# My American Lectures/Democracy in South-Eastern Europe

DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE
The whole of Europe and the America of George Washington were conquered, dominated and ruled by the new ideals of social and political life evolved by Jean Jacques Rousseau. The watchmaker’s son from Geneva conceived the life of human society as a mechanical contrivance susceptible to adjustment along the abstract lines of theory; the citizen of a small community, in which a restricted number of privileged persons enjoyed the exclusive right of governing the rest in their Major and Minor Councils, he could nevertheless conceive a state controlled by all its citizens. The master of an infinite number of dialectical subtleties, a powerful and elegant champion in intellectual warfare, a writer of emotional power who carried with him in an artificial world something of the freshness of his native valleys and lake, he exercised, notwithstanding his complete ignorance of history and his deliberate self-estrangement from all practical realities, an influence without parallel in his day.
Rousseau’s democracy, applied to such different forms as the unfortunate Louis XVI’s France, governed by courtiers and a sceptical bourgeoisie, and the English provinces of North America, created by farmers of religious and gentlemanly humour, could not but end in failure. This failure is, in our present day, an ineluctable fact: we shut our eyes in order to avoid seeing the decay of ​an edifice built upon evanescent clouds, the menacing cracks in crumbling walls, the absolute need of making up our minds either to abandon everything which, up to today, had been a fixed and certain article of faith, or of perishing under the ruins of our disillusionment.
Other forms of democracy are, indeed, to be found in the development of human society. Rousseau, however, could not see them. In Venice, where he played the part of an impertinent, pretentious secretary to the French Ambassador there, the old and mediaeval regime, based on the participation of all citizens, had disappeared at the commencement of the 13th century, when the Great Council was closed, no longer permitting the entry of new families into the stronghold of a proud and cunning aristocracy. In his own city, and in the neighbouring Swiss cantons, the mediaeval life in the isolated peasant communities of the valleys had given way to the domination of the wealthy bourgeoise communities of the cities: hardly a trace was left of the original clan predominance. All over Europe the princes, and the wealthy urban classes were in the saddle.
In the Balkan peninsula a transformation had also taken place which had destroyed the old systems in which an organic historical democracy had, for a time, prevailed.
I shall sketch this first in the Roumanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, particularly the latter, which was the product of the free and gradual combination of peasant communities, whereas Moldavia, in the north, was founded by immigrant Roumanian knights in rebellion against their overlord, the king of Hungary, who won for themselves a province wrested from the grip of the Mongol raider. ​
The aboriginal population, the Dacians of the highlands, who replaced their more ancient brethren on the banks of the Danube, had a king, Decebalus, who died unconquered in defence of his homeland against the legions of the Emperor Trajan. Under him, however, ruled not only other Dacian chiefs, but also the petty chieftains of other local federations. There were no cities before the Romans founded them: these intelligent barbarians, half won over to Roman civilisation, ordinarily lived in villages or «davas» north of the Danube and «paras» in the Balkans. They were unlike the Gauls in their «cities» dominated by the aristocracy of warriors. The country was the village and the village was wholly free, certainly autonomous.
The legend of a new society built from the ruins of the old by Trajan’s colonists must, in my opinion, be abandoned. It is not possible to admit that the fusion of two such different elements; of the patriarchal, pastoral Dacians and the army veterans, the retired officials and the prospectors after gold and other metals could have been accomplished between Trajan’s final and completely victorious campaign in 106 A. D. and the evacuation of the Roman province of Dacia by Aurelian in about 270 A. D. I am inclined to think, therefore, that it was more likely that the denationalisation of the inhabitants was brought about by the imperceptible, gradual infiltration of the surplus rural population of Italy, as Rome began to import her food from overseas and slave labour and the growth of large estates ousted the free peasantry from the peninsula. The first condition for a process of denationalisation is a majority of the invading population of the same occupation as those whose country it invades. The national character of the ancient Thracians could be altered only if newcomers of the same mode of life formed the ​starting point, viz: shepherds and agriculturists. The inhabitants of Roman Dacia who were city dwellers, accustomed to the advantages offered by great cities, had probably abandoned their threatened homes at the first call of the Emperor when he felt himself for a time unable to maintain his power on the left bank of the Danube. Had they received no such order, they also could have gone on living in their country after the occupation of the barbarians.
It is false to say true that the former alternative has no parallel in Roman history. When the city of Nisibis was ceded by the Romans to the King of Persia in the fourth century A. D., the citizens were not invited to leave: on the contrary they were ordered to accept the sovereignty of their new master, and promptly answered that they were capable of maintaining the liberty of their homes against any enemy.
