Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/13



Slavonic and not Latin. The only people among the races in this part of Europe speaking a Latin language and thinking in Latin was the last to participate in the currents sweeping from the great western Latinity.

Only in an isolated city of the Adriatic, Ragusa, subjected alternately to the Norman and Venetian will and maintaining unbroken relations with all cities on the coast of Italy overlooking it, the transmission of literary influence was never interrupted. This course was pursue dafter the common Italian tongue had taken the place of the Slavonic of the surrounding countries. The neighbouring Slavs of the Serb branch and, through their intermediary, other Balkan States took from Ragusa such celebrated books as the Romance of Alexander the Great, enriched by the skill of a southern Italian wrister. Besides the works of imagination coming from Byzantium, and thanks to the lively spirit of the Ragusan, to his interest in new things, the peninsula was able to lay claim to poetic achievements of which the far more developed Occident need not have been ashamed. But the part played by Eastern inspiration in fairy tales and treatises on life-philosophy remained predominant.

The sixteenth century was in most of the western countries first and foremost an age of scholarship. The Renaissance brought editions of the classics, commentaries, grammars, dictionaries, servile imitations of the Romans and the Greeks. South-Eastern Europe, being partly the Hellenic territory of old, gained an importance which, up to this moment, had not been recognised. Travellers like Bongars came to Wallachia, to the Balkans, in search of documents of epigraphy; the ambassadors of all Christian nations were often commissioned to buy rare manuscripts. The supporters of insurgent Protestantism, in their fight against Catholicism, hoped to find allies