NTIL the dissolution of the Great Moravian Commonwealth at the close of the Xth century the people inhabiting modern Czechoslovakia lived within the political and cultural orbit of the Byzantine Empire and its Eastern Civilization. U With the dissolution of this Slavic Commonwealth as a result of fortunes of war, migration of new tribes from the east and dynastic alliances, the lands of the Czechs and Slovaks were pulled into the orbit of the Roman Empire and its Western Civilization, which through German territorial and cultural expansion engulfed them within the confines of the Germanic world, eradicating in the process most of the vestiges of Eastern religion, political institu- tions and social patterns.