly two hundred years after his death; and it was
resolved that henceforth no mass should be read except in the Latin or
Greek language. From the decrees of that Synod, it appears that they
took the Gothic and Slavonic for the same idiom. A great part of the
inhabitants of Illyria remained nevertheless faithful to their
language, and to a worship familiar to their minds through that
language. A singular means, Dobrovsky asserts, was found by some of
the shrewder priests, to reconcile their inclinations with the jealous
despotism of Rome. A new alphabet was invented, or rather the Cyrillic
letters were altered and transformed in such a way, as to approach in
a certain measure to the Coptic characters.
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