Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/185

 judicatures », all « voevodates » were under the control of a «prince » resident in the castle of Argeș, concealed in a valley of the Carpathians. The down, who styled himself «sovereign of all the Roumanian land» and who resided first at Argeș, then in Târgoviște, and finally, descending towards the Danube, at Bucharest, was a ruler of a territorial unity which in theory represented a whole nation, a single race. He claimed to have sovereignty over all Roumanian districts, including those in fief to the Hungarian ruler, an usurper who ruled in the name of the Holy See of Rome, patron and organiser of crusades against heretics such as the Roumanians. The northern river-valley of Moldavia was, of course, included in this unity, together with the adjacent valleys of the Suceava, the Sereth, Pruth and Dniester, which were held under the nominal rule of the Tartars who, in the 13th century, had swept over the Russian steppe, laying claim to all territory in their path as far as the Carpathians. The Hungarian king, however, who, in the 13th century, had endeavoured to create a Roumania of his own in the south, wished to make of this borderland a Hungarian march against further invasion from Mongolia. This king, himself a cavalier of good French stock and the representative of crusading chivalry rather than a national severeign, sent one of his knightly followers, the Roumanian noble Dragoș, across the mountains. An ancient stronghold of the Hungarian realm had existed before the Tartar invasion, south of the newly-created fief, around the episcopal see of Milcov, which was transferred after the Tartar invasion to Bacău. The two Hungarian districts were conquered about 1360 by the rebellion of Bogdan, another Roumanian voevode, originally from the valleys of the Maramureș highlands. Bogdan styled himself, in opposition both to the ruler in