It must be remembered too that the barbarians were not conquerors in the proper sense of the word, no consistent adversaries of Rome, whom they revered even after they had ceased to have cause to fear her; that in theory their position was that of « foederati» of Caesar, who gave them a province as his vassals, or rather as a territory for the sustenance of the new military auxiliaries of the Roman State. But Dacia was a country of peasants, and no peasant ever leaves his lands because a new prince reigns in the stead of the old. In modern history, in which psychological situations arise quite unparalleled in the darker ages with their simple instincts uninfluenced by more complex desiderata, there are numerous other examples. A village can develop into a city, not merely one of the type of most Roumanian provincial towns, whose churches show them to be mere conglomerations of the old rural organisation, but a veritable fortified, mediaeval stronghold, ​like those founded by the Saxons in the 9th century. A city can decay, its limits can be contracted, as in the case of Bordeaux in the Middle Ages, it can be transformed into a mere group of cottages.
The villages of ancient Dacia were romanized by the natural advance of the Romans, as in the Balkans they assumed the same Roman elements: in their private lives, however, very little can have been changed. We know nothing of the organisation of the Dacian rural community, but it is probable that the «davas» in Dacia and the « paras» in the Balkans were ruled by local chiefs who were in their turn the vassals of valley-princes, the supreme leader being a king of the type of Decebalus:. Rome introduced, at the moment of conquest, the new forms of colonies and municipies both are typical of urban life and, although they may have influenced economic conditions in the villages, the two forms of settlement were obviously too divergent to modify one another.
Even after the Emperor had abandoned the populations of both Dacias, that of Trajan and Aurelian’s substitute province, the villages of the north Danubian province continued to look upon the imperial authority as emanating from their legal master, as the legitimate form of government. For the modern Albanian the chief of the State, now an independent « monarch », is an mbret, which is an abbreviation of the word «imperator ». Among the Roumanians of the Balkans, Albania’s neighbours, the word « amira » became current for « emperor ». This was a relic of the Ottoman conquest of the emirs, the later sultans and padishahs; for the great mass of the nation, the supreme political leader is the impdrat. Princes and kings have only borrowed names: craiu from the Slavonic name of Charlemagne, krai (Polish korol, Hungarian kiraly) ; only the Emperor, whom the Slavs called «Czar», retained ​his ancient and venerated title. The title of king has no such antiquity: for the Roumanian never lived under the rule of the German konige, called reges by the Romans (Russian: knyaz) nor under the Touranian «kha-gans », whose title has survived in the Carpatho-Danubian countries only as applied to the sovereign of the later Tartars: han or han-tatar. This is also the reason why, while the coming of the Avars created an Avaria in the Western Balkans, and the Italians in Western Europe inhabited a Langobardia, the Gallo-Romans a Francia, the Roman population of both banks of the Danube retained the name of Roman (roman) and speaking Roumanian (românește) in the Terra Romanesca (Țara Românească).
With no foreign overlordship, this isolated fragment of Rome was constrained at last to adopt a political system similar to that found, for instance, in Central Gaul in the 5th century, where the rural population, while preserving all deference to the Emperor, elected kings (reges) of the type of Syagrius or Aegidius. In « Roumania » however, the ruler’s authority was at first confined to the narrow limits of the «sat», the free defensible village (from the Latin: fossatum, a fenced establishment). By a reversion to the most elementary and natural conditions of human society, the power was vested in the elders, who may be compared to the aldermen of Anglo-Saxon civilisation, the Greek gerontes, who persisted up to mediaeval and even modern times, the Russian starosti. The title of these lowly senators was «oameni buni și bătrâni» (homines boni et veterani), like the boni homines frequently mentioned in the mediaeval manuscripts of many Italian regions. In all Roumanian popular records up to a recent date, the witnesses are always such « good old villagers ».
Directed by their prestige and their counsel, the small unit lived an existence of its own. Thousands of title-deeds show ​in detail the forms of this modest but highly interesting village organisation. Although the public functions were usually held by a small number of elected officers, a popular assembly, an adunare or sbor (this latter being the Slavonic term) was invariable. Most of the Italian cities were ruled by senators after the Byzantine system, the new Roman system established by Justinian on the ruins of the Gothic domination. Historically Gothic rule in Italy was itself a simple vassal state of the Empire, entrusted to the German chief, who was a ruler over his own tribe, which acknowledged the Emperor as the supreme overlord: Theodoric was an exarch, an imperial delegate and, by this only, the theoretical chief of all Italy — a position of undoubted inferiority to that of the present day viceroy of India, who rules the British provinces and controls the autonomous Rajah states. Besides the senators and the exercitus or army, which cooperated freely with the Imperial and popular authorities, were the magistrates or indices, whose title was hellenised in the Southern province as kritai. In Venice the Byzantine duke, the later Doge, came to wield an authority superior to all judges; in Rome, the Pope destroyed the power of his civil rivals; in Southern Italy, the judges persisted until the arrival of the Normans; Sardinia, until the close of the Middle Ages, was divided into giudicature.
