Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/134

 and requests: this was popular and of very old tradition.

Moldavia and Wallachia had in the beginning marked differences of organisation: the first under the stronger influence of Hungary, the second also subject to the interference of Poland, which had extended its frontiers to embrace the former Russo-Lithuanian state. In the 15th century very little remained of this differentiation. The political synthesis existed and, as the Phanariots of the 18th century began their reforms, these were extended over the two principalities without discrimination.

The people had long been united. The same mode of thought and feeling, the same traditions and the same enduring superstitions were common to each. The Roumanians living in the mountains of Maramureș? (the original conquerors of Moldavia came from here) were and still are able to understand and sympathise with the riverdwellers of the Danube: only between the Roumanians of ancient Dacia and their co-nationals in the deep valleys of the Pindus is this practically an impossibility: the language differs in certain essentials, when not in the morphology and the basic details of the vocabulary. Now the great families have begun to disappear, because of the accustomed changes of the princes from one principality to another, the old sense of a particular right for the now extinct dynasties having faded away. Each prince who was allied to the indigenous nobility brought his relatives with him. A single class of leaders was formed in this way during the course of the 18th century.

In the religious field this same transformation was rapidly accomplished. The catholic propaganda of the Franciscans and the black-gowned fraternity of St. Dominic owed their earlier successes to the need for the rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia of military aid from the