The Moravians were among the earliest Slavic tribes converted to Christianity. As early as the seventeenth century a considerable portion of them were baptized by German priests. It was however not before the first half of the ninth century, that the first Christian missionaries entered Bohemia. In the year 845, fourteen Bohemian princes were baptized at Ratisbon. In the year 894 the duke Borzivog, the head of the nation, received baptism; but his successors went back to idolatry, and with them the greatest part of the people. Christianity was not firmly established in these regions until the second half of the tenth century. At this time the Slavic liturgy introduced by Methodius into Moravia was already, in some measure, by the indefatigable exertions of the Romish German priesthood, superseded by the Latin worship. Thus it never was fully established in Bohemia with the exception of a few churches, attached to convents founded expressly in memory of the Slavic saints, Jerome, Cyril, and Methodius. Their inmates however were expelled in favour of German-Bohemian monks, or they died; and with them disappeared every vestige of the innovations of Cyril and Methodius. Hence the Old Slavic language, and the noble translation of the Bible extant in it, have exercised only an inconsiderable influence on the Bohemian idiom.[7] Bohemia, under the sovereignty of her dukes, and from A.D. 1198, under that of kings, was independent of the German empire, or at least did not belong to its circles; it recognized however a kind of sovereignty in that powerful neighbour, and the kings of Bohemia deemed it an honour to belong to the seven Electors, who chose the worldly head of Christianity. In the year 1306, the last male descendant of Perzmislas was murdered. His house had reigned in Bohemia in uninterrupted succession; although the kingdom was properly not hereditary, but elective, like Germany, Hungary, and Poland. After a short interval, the crown of Bohemia fell by succession to the house of Luxemburg, and thus became several times united with the Roman imperial crown. Under the emperor Charles IV, Bohemia rose to the summit of its lustre. It was he who founded, A.D. 1348, the university of Prague, the first Slavic institution of that description.[8] Under his successor, Wenceslaus, the war of the Hussites began. In the year 1457. the Bohemians maintained their right of election by placing George Podiebrad, a Bohemian, on the throne. The wisdom and equity of this individual justified their choice. In A.D. 1527, Ferdinand I, archduke of Austria, was elected king; and from that time the Bohemians have never again been able to detach themselves from Austria; with the exception of a short interval, during which the unfortunate palatine Frederic, known in the history of the thirty years' war, was placed on their throne. During the fifteenth, sixteenth, and the first half of the seventeenth, centuries. Bohemia was almost without interruption