Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/70

 origin and of their modest occupations, is one of the best proofs of this fact. Under the Romans they preserved their freedom. With its regime of « paroikoi » for new colonists, half-vassals to their masters, the Byzantine regime was not responsible for too deep a change. The legends as to the merciless rule of the Turk may now be rejected. The Ottomans came only as a weak band of mercenaries employed in the civil wars of Byzantium and their expansion was due less to their own vitality or to the ambition, which demands the development of the collective mind, than to the abdication of all authority in the peninsula, whether Greek, Serb, Bulgarian or Latin — the Roumanians were the last autonomy to survive because, being a newly-formed territorial and national state, they did not suffer from the same political disorganisations and despondency. Over all the Turks preserved the old laws, the old usages, not being able, owing to their own primitive notions of society, to substitute their own characteristics.

In the occupied territories the peasant pursued his former mode of living. If a Turkish warrior was substituted for the former master, he inherited only the rights of his predecessor, a Latin lord, a Greek landlord, a Slav noble as the case might be. His subjects’ only duty was the yearly payment as tribute of a part of their produce, the « tithe » of the west, and of giving him annual presents at certain seasons. The pagan intruder did not rule, the village following the archaic lines of its local administration. The bondman (the serf in the sense of occidental Europe) was not to be found in this land of traditional liberty. It is, in any event, a great error to blend the abuses of military brutality, following alien conquest, or those of another religious faith, with the necessary actions of a conscious system.