the representatives of the Roman and Byzantine Churches (the Roman being first), Kavkan Peter asked under whose jurisdiction the Bulgarian Church should fall. The Roman representatives were not prepared to discuss this matter. There appeared to have been a secret agreement between the Byzantine Patriarch, the Emperor and the Bulgarian emissaries. The Orthodox fathers immediately asked the Bulgarians whose clergy they had found when they came to the lands which they now ruled. They answered "Greek". The Orthodox fathers declared that the right to oversee the Bulgarian Church belonged only to the Constantinople Mother Church, which had held jurisdiction on these lands in the past. The protests of the Pope's emissaries were not taken into account. With the approval of the Knyaz and the Fathers of the council, the Bulgarian Church was declared an archbishopric. The archbishop was to be elected among the bishops with the approval of the Knyaz. The creation of an independent Bulgarian archbishopric was unprecedented. Usually, independent churches were those founded by apostles or apostles' students. For a long period, Rome had been challenging Constantinople's claim of equality to Rome on the grounds that the Church of Constantinople had not been founded by an apostle of Christ. Prior to the middle of the 9th century, in the practice of the formally united Church, there were no precedents for creating national churches among newly converted peoples. Such nationalization of the church and liturgy was exceptional and not at all part of the practice of other European Christians. Bulgaria created this precedent and set the example for others to follow. Just six years after his conversion, the Orthodox Church granted Knyaz Boris a national independent church and a high-ranking supreme representative (the archbishop). Over the next 10 years, Pope Adrian II and his successors made desperate attempts to regain their influence in Bulgaria and to persuade Knyaz Boris to leave Constantinople's sphere. The conversion of the Bulgarians to Christianity and the establishment of the Bulgarian national Church coincided with the unprecedented cultural prosperity in Bulgaria which had begun in 855 AD with the adopting of the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius' alphabet, who under the patronage of Knyaz Boris implemented for the first time, the Cyrillic alphabet and established literary schools in Pliska and Ohrid. This led to the Slavic Old Church Slavonic becoming the official language of the Bulgarian Church as well as initiating the beginning