Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/195

 discover, by cranial measurement, the true character of these villagers: it admits too that the great majority of Montenegrins are not Slavonic.

An important congregation of Roumanians, Vlachs or Vallachs (for origin cf. Welsh, Walloon), lived in the mountains at the end of the Middle Ages. They fed their flocks and sold their fresh cheeses, their caseus de Valachia, in Ragusa and other cities of the sea-coast, their pastoral commerce extended as far as the Holy Mountain of Athos, where, finally, they were excluded, on account of the presence of their women, who accompanied them. No caravan leader enjoyed more repute than the Vlach. In the 14th century they probably still spoke Roumanian: in any case, their names preserved the characteristic feature of the suffixed article (drac-ul the dragon, from drac, draco). A century later, the coastal Vlachs still used this termination, but these Morlachs, these Vlachs of the sea, were united to the Slavonic shepherds of the interior, to whom they bequeathed their ethnographical name. In Serbia today only a few scattered groups recall to the ethnographist, by this or that feature, a vanished zone of Romance people.

The erstwhile Romance peasant had now become, as I have said, a new element in the invading forces which surrounded the slowly yielding and changing cities. The denationalisation of the urban centres was rendered increasingly inevitable by the change in the most conservative of all elements of any population, the peasantry.

The preservation of the Romance peasantry was not the only condition necessary for the formation of a modern Romanic State in the Balkans. To hold their own against the Slavonic menace they needed a definite principle of organisation. This was present for the Roumanians when they were assailed, but not vanquished by the 181