Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/131



When the Touranians, masters of the Steppes, the Huns, Avars, Petchenegs, Cumans, Tartars came with different manners of life, they were wholly incapable of influencing this ever-developing synthesis. There was no partaking in the work, no means of striking a new note in this historical social symphony.

It was otherwise with the Slavs.

The character of their invasion is imperfectly recorded.

They came, not as mild dreamers, devoted to the gods of stream and river, nor were they the teachers in the agricultural sense of much older imitators of Rome as the ancestors of the Roumanians in the 6th and 7th centuries. But neither were they, on the other hand, the wild warriors capable of destroying all trace of their predecessors in the domination of the Balkans. I have sought to show the means they employed in crossing the Danube, ways which correspond to the great routes of ancient civilisations. Some were left behing in extended groups of villages, and these were easily assimilated by the great Roumanian masses. Where the Slavonic agricultural terms are numerous in the Roumanian language, this is not to be explained by the Roumanians having been taught by the newcomers; the old inhabitants were accustomed to ploughing the fields, but the Slavized-Greek merchants on the right bank of the Danube later exercised a strong influence upon the Roumanians.

No other foreign influence was to change the substance of a new and entirely consolidated nation. Though the Magyars were sent into Transylvania, they only formed isolated oases, in the boroughs of Carolingian imitation and in the neighbouring villages. The religious separation between these Catholics and the Orthodox Roumanian population was an insuperable obstacle. The Saxons were brought from their ancient lands on the Moselle for the better -