Foreword

The few words that I put as motto at the beginning of this book can be translated like this: “God must have had a hidden plan for this people that the western states rediscovered on the banks of the Danube and adopted like Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses.” These words represent the thoughts of a French writer on realizing how many disasters the Romanian people got out of and through how many trials it survived. According to his most inner beliefs, the future of our people appeared astounding, overwhelming. A providential fate looked upon us, having chosen and kept us to fulfill some secret intention. Le Cler saw in us, in the miracle of our survival, the signs and the hope of a people chosen by providence.

Far from having the same trust in our future was another foreigner that studied us around the beginning of the 19th century. On the contrary, Charles Pertusier wrote that he didn’t see “in the Romanians of whatever social condition the slightest motivation, the slightest energy, not even the slightest trace of a warrior, and consequently, not even the slightest of the ideas that enable one to foresee a higher destiny to a nation. If you knew to read in its destiny, you could predict that, certainly, it would never get its independence.” A fool and a liar this prophet was, fortunately for us. Anyway, the opinions of the civilized world on us were divided between these two extremes. Both these opinions had their foundation. Pertusier, a more superficial and positivist observer, took note of the striking faults, flaws and weak points of the Romanian will and mind. Le Cler saw better, because he saw deeper and he could notice and suspect that the negative traits, the weakness of the Romanian will and mind are the nasty outcome of hard times, and that, under this, there are hidden positive traits and spiritual treasures with great future.

The truth is that our tumultuous and unhappy past trained only the weak spiritual traits that were not favourable to us – the faults, adding to our innate moral flaws new ones. The positive qualities (sic!), the riches of our mind were prevented from their natural development, waited and wait still for favourable circumstances to appear. In the last fifty years, these favourable circumstances started to appear. Our mind, at present, enters a period of creation and fulfilling. All the signs of the times make us suppose that we are at a turn in history, which lays ahead of us a happier perspective than that which lies beyond us.

The future seems destined to erase the stains from our spiritual portrait, to improve and fill the flaws. This future will involve from now on the qualities and the treasures of our nature, to offer them the opportunity to develop and to fulfill in works of our own, but of universal value. This book will demonstrate that, indeed, our mind is universal through its origin, that almost all peoples in Europe enriched themselves, spiritually, with works from the Romanian spirituality.

Bucharest, 26th October, 1906

***

Chapter II. Elements of the Psychology of the Romanian People

Even if we should like to give account of the racial anatomical structure of our population, this is impossible at the moment. There hasn’t been a serious research of the present ethnical composition of the Romanian people. What is obvious for everybody, are the following two things: 1) the Romanian people is a mixture and a confusion of races impossible to make out and to classify; 2) the brachycephalic type is the predominant element in our population of all social strata.

The whole importance of the race factor is surpassed by the psychological point of view, in relation to which this element, considered as purely historical, should be presented. That’s why the main question that we face is: which particular race does the Romanian people belong to? The direct answer that is given to this question, from the beginning, is that the Romanian people does not belong to a single historical race, that the people, more than all the other known peoples, is comprised of an indefinite, chaotic mixture of multiple and various races. Indeed, in various proportions, a great number of various peoples came to mingle and unite, to give birth to the Romanian people. This people is made of the oddest ethnic material in an indefinite, bizarre variety of proportions according to which this mixture was made.

Respecting the chronological order, without regard to the importance of the proportions, there can be distinguished, in this desperate confusion of races, the following elements we are most sure of. Our first ethnic background is, indubitably, Thracian. It is formed of the well-known Geto-Dacians that had to absorb, at their arrival, numerous elements, remaining, between the Danube and the Carpathians, from the former populations of these countries: the Scythians and the Agathirshians. So, the first psycho-ethnic material of the Romanian people is Scytho-Thracian.

There have been numerous theories on the ethnical relatedness of the Thracians. There are a lot of arguments that are summed up by Bergmann’s work, proving that the Geto-Dacians would be a tribe departed from the trunk of the Germanic races. So, the Geto-Dacians would be brothers of the Scandinavians, the Danes, and the Saxons.

To this first level would, soon, engraft the Latin blood and especially the Latin civilization. The Latin civilization, the psychological and moral fund it was made of, is characteristic and rather well-known. We shall summarize and clear them up in their due time. Now the issue in question is the composition of the Latin element that was imprinted on the Geto-Dacian one. The Latin blood that mingled with the Thracian one wasn’t either so pure or so clear. Even this Latin blood was a mixture coming from too various sources. “After the submission of the Dacians, Eutropius writes, Trajan brought here a numerous crowd from the entire Roman world to work the fields and rebuild the cities.” “Thus came, says N. Iorga, people from Italy…or from the peaceful and diligent camps of the field workers, or craftsmen from various branches or victorious Gauls in search of gold, Asians, Egyptians etc…” “This crowd of distinct people, coming from Gaul, Pannonia, Illyria, Dalmatia, Asia Minor, Italy had to have a common language to understand each other and which language could that be if not the official language of the Empire?” Besides these colonies, mostly of civilians, commercial, with an economic role, one should take into account the ethnic elements that made up the cohorts. Thus, A.D. Xenopol reminds us that “Britons’ cohorts were found in Dacia.”