The case was similar on the Danube, where, owing to different circumstances, the earlier abandonment by the Romans being the chief cause, the judge appeared as early as the second half of the 4th century. He was master, not of Roman colonists, but of Goths who had no other chieftain than this index Thervingorum, Athanarich by name. The title is not to be found in any other part of the original German civilisation: the Germans of all branches were ​ruled exclusively by kings or by dukes. It follows, therefore, that Athanarich's rank was inevitably borrowed from the Roman population, which was associated with, rather than subject to, the newcomers. The German word for judge, richter, comes, as is well-known, from the Roman rector and it is curious to observe that, in the Roumanian language, dirigere, the verb corresponding to regere, has survived in the verbs a drege, a direge, while one who directs and would have borne the Roman title of director, is known as a diregător, or dregător.
The judge in Roumania, as in Sardinia, where, for some reason, general conditions resembled those of Roumania very closely, had a whole district under his rule, in most cases the whole community of a valley. This district was named, and is so named to this day in Wallachia (which was formed gradually by the free combination of small judicial districts), a județ (judicium) ; the limits of the modern districts do not differ greatly from those of the old peasant communities. In Moldavia the historical process was different, the State here being formed artificially from fortresses, each with its ținut or tenutum.
A Transylvanian document, fortunately preserved, of the late 16th century, shows the customary manner of electing the judge in olden times. The peasantry assembled in the church which, as in cities in the west in mediaeval times, was used as the communal meeting-hall. A certain number of candidates were chosen after a first scrutiny; it was only after a second vote that the village leader, whose tenure of office was for life, was finally elected.
When defensive wars were undertaken, the members of these free rural microcosms were led to battle by a duke. His Latin title is lost in the mists of time, the 17th century ducă and the modern duce being only neologisms from the Italian. A Slavonic term, voevode, which has the ​same meaning, replaced the original title, probably on account of the latter’s similarity to and possibility of confusion with the third person of the present indicative tense of the verb a duce (Latin: ducere).
At a later date it was undoubtedly possible, among the Roumanians as among their Italian kinsfolk or the Hungarians, for the judge to be merely a rural functionary of the feudal landowner. This was, in fact, his status in that part of «Țara Românească » conquered by the Hungarian kings, who were in the first place voevodes (as they are indeed called in the Byzantine sources), at any rate up to the reign of Stephen the First.
The Carolingian duke, the French governor on the middle Danube, where the Avars had been vanquished and whose inheritance passed to the Moravian kings, as Sviatopluk, and later to the Hungarians, was appointed by the king, the emperor of his nation, and in the Danubian countries no such title existed. It is therefore probable that the duke was elected by the judges, just as these latter were themselves elected by the peasants in an assembly convoked and presided over by the « oameni buni și bătrâni».
In the middle of the 13th century, after an earlier Roumanian organisation on the right bank of the Danube, round Silistra, had disappeared, the Roumanians south of the mountains were now ruled by judges only, who also bore the princely title of « cnezi » (singular: cneaz, as in Russian). In the « judicature » of Argeș, however, was a free voevode, who refused to recognise the authority of the Apostolic king in Hungary, the successor, appointed by the Pope, of the Carolingian dynasty. Later, he brought under his sceptre the territories on the right bank of the Olt, and represented, for the whole nation, the local, patriarchal successor of an emperor, who could not ​or would not appear in person—and never, indeed, appeared again after Manuel Comnene in the 12th century.
As, in Latin, the dominatio, the equivalent of the Greek basileia, was not accepted by the first Caesars, whose imperium was not to be confounded with the Eastern conception, so, in Roumanian an împărat (empire being împărăție, an emperor's wife: împărăteasă and his daughter: împărătița) dominates (Roum: domnește), no corresponding verb being formed from the title of emperor. Was this peasant emperor a conqueror? History records no war of aggression in Wallachia, as in the later formed Moldavia, where the whole sense of the domnia was adopted. The highest dignities were obtainable by election, a source of power for the elected as well as for the electors. The first characteristics of the traditional constitutional forms in the Roumanian lands are their elective and local character. The princes, except when imposed from overseas, long remained elective. The usual way of imposing a prince was for his father or predecessor first to associate him with his own power. Thus Mircea cel Bătrân (the Old) who died in 1418, associated his son Michael with him in Wallachia during his own lifetime, so that he was assured the succession. Some years later, Alexander the First adopted the same procedure towards his son Helias in Moldavia. In the middle of the 15th century, Stephen the Great, son of an assassinated prince, did not rest content with the victory which he won over the usurper: he gathered together the whole country, of every class, down to the peasantry, and had them «elect» him. In the same way, the young scholar Demetrius Cantemir, was elected at the end of the 17th century, after the death of his father. In Wallachia, Matei Basarab was proclaimed in this way by the army; Constantin Șerban and Constantin Brâncoveanu assumed power in the same way. The ​electoral system is also found during the Phanariot period, in the 18th century; Constantin Mavrocordato, Alexander Ghica in Wallachia became princes by popular vote. In 1821 the Wallachian peasantry, who revolted against their oppressors, claimed the right to nominate their chief, Tudor Vladimirescu, «domnul Tudor». It is true that Vladimirescu had previously lived in Serbia, where, as an officer in the Russian army, he had seen «the great captain of the people» at the head of an armed «parliament», but in Serbia too, it was the same popular tradition of South-Eastern Europe which inspired the idea of a revolution capable of creating a lasting State.
