Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/14

 in the indigent Greek Church, subjected to the spoliation and humiliation of the Turk. The Germans were thus interested in the Orthodox faith. Crusius, the author of the « Turco-Graccia », Gerlach, who has bequeathed us his priceless Byzantine Journal, and Chytraeus were the missionaries of these religious and archaeological explorations. But only in Ragusa was Petrarch, and even Dante himself, known and imitated; throughout the rest of this broad region no hope of literary influence was to be found. In the Italian-speaking quarters of Constantinople, Pera and Galata, in Chios (autonomous until the second half of the century) habits of life were mainly occidental, but literature consisted only in the preservation of the old popular songs. The reason of this was that for a profane literature the conditions were here wanting; the life of an enlightened court or of a highly developed and very rich middle-class. The Wallachian princess Catherine, the daughter of an occidental-minded father, had in Venice, in the retirement of Murano, a Latin sister, called, after the Roumanian manner, Mărioara, and the latter corresponded with Veronese himself. The very commonplace character of the correspondence this princess maintained with Mărioara, however, is in the debased Greek of her day.

There is a single case of occidentalism — that is to say of Italian occidentalism — in the Greek literature of the period, and it conserves the Hellenic form. A great role was played at this juncture by the Roumanians in the Christian life of South-Eastern Europe, where their princes superseded the old Roman emperors and influenced the mixed Occidental and Oriental culture of such Russian territories as were subject to the Polish crown. The example is the epic of a Cretan, George Palamede, consecrated to the martial deeds of Michael the Brave, Prince of