Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/15



Wallachia and conqueror of Transylvania and Moldavia, the natural leader of all Greeks, to whom he belonged on his mother’s side, and a potential emperor of a free Byzantium. His poem, of long harmonious rhythm, is an imitation of the « Gerusalemme Fiberata ». At the same time, the simple popular form was employed by one of Michael’s officers, the Greek Stavrinos, to celebrate the same stirring exploits. The Greek domain of Venice had still, for the most part, been preserved. It was unfruitful in many districts, as in the formerly illustrious island of Cyprus, that heritage of the French knightly kings, the Fusignans, of literary products. Crete was the sole domain of literature in the colonial empire of the Republic. If Palamede, a Greek, could use the form of Tasso, a contemporary, for presenting an oriental subject, to Vincenzo Cornaro, an Italian of old noble family, must the credit go for the idea of recurring to the memories of eastern contests of chivalry (between the Dukes of Athens, the Lords of Morea, and their adversaries) in order to compose the popular poem of the «New Erotocrite». The first Greek plays after the Italian manner were written, and perhaps performed, in the same island, which may thus be considered to have been the cradle of the new Greek literature.

At this moment not only French diplomacy in Constantinople, honoured before all other because the kings of France were praised as the Lords of all Christianity, as the emperors among the « believers of Jesus », spoke and wrote Italian in all their relations with the Turks of the Sulimanic era, but the Italian of the concetti was the courtly language in the milieu of the ruling dowager queen, the Florentine Catherine de Medicis. A refugee from the East, the most handsome, intelligent and gifted of all Oriental adventurers, the Wallachian Peter Cercel (