Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/161

 of Greek blood. The ruins of these fortresses are to be seen to this day. Athens itself had, up to the moment of its transformation into a copy of antiquity, a French tower in memory of the departed dukedom of the invaders.

But this influence extended itself over other fields of Greek life. The French in the middle ages were the creators of epic literature, the chansons de geste of France being the source of the inspiration for the Niebelungenlied of the Germans. Within the stone walls of the castles, the old songs of the distant homeland were frequently heard, and they were not exclusively confined to the members of this brilliant chivalry. The subject nation too was incited to give the same form, in verses of similar composition, to the same subjects or to such as were to be found in the local traditions and memories. So Blanchefleur was adopted as an image of the adored one, and the history of the Morea, with its fights and victories, its adventures and reverses, was clothed in a foreign garment, forming the well-known version in two of the western languages. Later, when a Greek « condottiere », a stratiote was lauded in long lines of a western type, the original note of this borrowed literature was recognisable.

In the 14th century this world, divided and exhausted by continual strife, had ceased practically to exist: Catalans and French, Navarrese and Teuton knights in their fierce struggles killed the « Frankish »influence in the Morea and in the adjacent provinces of the Greek peninsula.

An epoch began in which all the efforts of the French tended towards the creation of a ruling monarchy of Roman type, almost to be realised under Phillipe le Bel, and interrupted by the brilliant and disastrous return of the Middle Ages in the form of the Hundred Years War. France was separated from England, from the England which was prepared, by a long process of infiltration, to become