Much more uncommon that the elective principle was the second characteristic, of local authority, which lasted until the modern era of borrowed constitutions, which began with the «Regulament Organic» of 1834.
Before these attempts to change the character of a life which had developed naturally for more than a thousand years along gradual, organic lines, the greater part of public affairs was concluded, confirmed and sanctioned within the village itself. At the sale of a property, only the presence of the «oameni buni și bătrâni» and of the neighbours was necessary; these neighbours were relatives, the village having been formed by the expansion of a single family, all members of which bore the name of the ancestor; thus, if he was a «Ion» (or John), they were all called Ionescu (Johnson). Each village had its scribe, who committed the contract to writing; the prince had merely to confirm it. The military contingent to be furnished by the village in time of war was trained and led by the «captain» of the same group, the vătăman (a word derived from the German: hauptmann). As the officers of the state had financial needs, the charge was apportioned, through ​the village, by its headman, who knew the capability of payment of each individual; this procedure was known as the « cisla ». The schoolmaster was also appointed by the village, as was the practice in Transylvania, under Hungarian rule, up to modern times. Some traces of economic community of goods survived up to very recent times, e. g., in the usufruct of the forests, lakes and waste-lands.
Religion itself preserved this local character during the first centuries after the foundation of the Roumanian race. The priests, known as preoți (from the Latin: presbyter. In Albanian it is prevt) or popi (from the Latin), had often no canonical consecration. Some were theological teachers by hereditary right, being the sons of priests; in Transylvania whole priestly lines were formed in this way. Others had sought consecration from the superiors of the monasteries, who played the part of the chorepiscopi in Gaul. Others, again, were consecrated by the Slavonic bishops on the right bank of the Danube. Thanks to this, not only the Cyrillic alphabet, but the old Bulgarian language, the « Slavonic », tongue of the gospels and of the liturgy, found their way into the Roumanian church. When the two States of Wallachia and Moldavia took definite shape, the princes received from Constantinople a regular, canonical form of the church, which was made official. The influence of the bishops and archbishop-metropolitans was, however, weak to the last among the secular clergy who, based on the village autonomy, constituted one of the great forces of the State.
Yet the Roumanian villagers were able to make of their natural community, of their mediaeval « Roumania », not only a State, but a free government on a democratic basis; the whole nation developed its forms of historical and natural liberty. In the beginning of the 14th century all « ​judicatures », all « voevodates » were under the control of a «prince » resident in the castle of Argeș, concealed in a valley of the Carpathians. The down, who styled himself «sovereign of all the Roumanian land» and who resided first at Argeș, then in Târgoviște, and finally, descending towards the Danube, at Bucharest, was a ruler of a territorial unity which in theory represented a whole nation, a single race. He claimed to have sovereignty over all Roumanian districts, including those in fief to the Hungarian ruler, an usurper who ruled in the name of the Holy See of Rome, patron and organiser of crusades against heretics such as the Roumanians. The northern river-valley of Moldavia was, of course, included in this unity, together with the adjacent valleys of the Suceava, the Sereth, Pruth and Dniester, which were held under the nominal rule of the Tartars who, in the 13th century, had swept over the Russian steppe, laying claim to all territory in their path as far as the Carpathians. The Hungarian king, however, who, in the 13th century, had endeavoured to create a Roumania of his own in the south, wished to make of this borderland a Hungarian march against further invasion from Mongolia. This king, himself a cavalier of good French stock and the representative of crusading chivalry rather than a national severeign, sent one of his knightly followers, the Roumanian noble Dragoș, across the mountains. An ancient stronghold of the Hungarian realm had existed before the Tartar invasion, south of the newly-created fief, around the episcopal see of Milcov, which was transferred after the Tartar invasion to Bacău. The two Hungarian districts were conquered about 1360 by the rebellion of Bogdan, another Roumanian voevode, originally from the valleys of the Maramureș highlands. Bogdan styled himself, in opposition both to the ruler in ​Wallachia and to his former liege lord, «Roumanian Prince of Moldavia». His successors were of the whole territory as far as the Dniester by 1400, so lightly was it held by the Mongol invaders. The division of the free Roumanian territory, which had detached itself from the subject province of Transylvania, was destined to endure until the eventful year of the first national union in 1859, followed by the second union in 1918, when Transylvania, and those parts of Moldavia which had been taken at a later date (Bukovina to Austria, Bessarabia to Russia) rejoined Roumania, and the wounds inflicted in 1100 by the Hungarians and in 1360 under the influence of an event in Hungarian history were at last heald.
