Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/170

 character. In the Carpathians, the Empire was absent; no barbarian system of government was at hand to exercise the same power. Great cities had disappeared, the rural group was the sole surviving reality. The peasants lives in separate villages, each of them a patriarchal autonomy; the idea of the emperor gave a certain cohesion to these scattered units of social life. That was all. In time of war a group of villages would organise itself under the leadership of the dukes. After a time one of them became a domn (dominus), exercising power and having almost imperial sway over his subjects. His country was « the Roumanian lands » in the strictest national sense, not a state of the Balkans, not an ambitious copy of the Roman Empire of the East.

No political difference can be more strongly marked than this. In the Balkans the Christian regime was substituted by the last form of Rome, the Mussulman Rome of the Turks. The old system was preserved under the new masters: nothing essential was changed. Upon the left bank of the Danube the complete autonomy of the Princes of Moldavia and Wallachia was not diminished by the acceptance of Turkish suzerainty. They were the same rulers with the imperial might of the old emperors and, further, the Crown of the Byzantine Caesars seemed to be surrendered to them, the natural protectors of the Eastern Church. The four patriarchs lived under the control and by the grace of these crowned leaders of the Orthodox community. The Turks merely occupied the fortresses of the Danube, alone considered the conquest of the Sultans. In the interior there was no community with the Turk. The political masters held no rights other than that of granting investiture to princes « by the Grace of God » — never the grace of an earthly monarch, — and to receive annual tribute. Pashas commanded in Buda,