Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/132

 cultivation of the fields, but against these colonists, too, who were to form cities by themselves in the sense of the west, the same religious barrier was reared. Each of these nations remained as in an entrenched camp. Transylvania evolved a separate character which it has conserved to this day. As the Teutonic knights were called about the year 1200. from their distant strongholds in the Holy Land to be the guardians of these Transylvanian marches against the Pagans of the orient, they assembled Magyar colonies the better to delimit these borders. As a certain number of the Roumanian free-men too had had this same mission before, they intermingled, the Magyar language predominating, even among non-Magyar types, which is to be found in a minority of this highly intereesting population. The Transylvanian ethnographical aspect gained a new note by the creation of these so-called Szekler (or men of the « seats » or «tribunals » of justice).

About the year 1000 the first political foundations of the Roumanians are to be traced on the right bank of the Danube, under the influence of the Byzantine Empire, which had restored its northern frontier. Princes were mentioned in the Annals of Eastern Rome in the epoch of the Comnenes, in the neighbourhood of Silistra and in the present-day Dobrudja. This is a Byzantine form of state-creation. At that time a great part of the Roumanians on the left shore of the Danube lived in free associations of peasants which I call «Romaniae». Here we have another, rural, form of organisation. Some of these groups united in districts in the valleys, and possessed as military chiefs, and ranking superior to the civil judges, the dukes or, to use a Slavonic term, the voevodes. The second form evolved. The similar organisations of Transylvania were doomed to decay after the consolidation of the Magyar conquest.