National division in the Middle Ages, continued in the modern and contemporary eras, was also the fate of the other races in South-Eastern Europe. After the destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire by the Byzantines and their allies, the Norman Russians of Kiev, at the end of the 10th century, a new and free «Bulgaria» arose in Macedonia, with the support of the new nations, the Albanians and the Roumanians of the Pindus. In the 14th century, while the «emperor», the counterfeit of the Byzantine Caesar, reigned in Trnovo, a second Bulgaria arose at Vidin on the Danube, representing the Serbo-Bulgarian districts of the west; a third Bulgaria succeeded to an older Byzantine fief embracing the Greek cities on the shores of the Black Sea, the Roumanian, and certain Bulgarian, villages of the hinterland. This kingdom, which had its capital at Varna, occupied the territories covered by the ancient Scythia Minor, the later Turkish Dobrudja.
The Serbs first formed a State on the coast of the Adriatic: then, in the interior, which was Byzantine and Orthodox, there arose a new State, the Rascia of the ​Nemanides, which was destined gradually to absorb the other. The Hungarian conquest gave rise to a third Serbian province, corresponding to the Roumanian Moldavia, the Serbian Banate on the banks of the Bosna: and out of this Bosnia, by the revolt of a voevode, upon whom Frederick III, the Emperor of the West, had conferred the title of Duke in the 15th century, arose yet another Serbia, the «Serbia of the Dukedom» (or Herzegovina, derived from the Hungarian herczek, viz the German herzog, meaning «duke»). The Serbia on the Danube with its centre at Belgrade, the later Serbia of the Despots Stephen, George and his sons, is quite different from the Macedonian Serbia, and, when, in the 15th century, kings were reigning in the Macedonian districts, and a despot, the nominee of Byzantium, in Thrace, Thessaly (then a separate province) formed the ultimate stronghold of the race of Stephen Dushan, the King-Emperor.
The former small state of Zenta, afterwards became Črnagora, or Montenegro. In the same century, Ragusa, a Roman city and a former dependency of Venice, became the intellectual and commercial centre of the Serbian world.
This division was ill-starred and, indeed, fatal: it was impossible thereafter to form a new synthesis of culture. This was because none of these regions possessed any geographical unity.
Greece herself was divided in the Middle Ages into three parts: the Roman Greece of Byzantium, as an extension of the Eastern Roman Empire, the patriarchal Greece in the semi-autonomous province of Morea, and the Latinised Greece, under French, Catalans and Navarrese, whose work was carried on by the mightier Venetians from Corfu to Crete and by the Genoese to the shores ​of Scythia Major and Minor. The cities on the border of the Euxine were in the ancient times rich, ancient colonies of the Ionian and Dorian Greeks: Histria, Tomi, Kallatis and their dependencies such as Halmyros, but in the vici of the interior, on both banks of the Danube, the old Getic and Thracian life pursued its way under Roman forms.
II
Political division for the Roumanians was lasting, but in a completely unitary terrain. This was the origin of the important syntheses which gives them a place in world history. From Transylvania came the powerful influence of the German colonies of «Saxons», concentrated there by the Hungarian rulers after 1100. Wallachia received the heritage of the Slavonic countries subdued by the Turks, and was enriched by currents of western influence. Moldavia accepted the culture of Red Russia, and was brought into contact, through Poland, with the Latin Renaissance. Later, through French secretaries and teachers, she came, much more strongly than any other Roumanian province, under the influence of every form of western civilisation. Never was a single State in a position to blend so many different currents of culture together and to create, by healthy rivalry, a new form in the moral life of European civilisation.
If Roumania, the old Țara Românească, the modern Roumania, represents mediaeval «Roman» democracy at its fullest and most solid development by contrast to the international and inter-territorial empires whose last manifestations — Austria-Hungary and Russia — perished in the Great War, so the other «Roumania», not on the Black Sea but on the Adriatic, might have formed a second Roman State, had circumstances not prevented the development of its natural tendencies.
Here, too, the attention of historians has been obstructed by points of detail, to the detriment of the broader vision, while national prejudices also have prevented them from taking a clearer observation of the general position.
I will begin with the most typical example of a « Romania » estranged from its first tradition and transformed into an exponent, on the shores of the Adriatic, of a very different historical existence: Ragusa, known to its Yugoslav masters today as Dubrovnik, — formerly an important harbour and centre of commerce, a city of rich pageantry, the cradle of poets and writers — is today a decayed borough (one might almost say a «rotten borough» if its intrinsic value as a political constituency be considered). Today, it is an oasis of historical records, holding within its high walls the beautiful remnants of a mediaeval Gothic art, surrounded by a splendid African vegetation and, unfortunately, in the course of the last few years, has become a haunt chosen by the idle rich of various European States in search of sunshine.
