What political and strategic moments dictated this Byzantine mission and what were relations with Bulgaria like?

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(c) What political and strategic moments dictated this Byzantine mission and what were relations with Bulgaria like?

The moment of sending the mission was determined by purely political and military-strategic factors. By the year 861 the relations between Moravia and the Germans had been strained for a long time and were characterized by permanent wars and tension. Nearly always Bulgaria was the ally of the former state of the Franks, and later of that of the Germans, actually fighting against the Slavs in Moravia. This traditional Germanophile policy of Bulgaria since those early centuries was also the result of the constant military conflicts with Byzantium, at whose expense Bulgaria expanded its territories. In 862 Louis the German sent his own mission to the Bulgarian Prince Boris to negotiate a war against Slavic Greater Moravia, and perhaps proposing to him the conversion of the Bulgarian state to Christianity through the Roman rites. At the same time, in order to thwart the new war and hamper the Germano-Bulgarian military alliance, knowing of the attitude of the Byzantine Empire towards Bulgaria, the Greater-Moravian Prince Rostislav sent a mission to Constantinople and asked for direct military assistance in political alliance with Byzantium, as well as preachers and teachers in the Slavonic language, to protect Greater Moravia from the subversive actions carried out by the German Roman clergy, who supported the Germano-Bulgarian alliance. The result of all these military, strategic, political and other combinations was the mission of Cyril and Methodius to Greater Moravia in 862/863. To understand better the anti-Bulgarian character of Cyril and Methodius’s mission it is sufficient to mention that in 863 the Bulgarian Prince Boris, together with Louis the German, waged a war against Greater Moravia and against Louis’s disloyal son Carloman, while in early 864 the Byzantine Empire attacked Bulgaria and compelled Boris to break up his alliance with the Germans, and, among other things, to receive Christianity through Constantinople.