Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/204

 title of voevod; the duchies coalesced into counties (țeri: terrae) and, in the absence of an Emperor, a peasant Emperor, a domn (dominus), who could not assume the full title of the Caesars, took the first place among the various popular chiefs. The oldest democracy of Europe was alone able to create a State of its own which preserved the name of «Roman Country» — «Țara Românească».

Another characteristic of Roumanian history is the way in which, thanks to geographical conditions, it was able to combine all currents of Art, and, to a lesser degree, all tendencies of thought, Eastern and Western alike, in an ethnographical synthesis. Before the Slavs of the 7th century altogether disappeared as an ethnical component, such tendencies as could form a corresponding synthesis in the moral field of artistic creation were retained. The primitive popular tradition formed a common basis connecting them all.

Byzantine art was transplanted into this new soil immediately after the foundation of the earlier southern principality of Wallachia. Hence it passed naturally into the northern principality of Moldavia, and into that part of the Daco-Roumanian heritage which was still enslaved: Transylvania. It was forced, however, to adopt the basic local characteristics: the love of bright, striking colours, invariable in Roumania. Thus the frail wooden improvisations and stones dipped in cement — the former serving as a frame for the latter — were replaced by better, larger stone buildings with a narthex — later doubled by an open peristyle — a nave and a secluded, mysterious altar, in front of which stood a wall or wooden screen covered with religious scenes and figures. The Gothic of Transylvania added only ornaments of carved stone round the windows and doors: crossed lineals of window frames and a series of tall, interlacing ogives. The outer walls