Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/53



Both attempts to enlist the aid of the knights had failed. But the Pope had yet another instrument to his hand for the extension of his power over the heretical, schismatical South-Eastern Europe, in the newly-created orders of the Dominican and Franciscan friars, whose only weapon was that of an untiring propaganda.

In the second half of the 13th century both were sent to the Danubian territories to work under the leadership of the Hungarian sovereigns. Thus the See of Severin, that of Milcov, or that of the Cumans, could be preserved from retrogression. The Bosniac heresy of the Patarenes or Bogomiles, an Asiatic doctrine transmitted by Anatolian colonists in Thrace to the Bulgars, had in these new and fervent apostles its fiercest enemy.

But to renew the offensive energetically there had to be two new factors besides the conquering spirit of the Popes of Avignon. First the creation of enduring States on the Roumanian slopes of the Carpathians: Wallachia, towards the year 1300, and, half a century later, Moldavia. Secondly, the substitution of the degenerate Ar-padians in Hungary, suspected of having connived at the heathen usages of the Cumans, by the new and fierce dynasty of the Neapolitan Angevins, in whose veins ran the blood of St. Louis.

Now a catholic bishopric was founded in the very capital of the Wallachian state, Argeș, where the Dominicans were mainly connected with the great work of latinization. The Franciscans on the other hand confined their activities to Severin and to the neighbouring Bulgarian town of Vidin, which the second of the Angevin line, Louis the Great, caused to be made the capital of a new Banate in addition to that of Severin, transferred by his father, Charles-Robert, to Timișoara (Temesvar). To the German Franciscans of Silesia was confided