Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/84

 in the 13th century were able to organise their villages into groups called « judicatures », to govern them by dukes (voevodes) and give birth in this way to the principalities, the imperial « domnii » of Wallachia and later of Moldavia. No foreign conqueror menaced the Danube or the Carpathian slopes to introduce alien political principles, but in the case of Russia this was effected by the incursions of Scandinavian Normans — and in the Carolingian annals Rhos is Scandinavian, notwithstanding Roumanian place-names such as Ruși, Rușciori, or the Saxon Reussmarkt, which seem to give support to the Slavonic theory of the Russians — or more probably South Scandinavian (Byzantine Varegues), because the centre was so far to the South-East as Kiev, and their foundation tended to the possession of Constantinople, which was the goal of all barbarians. Such Scandinavians employed the Slavs without, in their turn, being of service to them. If Sviatoslav, called upon by the Byzantine emperor to destroy the state of the Bulgarians, had continued to rule in Silistria (Durostoron), on the Lower Danube, the capital, which, of all places belonging to the besieged Bulgarians, he preferred, he would have employed Bulgars and Serbs in the same manner. From the first he took the name of « boyar » for his noblemen, then adopted Byzantine architecture for the church of Hagia Sophia, and, for Greek Christianity, the literary forms recommended by Methodius and Cyrill, with cyrillian script. All, for these adventurers of the blood of Rurik, was loot of war, and nothing else.

The Mongols conquered, one after the other, the territories, the « kingdoms » or « knezates » in which the once-united state of the Dnieper was divided by the caprice of the times. As their supremacy was attacked in the 14th and destroyed in the 15th century, so the new unitary state of Moscow, far to the East, was only, as commonly