Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/157

 long and, in the main, disastrously. The union of all Roumanians was thereby impeded for five hundred years.

Had there been a single ruler for the north and south, they would have been able to resist not only the rapacity of their Christian neighbours, the Hungarians and the Poles, but also the onslaught of the Ottoman Turk who considered himself the legitimate heir of Byzantium. What is more, that division into different and rival states was, a hindrance to the revival of a Roumanian political life in Transylvania, where the Magyar kings to whom an Apostolic mission of conquest, and of proselytism had been entrusted, had established their dominion since the beginning of the 12th century, though maintaining, a local «voevode» and respecting the country’s ancient customs.

Many were the times when the Moldavians and Wallachians, either of their own accord or following the commands of their Turkish suzerains, have entered this fair province, winning victories over the Hungarian nobles and Saxon bourgeoisie, settled there in the nth and 12th centuries. But they always returned, retaining only places of refuge or useful markets in this region which was never alien ground. Had it not been for the dual character of the Roumanian life east of the mountains, Transylvania, which for the Roumanian had no separate entity, would long ago have been incorporated in the Roumanian state, as it is now, by a natural consequence of the Roumanian unity.

Austrian diplomatists foretold this result, even as remotely as 1859, when Moldavia and Wallachia were united under the rule of Alexander Cuza.

But Transylvania remained a country of peasants, and exclusively so. It had no ancient leaders other than the priests, themselves of rustic origin and character, there being