Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/60

 to the same prince Sigismund. The imperial secretaries and agents burnt with the same Catholic aims and fervours. The principal representative of the Danubian crusade, the Wallachian prince Michael the Brave sent a mission to Italy to testify his goodwill towards the Holy See.

A consolidation of the Catholic work in the Principalities was the result of this joint crusade against the Turk. The old organisation was refashioned under the active influence of the Jesuits and a Franciscan revival. One Arsengo of Crete, succeeded by a Venetian, Querino, was appointed, after a lengthy interval, Bishop of Argeș and Moldavia. As the then ruling Moldavian prince, the deadly enemy of Michael, who had momentarily routed him and had set over the church of that principality a Greek chief of good family (Dionysius Ralis, Archbishop of Tirnovo), had been reinstated by the Poles, his attitude towards Rome was subservient in the extreme: this same Jeremias Movilă visited the Latin church in the old capital of his territory, Suceava, and assisted the Italian bishop from his own treasury. All the members of this dynasty preserved the same attitude towards the Western Church, the insincerity of their belief being proved by the fact that Peter, the son of Jeremia’s brother Simeon, was responsible for the restoration of the Russian church in the states of the Polish king, the celebrated Metropolitan of Kiew Peter Mogila.

At the commencement of the 17th century, the position of the Jesuits in Constantinople, whither they had come to combat the efforts of the Calvinist ambassador of the Bow Countries to win over to Protestantism the leader of the Eastern Church, and the projects of the gifted Patriarch Cyrill Bukaris (a true chief of the Greek nation in its struggles for liberty), was an exceedingly strong