Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/178

 his ancient and venerated title. The title of king has no such antiquity: for the Roumanian never lived under the rule of the German konige, called reges by the Romans (Russian: knyaz) nor under the Touranian «kha-gans », whose title has survived in the Carpatho-Danubian countries only as applied to the sovereign of the later Tartars: han or han-tatar. This is also the reason why, while the coming of the Avars created an Avaria in the Western Balkans, and the Italians in Western Europe inhabited a Langobardia, the Gallo-Romans a Francia, the Roman population of both banks of the Danube retained the name of Roman (roman) and speaking Roumanian (românește) in the Terra Romanesca (Țara Românească).

With no foreign overlordship, this isolated fragment of Rome was constrained at last to adopt a political system similar to that found, for instance, in Central Gaul in the 5th century, where the rural population, while preserving all deference to the Emperor, elected kings (reges) of the type of Syagrius or Aegidius. In « Roumania » however, the ruler’s authority was at first confined to the narrow limits of the «sat», the free defensible village (from the Latin: fossatum, a fenced establishment). By a reversion to the most elementary and natural conditions of human society, the power was vested in the elders, who may be compared to the aldermen of Anglo-Saxon civilisation, the Greek gerontes, who persisted up to mediaeval and even modern times, the Russian starosti. The title of these lowly senators was «oameni buni și bătrâni» (homines boni et veterani), like the boni homines frequently mentioned in the mediaeval manuscripts of many Italian regions. In all Roumanian popular records up to a recent date, the witnesses are always such « good old villagers ».

Directed by their prestige and their counsel, the small unit lived an existence of its own. Thousands of title-deeds show