Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/51

 magnificent foundation was Hungary able to resume the offensive.

But at his moment the papacy, ready to abandon the Arpadians of Hungary as it had formerly the Carolingians of France in the day of their decay, now bethought itself of the possibility of direct action. This took the form of negotiations with the Wallachian chief, Joannice, ruler of certain Bulgarian lands, who considered himself, in contrast to the Latin intruders of Constantinople, as the true emperor of the Romans (that is to say the Greeks) as well as of his own Bulgars and Wallachians. He, and not the Arpadian, Andrew the Second, who headed a crusade into Egypt, was to be the armed hand of the Pope against the heretic. No flatteries were spared the proud barbarian, whose simple genealogy was connected by the skill of pontifical secretaries with the masters of ancient Rome. But Joannice deemed that his imperial mission in the East could be accomplished only by the preservation of his own orthodoxy.

The crown given to the Serbian voevode at almost the same time that pontifical crowns made kings of the rulers of Cyprus and Armenia, had the same significance.

Such direct intervention was the more necessary after the invasion of the Tartars, who seemed to have destroyed Hungarian power for ever.

As the realm partially recovered from this immeasurable catastrophe, against which the proud Pope Innocent III had found no means of fighting as in the days of his greatest triumphs at Lyons, the role of the apostolic kings was seen to lack support. At the beginning of the 12th century, however, King Bela called a band of the Teutonic knights who built wooden strongholds, assembled colonists in Southern Transylvania, then frequently infested by pagans from the opposite slopes of the mountains,