Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/177

 like those founded by the Saxons in the 9th century. A city can decay, its limits can be contracted, as in the case of Bordeaux in the Middle Ages, it can be transformed into a mere group of cottages.

The villages of ancient Dacia were romanized by the natural advance of the Romans, as in the Balkans they assumed the same Roman elements: in their private lives, however, very little can have been changed. We know nothing of the organisation of the Dacian rural community, but it is probable that the «davas» in Dacia and the « paras» in the Balkans were ruled by local chiefs who were in their turn the vassals of valley-princes, the supreme leader being a king of the type of Decebalus:. Rome introduced, at the moment of conquest, the new forms of colonies and municipies both are typical of urban life and, although they may have influenced economic conditions in the villages, the two forms of settlement were obviously too divergent to modify one another.

Even after the Emperor had abandoned the populations of both Dacias, that of Trajan and Aurelian’s substitute province, the villages of the north Danubian province continued to look upon the imperial authority as emanating from their legal master, as the legitimate form of government. For the modern Albanian the chief of the State, now an independent « monarch », is an mbret, which is an abbreviation of the word «imperator ». Among the Roumanians of the Balkans, Albania’s neighbours, the word « amira » became current for « emperor ». This was a relic of the Ottoman conquest of the emirs, the later sultans and padishahs; for the great mass of the nation, the supreme political leader is the impdrat. Princes and kings have only borrowed names: craiu from the Slavonic name of Charlemagne, krai (Polish korol, Hungarian kiraly) ; only the Emperor, whom the Slavs called «Czar», retained