Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/186

 Wallachia and to his former liege lord, «Roumanian Prince of Moldavia». His successors were of the whole territory as far as the Dniester by 1400, so lightly was it held by the Mongol invaders. The division of the free Roumanian territory, which had detached itself from the subject province of Transylvania, was destined to endure until the eventful year of the first national union in 1859, followed by the second union in 1918, when Transylvania, and those parts of Moldavia which had been taken at a later date (Bukovina to Austria, Bessarabia to Russia) rejoined Roumania, and the wounds inflicted in 1100 by the Hungarians and in 1360 under the influence of an event in Hungarian history were at last heald [sic].

National division in the Middle Ages, continued in the modern and contemporary eras, was also the fate of the other races in South-Eastern Europe. After the destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire by the Byzantines and their allies, the Norman Russians of Kiev, at the end of the 10th century, a new and free «Bulgaria» arose in Macedonia, with the support of the new nations, the Albanians and the Roumanians of the Pindus. In the 14th century, while the «emperor», the counterfeit of the Byzantine Caesar, reigned in Trnovo, a second Bulgaria arose at Vidin on the Danube, representing the Serbo-Bulgarian districts of the west; a third Bulgaria succeeded to an older Byzantine fief embracing the Greek cities on the shores of the Black Sea, the Roumanian, and certain Bulgarian, villages of the hinterland. This kingdom, which had its capital at Varna, occupied the territories covered by the ancient Scythia Minor, the later Turkish Dobrudja.

The Serbs first formed a State on the coast of the Adriatic: then, in the interior, which was Byzantine and Orthodox, there arose a new State, the Rascia of the