Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/155

 yielded to the fortunate discoverer of a later period a diadem of pearls, a red silk surcoat embroidered with the lilies of the French dynasty then reigning in Hungary, besides a golden belt and rings of the same metal. All these were evidence of a monarchy, unique in the Europe of its time, which combined such imposing borrowed symbols of royal rank with the truest traditions of its rural descent.

The peaceful Moldavian peasant of today appears just to have returned from a hard-fought battle with the invaders of his fatherland, be he Tartar or Turk, or those neighbours who dreamed of extending their boundaries to the shores of the broad Danube or the Black Sea. Impoverished the Moldavians might have been, but they were not humiliated by a vassalage which was never true serfdom in the occidental meaning of the word. Their « boyar » was the descendant of their former leaders in the battles for the common heritage. In him they revered their own past of suffering and revenge. A village was not, as in Wallachia, the homing-place of a clan descended from the same ancestor, the founder of the community, but was a military unit as well. In time of danger, when beacons burned on the hills to herald the approach of hereditary foeman, they assembled under the leadership of their vătăman («captain» from a Slavonic derivation of «hauptmann») eager to fly to the assistance of their supreme lord, the Domn, an untiring defender of the Christian faith, as was Stephen the Great, for instance, in the 15th century.

Today the Wallachian peasant indifferently regards the passer-by clad in dark garments of orthodox cut, which contrast strangely with his own picturesque white shirt and cream tight trousers: to him he is merely an interloper, much as the crow in his near-by corn. In Moldavia any «foreigner» apparently of a superior station of life 141