Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/188

 of Scythia Major and Minor. The cities on the border of the Euxine were in the ancient times rich, ancient colonies of the Ionian and Dorian Greeks: Histria, Tomi, Kallatis and their dependencies such as Halmyros, but in the vici of the interior, on both banks of the Danube, the old Getic and Thracian life pursued its way under Roman forms.

Political division for the Roumanians was lasting, but in a completely unitary terrain. This was the origin of the important syntheses which gives them a place in world history. From Transylvania came the powerful influence of the German colonies of «Saxons», concentrated there by the Hungarian rulers after 1100. Wallachia received the heritage of the Slavonic countries subdued by the Turks, and was enriched by currents of western influence. Moldavia accepted the culture of Red Russia, and was brought into contact, through Poland, with the Latin Renaissance. Later, through French secretaries and teachers, she came, much more strongly than any other Roumanian province, under the influence of every form of western civilisation. Never was a single State in a position to blend so many different currents of culture together and to create, by healthy rivalry, a new form in the moral life of European civilisation.

If Roumania, the old Țara Românească, the modern Roumania, represents mediaeval «Roman» democracy at its fullest and most solid development by contrast to the international and inter-territorial empires whose last manifestations — Austria-Hungary and Russia — perished in the Great War, so the other «Roumania», not on the Black Sea but on the Adriatic, might have formed a second Roman State, had circumstances not prevented the development of its natural tendencies.