POLAND: How did the Western Slavs come to be Christians?

The Western Slavs were pagans until about a thousand years ago, when the centuries-long process of their Christianization began. But the path into the Roman Catholic Church wasn't the same for them all.

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[Artur_M.]

It's great to see you making videos in my country. It looks like it was shot some time ago. Are there any other videos from Poland coming?

[ScreamCZEG]

I am not sure how exactly have you meant that... but Moravia does not really corresponded to today's Slovakia... Czechia is made out of Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia. Moravia itself was (usually) "given" to king's heir - something like Prince of Wales to heir to British throne.
And for most of history, Bohemia and Moravia were part of Bohemian kingdom or later Czechoslovakia/Czechia.
But great video 👍

[ihmejakki]

Wonderful video, I often wondered why the western slavs are catholic and now I got it all in one story! Also, the "g" in magyar is pronounced like the "g" in goat or hagiography

[olowrohek]

Really interesting 👌
Was the Mountain Velky Pradziad a holly place before?
Pozdrawiom Wos.

[HoosierRallyMaster]

Cyril and Methodius are before the Great Schism, so wouldn't it be more proper to characterize them as Byzantine rather than Eastern Orthodox?

[AntonBalint-lo]

Great video, although you made a grave mistake when you called Cyricl and Methodius "Eastern Orthodox" - before 1054, it was one Church everywhere, no matter the worldly political and cultural centres.

[Artur_M.]

Although I liked this video as a whole, there's a part near the end that is simply bad and misleading. At first, I wanted to let it slide, as it's outside of the main topic of the video and explaining it would take a lot, but bear with me. King Sigismund (Zygmunt) III Vasa indeed invaded Muscovy/Russia in 1609 (earlier supporting a false claimant to the Russian throne in a civil war since 1605) beginning a bloody war lasting till 1618, which in turn was part of a bigger period of internal and external strife and general chaos in Russa, accompanied by famines, plagues and so on, known as "the Time of Troubles" or Smuta. But the goal of the Polish invasion was definitely *not* to forcibly convert huge Orthodox populations to Catholicism. In fact, the Polish commander who took Moscow in 1610 made a deal with Russian boyars according to which *the Polish prince Władysław was supposed to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy* and become the tsar. Sigismund didn't allow this deal to be realised but religious matters were only part of the reason, others were that he was simply afraid for his son's safety (contemporaries did actually criticise him for being an overprotective father) and that he preferred the much simpler goal of just weakening Russia and *regaining the territories lost by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to previous Muscovite invasions* especially the important city of Smolensk. There is a whole other Swedish angle to all of this but this comment is already getting g to long.

In general, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) was very diverse both ethnically and religiously and was quite tolerant for the time. That tolerance was legally guaranteed by the 1573 Warsaw Confederation, which became part of the Henrician Articles, which Sigismund (as an elected King) had to swear to abide by. That being said he was a staunch Catholic and supported the Counter-Reformation movement and his reign marked the beginning of the slow decline of the aforementioned religious tolerance. Related to that was the issue of the Church Union of Brest in 1596, which was supposed to unite the Catholic and Orthodox churches within the Commonwealth but instead created a schism among the Orthodox, and further disenfranchised the anti-union Orthodox Christians, contributing to rising tensions in Ukraine, which eventually led to the Khmelnytsky Uprising. The faction of the East Orthodox Church which accepted the Union of Brest became the Ruthenian Uniate Church, which is now the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church. The "Greek" in their names refers obviously to them being of the "Byzantine rite", not the Latin one, so they are Catholic but not Roman Catholic.

[عليريسؤينا]

Roman christian ignored moravian ruler? Weird

[fiaskolo]

Hundreds of thousands, millions of bodies.. Your source for such claims? The whole population of Europe at that time was tens of millions.

[aa-xnhc]

Please videos about the history of Russia

[fancyboy.]

Back then there was no Poland only a bunch of divided Slav people not yet united? It is still divided today, Polish sending arms to Ukraine to fight their Russian brother

[jj]

It's VACLAV not vanclav. You're pronouncing it like it has an 'n'