The Illyrian village which gave it its first name was hellenised as Epidaurus, later to be Romanized into the civitas preserved in the present-day name of Captat. For some time Byzantium retained the mastery of the Adriatic coasts, the Imperial fleet giving her the decisive advantage in the conflicts with Narenta corsairs. As soon as the vast hordes of Slavs, deserting their eastern Danubian homes, poured into the Balkans, however, this province was completely overrun by the barbarians. It is all too commonly supposed that the barbarian invasion signified conquest, domination, direct rule, and, in short, a complete transformation of all conditions of life if not, as in Ragusa itself, the immediate abandonment of the language hitherto employed. On the contrary, here, as everywhere else (and the ​life of St. Severin remains to show how very different was the reality in Pannonia, which was traversed by the bands of Germanic appertaining to the minor races such as the Heruls), the invaders could only move along the great Roman highway and over the country immediately adjacent. They were incapable of laying siege to the cities, still less of administering government as the Romans understood it. They were impelled neither by hatred nor contempt for the old order of things: they entertained no ambitious plans of founding a new State, nor were they bent on setting a catastrophe in motion. What they desired was loot and tribute: the ambition of their chiefs was to be recognised as overlords. This indeed they wanted, but nothing more (so in the territories which later formed mediaeval Austria, as Eugyppius, St. Severin’s pupil and biographers, shows): it has been repeated in terms of con temporary critical history by the Austrian professor Dopsch.
Ragusa, then, was not conquered: indeed, she was invincible. Weak and deserted, defended only by her tiny army, called a bandon or harm (so at least the 7th century Byzantine chronicler, Theophylactus Simocatta, testifies of the right bank of the Danube), she was better able than the city of the Pannonian saint to withstand sudden attack from neighbouring barbarians. Like the cities on the right bank of the Danube under the Emperor Mauricius, like the ancient Roumanians in their villages, she preserved the enduring memory of her only legitimate lord, the Caesar of New Rome. She even remained an imperial city, ready to receive into her harbour the imperial fleet in its varying campaigns against Saracens and Normans, ready to send tribute to the remote capital of the Empire, to commemorate the heir of Constantine in the prayers celebrated at her Catholic cathedral, to employ the ​Byzantine weights in her monetary system, the coins of which bore the Byzantine image of Christ surrounded by Greek script: many Greek works remained in use, legal terms as well as words of the every-day vocabulary. The Byzantine Saint Blasius, successor of the old Illyrian and Hellenic deities, remained the protector of the commonwealth. Here and there eastern influences may be seen in the Gothic forms of Ragusan art.
This unchangeable fidelity was not only directed towards the idea of empire and to Byzantine forms. Any influence, in any field, which recalled Byzantium, i. e, the Roman domination or the Roman law, was sure to find a welcome both in ancient and latterday Ragusa. The submission to Venetian rulers, which began in the days of the campaigns of the Doge Orseolo against the pirates of the Adriatic, was renewed more than once before the establishement of the Latin (Franco-Venetian) Empire in Constantinople was to become an enduring reality in the 13th century. The cession of all Venetian rights to the Crown of Hungary, as the rightful heir of Charlemagne, in the year 1358, was only the admission of another form of adherence to the Empire, as far as Dalmatia was concerned. The Venetian rule was imposed because Venice, a Byzantine city on the Italian shore of the Adriatic, governed by Doges who at first were appointed by the Emperor, and enjoyed at the hands of Byzantium a commercial monopoly in the waters of this sea, was, in the sight of Dalmatia and others, only an instrument of Byzantine rule. In rendering obedience to the functionaries sent from Venice — the character of whose rights cannot be otherwise explained — the old Ragusans felt that they were only treading the straight path of fidelity to their Emperor. When the Roman Kings in Southern Italy, (who were de facto rulers over all Italy, but at the same time ​heirs of Eastern Rome by the traditions of their territories, by the Greek style of their chanceries, and in their ecclesiastical art, by their ambitions and plans of conquest), when these kings, for two brief periods achieved the same position in Ragusa as their rival Venice, as representatives of the Eastern Empire, submission was inevitable for the Ragusans who merely regarded this as a new form of legal Imperial authority. The quasi-domination of the Serbian king Stephen Dushan in the 14th century must be regarded in same light. He was not only master of a great part of the Dalmatian coast, and a citizen of Venice, but as « Emperor of the Serbs and Romans » he constituted yet another embodiment of the imperialism represented on the old Byzantine lines by his rivals and enemies, the Palaeologues of Constantinople. Remaining theoretically bound to the emperor, the abandoned city was constrained to organise herself, her constitutional power, and, to the end of her existence, notwithstanding the great influence of the Venetians, she remained true to the initial forms of the common life.
