The creation of the Glagolitic alphabet in the mid-ninth century was one of many
scholarly and educational initiatives taking place in the Byzantine Empire in the ninth
century. Constantinople had always had schools, books, and teachers dedicated
above all to training civil servants. But in the eighth century the number of
bureaucrats was dwindling, schools were decaying, and books, painstakingly written
out on papyrus, were disintegrating. Ninth-century confidence reversed this trend,
while fiscal stability and surplus wealth in the treasury greased the wheels. Emperor
Theophilus (r.829–842) opened a public school in the palace headed by Leo the
Mathematician, a master of geometry, mechanics, medicine, and philosophy.
Controversies over iconoclasm sent churchmen scurrying to the writings of the
Church Fathers to find passages that supported their cause. With the end of
iconoclasm, the monasteries, staunch defenders of icons, garnered renewed prestige
and gained new recruits. Because their abbots insisted that they read Christian texts,
the monks had to get new manuscripts in a hurry. Practical need gave impetus to the
creation of a new kind of script: minuscule. This was made up of lower-case letters,
written in cursive, the letters strung together. It was faster and easier to write than the
formal capital uncial letters that had previously been used. Words were newly
separated by spaces, making them easier to read. Papyrus was no longer easily
available from Egypt, so the new manuscripts were made out of parchment—animal
skins scraped and treated to create a good writing surface. Far more expensive than
papyrus, parchment was nevertheless much more durable, making possible their
preservation over the long haul.
A general cultural revival was clearly under way by the middle of the century. As
a young man, Photius, later patriarch of Constantinople (r.858–867, 877–886), had
already read hundreds of books, including works of history, literature, and
philosophy. As patriarch, he gathered a circle of scholars around him; wrote sermons,
homilies, and theological treatises; and tutored Emperor Leo VI. For his own part,
Constantine-Cyril, the future missionary to the Slavs, was reportedly such a brilliant
student in Thessalonica that an imperial official invited him to the capital, where he
met Photius:
When he arrived at Constantinople, he was placed in the charge of
masters to teach him. In three months he learned all the grammar and
applied himself to other studies. He studied Homer and geometry and
with Leo [the Mathematician] and Photius dialectic and all the teachings
of philosophy, and in addition [he learned] rhetoric, arithmetic,
