Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/153



When one comes from the former country of Maramureș, now divided between Roumania and the Carpathian Ruthenians under Czechoslovakian rule, and descends into the valleys of the so-called Austrian Bukovina and, further, into the larger settlements of the vanished principality of Moldavia, one encounters representatives of another race — tall men of war-like appearance with long hair and swarthy skins, with the dignified demeanour of true aristocrats. They possess a certain courtesy of manner and dignity which no injustice or opression has been able diminish. Knights under the Angevin banners, defenders of the marches against the pagans of the east, counsellors of autochton princes: such was the Moldavian chivalry.

And a new state has sprung up whose monuments are not only churches, but ancient strongholds, scattered at all strategic points of the principality and guarding the homes of the princes. Everything in the principality has a war-like character.

From the feeble political beginnings of Wallachia a stronger organisation was slowly shaped. First judges over groups of small settlements throughout an entire valley: then, in times of danger, dukes after the manner of the Frankish rulers of Central Europe under the Carolingians, the armed apostles of the Catholic faith; finally, greater than any of these, was the popular emperor, ruling oyer a whole country, the domn, whose title derived from the Latin dominus. These last were capable of defending themselves from the ambitions of the Hungarian kings who had, at that time, conquered that part of the Roumanian territory of traditional right known as Transylvania. In the mediaeval ensemble they attained a yet more advanced stage of development. The tomb of Bassarab, the reigning prince of the first decades of the 14th century,