Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/198

 subjects, whom the arms of their tireless peasants and shepherds defended.

Like their predecessors of true Slav-Touranian blood, they were impelled towards the possession of Constantinople, the conquest of which by the Latins was an encouragement for Ioniță (Johannicius for the Pope) — the third of the brothers who revolted about 1200. Their highest hope was to be crowned in Hagia Sofia, but, failing to achieve this summit of their ambitions, they contented themselves with the title of Czar, which the true Bulgarian sovereigns had borne on the shores of the Euxine. Pontifical chanceries might style them «kings of the Vlachs and Bulgars» and speak to them, on occasion, of their Roman ancestry: but for them the highest praise was to be recognised as the successors of Czar Symeon, the pupil and rival of Byzantium, the truest «emperor» of all Bulgarian Czars.

Thus the Romance element in the Balkans worked in two different forms and by two different means towards the formation and maintenance of Slavonic States. Firstly, through the old peasants of the Adriatic, transformed into authentic Slavs by serving a series of Serbian chiefs, princes, kings and emperors, who colonised many of the «transhumant» Vlachs on the lands of the monasteries which they built; secondly, through the initiative of Roumanian chieftains, admitted as such by Byzantium, whose revolt against imperial oppression and cruelty gave the weakened and depleted Bulgarian upper classes the opportunity of renewing their lost State, with the benediction of the national Slavonic church. On the left bank of the Danube only, has mediaeval «Romania» survived to modern times as a solid national state, ruled by sovereigns of an imperial character.