These forms sprang from the same needs as were felt by the Roumanians, and found similar expression. In the first place, of course, came the « good elders » who formed the Senate of the Commonwealth, afterwards called the pregadi (pregati — called), as in Venice. But as the Roumanians allowed the convocation of larger assemblies, as in Venice, outside the daily work of the senators, all the old families, all citizens could be called together in the Consiglio Maggiore — a Consiglio Minore being called afterwards for decisions involving political desiderata to be taken —, so Ragusa, too, had a greater and a lesser council. Naturally there was a magistrate whose functions were the most important of all, comprising not only the dispensation of justice, but also the general control of affairs. ​
Under the influence of the Frankish regime in Dalmatia and Pannonia, which worked through counts, acting under the supreme authority of the dukes, the original title of judex, which is found in all neighbouring cities, was changed to comes, and, as the Slavs near-by had kings after the German fashion, this «judge-count» became a knez. He and the Councillors were the masters of Ragusa.
The same state of things can easily be traced in all the other cities of the Dalmatian coast. In Zara, the capital, which passed repeatedly from Hungarian to Venetian rule and back again, and undoubtedly also in Sebenico and in Trail, which are mentioned by the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenete as free communities, not occupied by the barbarians of the interior; in the Albanian cities of Durazzo, Dulcigno, Antivari; in Ragusa’s hated rival Cattaro (Kotor), with its splendid harbour, on the crescentshaped bocche; in the islands which fringe the shore, Cherso, Osero, Arbe — everywhere — the judge and his councillors rule the community. The system extends as far as the urban communities of the Pindus, such as Scutari. All of these were, in theory, imperial civitates, all have their traditions: this is the common element which constitutes these rudimentary « Romanias ». Natural ties grew up between these nuclei of liberty, of traditional historical organic democracy. Assemblies, or sbors, were held, originally perhaps for law-suits, but also for other purposes, and, just as the Roumanians elected their judges in the churches (in the Greek community of Venice the magistrates to this day are elected in S. Giorgio dei Greci), so the site of the assembly (which the Albanian tribes called a kovent — from conventus) was near a church: that of S. Sergio, or another. Close similarities, due to their common origin, existed between the laws of the different cities. ​
This can be seen from the new statutes drawn up in the era of the Venetian supremacy.
All the necessary elements for the creation of a « Roman » State were present on the Adriatic coast. It could have had a language of its own, since a special form of vulgar Latin had been evolved in the region, besides the Roumanian dialect spoken by the shepherds or caravan-leaders in the mountains (a variety of the Ratin tongue which is today extinct. Bartoli was able to cull this treasure from the lips of the last survivors of this « Roman » population).
Instead, after Venice had been expelled by the treaty of 1358, Hungary was able to retain possession of Dalmatia until a new Venetian victory regained the inheritance of Doge Orseolo. Ragusa alone preserved, as before, her special position on the former Roman coast. Later, the Turks extended their domination to the Adriatic, and, masters of Albania, they took the place of the former suzerains of Ragusa, receiving annual tribute from the ambassadors of the tiny republic, whose days of liberty were only ended by the Napoleonic edict of 1804. At the same time the Slavonic language ousted the old Roman still spoken and used in the Senate at the end of the 15th century, and the Venetian of common usage.
What was the reason for this political failure — a definitive one, inasmuch as, when Austria collapsed, the considerable majority of Serb-speaking Dalmatians caused the district to be allocated to the new Southern Slav State ?
Firstly, it was because these free cities had lost their peasant populations, from the early days of the Slavonic invasion. Under the influence of the unceasing flood of peasant immigrants, the numerous Romance population, which existed in the 7th century, lost its language and therewith, the assurance of its origin. Ethnography alone can ​discover, by cranial measurement, the true character of these villagers: it admits too that the great majority of Montenegrins are not Slavonic.
An important congregation of Roumanians, Vlachs or Vallachs (for origin cf. Welsh, Walloon), lived in the mountains at the end of the Middle Ages. They fed their flocks and sold their fresh cheeses, their caseus de Valachia, in Ragusa and other cities of the sea-coast, their pastoral commerce extended as far as the Holy Mountain of Athos, where, finally, they were excluded, on account of the presence of their women, who accompanied them. No caravan leader enjoyed more repute than the Vlach. In the 14th century they probably still spoke Roumanian: in any case, their names preserved the characteristic feature of the suffixed article (drac-ul the dragon, from drac, draco). A century later, the coastal Vlachs still used this termination, but these Morlachs, these Vlachs of the sea, were united to the Slavonic shepherds of the interior, to whom they bequeathed their ethnographical name. In Serbia today only a few scattered groups recall to the ethnographist, by this or that feature, a vanished zone of Romance people.
The erstwhile Romance peasant had now become, as I have said, a new element in the invading forces which surrounded the slowly yielding and changing cities. The denationalisation of the urban centres was rendered increasingly inevitable by the change in the most conservative of all elements of any population, the peasantry.
