Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/190

 life of St. Severin remains to show how very different was the reality in Pannonia, which was traversed by the bands of Germanic appertaining to the minor races such as the Heruls), the invaders could only move along the great Roman highway and over the country immediately adjacent. They were incapable of laying siege to the cities, still less of administering government as the Romans understood it. They were impelled neither by hatred nor contempt for the old order of things: they entertained no ambitious plans of founding a new State, nor were they bent on setting a catastrophe in motion. What they desired was loot and tribute: the ambition of their chiefs was to be recognised as overlords. This indeed they wanted, but nothing more (so in the territories which later formed mediaeval Austria, as Eugyppius, St. Severin’s pupil and biographers, shows): it has been repeated in terms of con temporary critical history by the Austrian professor Dopsch.

Ragusa, then, was not conquered: indeed, she was invincible. Weak and deserted, defended only by her tiny army, called a bandon or harm (so at least the 7th century Byzantine chronicler, Theophylactus Simocatta, testifies of the right bank of the Danube), she was better able than the city of the Pannonian saint to withstand sudden attack from neighbouring barbarians. Like the cities on the right bank of the Danube under the Emperor Mauricius, like the ancient Roumanians in their villages, she preserved the enduring memory of her only legitimate lord, the Caesar of New Rome. She even remained an imperial city, ready to receive into her harbour the imperial fleet in its varying campaigns against Saracens and Normans, ready to send tribute to the remote capital of the Empire, to commemorate the heir of Constantine in the prayers celebrated at her Catholic cathedral, to employ the