Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/54

 the new Moldavian bishopric of Sereth, the second capital of the Principality. The Princes Alexander and Vladislav-Payko of Wallachia, and Latcu of Moldavia were considered to be good and steadfast catholics; the second wife of Alexander was a Hungarian, Clara, while of the daughters of this prince one was married in Hungary to a Piast, a Silesian prince and a high dignitary of the realm, and the two others, one of whom was Empress of Serbia while the other lived in Bulgaria, at Vidin, were charged by the Pope himself with the mission of winning over both their husbands to Catholicism. This enterprise, which seemed to prosper and to be under the best of auguries, was compromised and almost ruined altogether by the greatest crisis in the Papacy — the occidental schism.

Hungary obeyed the French pope, but the latter could not obtain the victory over his rival. The Hungarian king had enough strength to uphold the catholic foundation of Severin, Argeș, too and Sereth, and the older one of Milcov, which was transferred to Bacău, in the midst of the Hungarian colonies in Moldavia, near the Franciscan centre of Csik. Louis died almost at the same moment that the Catholic Church was split into two inimical factions and, as the heirdom of Gregory XI, his own was long disputed, viz between the husbands of his two daughters and sole heiresses, Sigismund of Luxemburg and the Lithuanian Duke Jagello, baptized Wla-dislaw. Louis had ruled Poland also, as the successor of Casimir the Great, conqueror of Russian Galicia, where his mother, the sister of Casimir, Elizabeth, had exercised sovereign rights. The reunion of the two great catholic realms in the East of Europe, now wholly freed from the Tartar yoke, could have had far-reaching results in the south-east of Europe. Now Hungary remained on one side, and Poland on the other.

Monastery of Sucevița (