Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/181

 same meaning, replaced the original title, probably on account of the latter’s similarity to and possibility of confusion with the third person of the present indicative tense of the verb a duce (Latin: ducere).

At a later date it was undoubtedly possible, among the Roumanians as among their Italian kinsfolk or the Hungarians, for the judge to be merely a rural functionary of the feudal landowner. This was, in fact, his status in that part of «Țara Românească » conquered by the Hungarian kings, who were in the first place voevodes (as they are indeed called in the Byzantine sources), at any rate up to the reign of Stephen the First.

The Carolingian duke, the French governor on the middle Danube, where the Avars had been vanquished and whose inheritance passed to the Moravian kings, as Sviatopluk, and later to the Hungarians, was appointed by the king, the emperor of his nation, and in the Danubian countries no such title existed. It is therefore probable that the duke was elected by the judges, just as these latter were themselves elected by the peasants in an assembly convoked and presided over by the « oameni buni și bătrâni».

In the middle of the 13th century, after an earlier Roumanian organisation on the right bank of the Danube, round Silistra, had disappeared, the Roumanians south of the mountains were now ruled by judges only, who also bore the princely title of « cnezi » (singular: cneaz, as in Russian). In the « judicature » of Argeș, however, was a free voevode, who refused to recognise the authority of the Apostolic king in Hungary, the successor, appointed by the Pope, of the Carolingian dynasty. Later, he brought under his sceptre the territories on the right bank of the Olt, and represented, for the whole nation, the local, patriarchal successor of an emperor, who could not