Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/57

 true if uncrowned sovereign, successfully filled the mission of crusader at Varna (where Wladislaw, sovereign of both Ludovician realms, and the legate of the Pope had died).

But with the new Hungary of Matthias, John’s son, the fight against the Turk could no longer be maintained. Matthias, a ruler in the sense of the Renaissance, dreamed of the crown of the Caesars, and died at Vienna. His contemporary, the Moldavian Prince Stephen, was the heir of the old Roumanian crusader in Hungary and Pope Sixtus IV was quick to recognise, praise and occasionally to reward this champion of Christendom. Stephen was naturally obliged to admit and to sustain, as the ally of the western catholic powers against the Sultan, Catholicism within his own territories, notably at Cetatea-Albă which was, for Italians, an important colony and the principal harbour at the mouth of the Dniester, and at Baia, the cradle of Moldavia, where a Polish bishop had been sent for the spiritual needs of the Lithuanian princess Ryngalla, who was the wife of the Moldavian Prince Alexander the Good, Stephen’s grandfather.

The dream of Innocent II haunted the Popes long after the Holy See was restored, by Eugene the Fourth and Nicholas the Fifth, in its old unity. But they were, at the birth of the modern era, also Italian princes eager to form a state of the Church and ready to fight all who challenged their territorial ambitions. In the 16th century their newly-extended arm was broken by the Protestant revolt.

The Hussites, the first to move against Rome, had gained credence in some parts of Poland, Upper Hungary and the neighbouring Roumanian districts: they afforded Roumanian literature the first translations of the Gospel. But this was not a danger to the Orthodoxy; the Protestantism of the Transylvanian Saxons, who had printed