Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/12

 the Comnene crown; inasmuch as it broke the continuity of the old Greek fashions, the ruling Occident was personified by the Venetian merchants, and the supremacy of the Italian language (established in Byzantine times when Venetian, Genoese, Pisan, and the old Amalfitans were considered the natural bourgeoisie of this new Rome), became more and more apparent. This familiarity with the spoken language of the majority of the Latin inhabitants of the eastern capital was to outlive all changes in the imperial domination and to subsist down to the seventeenth century.

But it is necessary to add that this long intercourse in the middle-ages as well as in the modern era had no literary influence; it remained in this sense — not like art, which became, in the days of the Palaeologues, common to East and West — completely sterile.

In the fifteenth century, Bulgaria no longer existed in the politically-important part of mediaeval SouthEastern Europe. In literature it owed all to Byzantium, the works of which passed to some extent into the old Slavonic tongue through the efforts of the cultured clergy at the court of the Czars. The Roumanian territories were particularly characteristic of that time and in this respect. Their epic poetry was at first the mere translation of Serbian songs. Then upon this model new forms were created, epitomising the exploits of the reigning princes or of their predecessors. Lyric poetry, less popular than the epic in the regions south of the Danube, had as its point of departure the same as what surely had been formerly achieved in mediaeval Italy, but feelings belonging to this sentimental and visionary race were expressed in noborrowed forms; this is the origin of the melancholy doinas, which sang of love and especially of the longing for the loved one, But for the epics the models employed were