Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/128



Nineteen centuries ago, a large but dispersed society inhabited not only the territory of the present-day Roumania, but also the whole Balkan Peninsula, the islands of the Archipelago and Asia Minor: the Thracians, neighbours of the Illyrians who dwelt on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. After a century or two, however, they had disappeared; with the single exception of the Greeks on the shores of all seas in this south-east corner of Europe, Latin-speaking subjects of the Roman Empire alone led a life in which all the traditions of the apparently completed past were to be recognised. Three centuries after this process of blending two very different civilisations, the Slavs, continuing the great movement of nations towards Constantinople and the great cities of new Rome, occupied the vast valleys of this territory not only as invaders, but as peaceful inhabitants: Roman and Slavonic tongues were spoken on the same spot. In a certain number of years, before 1000 AD certainly, a single mode of speech served for the manifestations of an apparently homogeneous people.

As these people began to organise, in forms corresponding to the oldest imperial traditions, under domini, who were called « domni», in their residences the Catholic priest sang the Mass in his way, while the poor Orthodox celebrant in his wooden church continued his accustomed oriental rites. The Gothic church of the princess, a foreigner, stood side by side with the Orthodox edifices in which all forms of the great Byzantine tradition were represented: Greek, Serbian; the art of the city and of the village and monastery, all were manifest.

There were two principalities: Moldavia in the north, the older, Wallachia in the south; a military and a popular state: two dynasties of opposite character, ever-ready to fight no matter who the opponent. At the beginning of the