The preservation of the Romance peasantry was not the only condition necessary for the formation of a modern Romanic State in the Balkans. To hold their own against the Slavonic menace they needed a definite principle of organisation. This was present for the Roumanians when they were assailed, but not vanquished by the ​
Apostolic kings of Hungary. The regions of the Theiss and the western borders of Transylvania were the first to be occupied by the invading Hungarians, who were then able, at the beginning of the 12th century, to enter Transylvania proper, where the Mureș pierced the western ramparts of the mountains, creating strongholds for the bishops and burgraves, on the Carolingian principle, and attempting to secure exploitation of the salt and gold mines. In order to gain the southern and eastern portions of the province as well, they were forced to employ the Teutonic knights recently expelled from the Holy Land. These built their castles on the northern slopes of the Carpathians, and Hungarian peasants, the Szekler, were sent to watch the frontier which marched with the Touranian nations of the steppe. Thousands of Roumanians, especially in this eastern region, abandoned their original language and ethnographical character, becoming assimilated to the Szekler: in some cases the sole element preserved was the Greek creed. But to change the nature of the whole Roumanian population was a physical impossibility: the number of the conquerors was too small—so small that the king was forced to resort in foreign countries the elements necessary for the consolidation of the invaded territories. The Hungarians were never an invading flood of the intensity of the Slavs in the Balkans. To bring the southern slopes of the Carpathians within his dominion, or at least within his fief, the Arpadian monarch of the 13th century, after the havoc wrought by the Tartar incursion, was forced to call to his help fresh knights from the Holy Sepulchre, the knights of St. John, to whom was promised the Banate of Severin with all the adjacent Roumanian districts. In this way the numerous and powerful peasantry of these districts, endowed with a strong military system, were ​enabled to bring about the foundation of their free state as a democratic « domnie ».
But in the hinterland of the Adriatic sea-shore the military force in the rural districts was that of the Serbs and Bosnians. No Roumanian voevode or duke, except the modest of the scattered Vlach cete (sing.: ceatd), existed in the surrounding lands, while among the Roumanians of the Danube the chiefs became crowned dukes against the kings leaders by the wish of the Pope or the Emperor, but foreign kings. The political catastrophe of the Romance world in the Balkans and the Pindus was thus complete. Only the Roumanians of Thessaly, who were both numerous and brave, persisted, a phantom remnant of the ancient glories of the race. Sustained by their Macedonian brothers, they were enabled to aid foreign states: first in the region of Ochrida about the year 1000, then, at the end of the 12th century, in Thessaly itself.
It should be added that a principality on the Lower Danube, near Silistra, existed under the Comnenes. Furthermore, the small state of the Zenta at the end of the 14th century, and the Dobrudja, a hundred years later, bore witness to their Roumanian initiative. Everywhere, however, they found the traditions of the first Bulgarian state, an « empire », opposed to that of Byzantium: they found the Bulgarian church, employing the old Slavonic language of the province of Salonika, with a new, Cyrillic alphabet; the cities were Slavonic and every state formed in the cultural atmosphere of an older political organisation must enter into all its customs and adopt all its forms. Thus the boyard-sons of Ochrida, the Asenides of Trnovo, the Shishmanide princes of the 13th century, the Balshides in Adriatic Zenta, a Balica, a Dobrotitch in the maritime provinces of the Euxine became Slavs in the second generation, like the greatest, richest and most higly-cultured of their subjects, ​subjects, whom the arms of their tireless peasants and shepherds defended.
Like their predecessors of true Slav-Touranian blood, they were impelled towards the possession of Constantinople, the conquest of which by the Latins was an encouragement for Ioniță (Johannicius for the Pope) — the third of the brothers who revolted about 1200. Their highest hope was to be crowned in Hagia Sofia, but, failing to achieve this summit of their ambitions, they contented themselves with the title of Czar, which the true Bulgarian sovereigns had borne on the shores of the Euxine. Pontifical chanceries might style them «kings of the Vlachs and Bulgars» and speak to them, on occasion, of their Roman ancestry: but for them the highest praise was to be recognised as the successors of Czar Symeon, the pupil and rival of Byzantium, the truest «emperor» of all Bulgarian Czars.
Thus the Romance element in the Balkans worked in two different forms and by two different means towards the formation and maintenance of Slavonic States. Firstly, through the old peasants of the Adriatic, transformed into authentic Slavs by serving a series of Serbian chiefs, princes, kings and emperors, who colonised many of the «transhumant» Vlachs on the lands of the monasteries which they built; secondly, through the initiative of Roumanian chieftains, admitted as such by Byzantium, whose revolt against imperial oppression and cruelty gave the weakened and depleted Bulgarian upper classes the opportunity of renewing their lost State, with the benediction of the national Slavonic church. On the left bank of the Danube only, has mediaeval «Romania» survived to modern times as a solid national state, ruled by sovereigns of an imperial character.
Interior of a peasant dwelling in Roumania