The Latin blood, engrafted on the Thracian organism from Dacia was very mixed up. In it entered in different, unknown proportions the Latin blood proper, Gaulish, Illyrian, Dalmatian and even Briton. The Illyrians gave the greatest proportion from these different ethnic elements. The population on the right bank of the Danube and especially from today’s Macedonia and Albania was Illyrian, Romanized. It is no doubt that the greatest part of the colonists must have come from there. It must also be taken into account that, besides this, the populations on both sides of the river kept in touch with one another, mingled continuously, and when part of this population of the colonies was withdrawn from Dacia to Moesia, these populations became one. Later their resultant population spread again on both banks, and with the invasion of the Huns, Goths and Avars, that dashed in the middle of the Dacian province, the united Romanized populations broke up and spread again, some towards north, some towards south. That is why the Illyrian blood contributed, after the Thracian and the Latin one, in a big proportion to the birth of the Romanian people. That is why, according to Mr. Onciu’s opinion, the first ethnic background of the Romanian people is Latin and Thracian-Illyrian.

Almost at the same time with the Huns and the Avars came to these lands, in the first half of the sixth century, the Slav tribes, pushed down by the furious, invading movements of the Huns and the Avars. These Slav elements, known under various names: Venetians, Sclavinians, Antians running away from the savage Avars, withdrew to the farthest hidden places that were already filled by the Romanic populations, that had arrived and hidden there for the same reason. “This way spread over the whole Dacia the Slav peoples, who came over the Romanians not as invaders, but as refugees themselves from an invasion, searching not prey but salvation.” The Slavs lived in Dacia’s mountains in common with the Romanic populations. “They came, says Mr. Iorga, not in the classic way of the barbarians…dramatically snatching, with their hands full of blood, the curtain of world history: they appeared, on the contrary, slowly, calm and sure of themselves, in small tribes, carrying the tools for working the land on the war carts and accompanied by the flocks of sheep and herds of oxen.”

Later when the danger of the Avars was headed towards the west of Europe, the Romanic-Slavic populations started to come down to the plains and set the foundation of a settled peaceful life by working the land. Certainly, out of this common life couldn’t but appear a process of mutual union. It is clear that the Romanian element was more powerful, more active, and the multitude of the Slav population dissolved in it. The latter left, in its turn, undeletable and numerous traces in the ethnic structure of our people. Here is the way Mr. Xenopol describes this process of fusion: “…Being very numerous, the Slavs invaded Transylvania first, the Trans-Carpathian countries and today’s Romania. From here and especially from Wallachia, where they were refreshed by the flow of the population from north to south, they started to invade the territories across the Danube, settling them, gradually. Whereas those who came in the Carpathians’ fortress were absorbed by the Romanian element, those from the Moldavian and Wallachian plains remained themselves for a longer time, until they were denationalized by the arrival of the Romanians from the mountains to the plains, after the formation of the Principalities.

The Slav element was so important to the formation of the Romanian people that Mr. Iorga believes that the Romanian nation couldn’t have been born and couldn’t have become stronger without the arrival and the incorporation of the Slav elements into the Romanic or Romanized ones. It lacked, in the fifth century, the indispensable barbarian element, because the old Thracian foundation was no longer valid. The Germans didn’t exactly live in Dacia, they only appeared in the Romanian countries in the south of the Danube… The Huns were barely numerous enough to rule Pannonia… There had to be a Slav invasion to make possible the formation of a Romanian people in the east.

Between the years 800 and 1200, i.e. for four centuries, the Bulgarian element, south of the Danube, and the Hungarian one, in the north-west of the Carpathians, spread their domination, which became a peaceful one, and covered the Thracian-Illyrian and Latin-Slav strata, that lived spread in villages and towns in old Dacia and Moesia. The fate of the Romanized peoples seemed decided and settled between these two Finnish-Mongolic elements. The Romanian nation, shapeless and powerless, spread like colorless, shallow water over the whole of Trajan’s Dacia, Moesia and beyond the Balkans. The invasion of the various barbarian peoples, and especially those of the Bulgarians and the Hungarians was like the overflowing of some thicker and heavier waters, that mingled for the moment with the neo-Latin water, and then they separated, became clear, and settled, one part in today’s Bulgarian plains, the other in the endless fields of Pannonia.

The neo-Latin water, light like the oil or the alcohol, goes up in light vapors towards the Balkan or the Carpathian Mountains. There it was preserved under the clean form of snow which, in time, especially the element from the Carpathians, spread in peaceful torrents scattered in the fruitful and large plain from the left side of the Danube.

These Romanian torrents, coming down from the mountains, make up the second foundation of the Romanian people.

This separation, clarification and settlement of the neo-Latin waters didn’t last long. They were soon troubled again by a torrent of Mongolian origin: the Turks. But even before the Turks their brothers, the Tatars often brandished their spears and prepared the way for the Turk invasions. Towards the end of the 15th century, the Turks reach the Danube. The Wallachian Principality submits to them. A century later, the Moldavians do the same. Transylvania falls under their occupation a century later. Turkish oppression rules the Romanian people from around 1390 till around 1880. Almost five centuries. Although the Turkish domination lasted so long, it didn’t have, in the given circumstances, much effect upon us. Much bigger than that of the Hungarians, the Turkish influence is, still, smaller than the Slavs’. In any case, with the Turks the Mongolian influence upon the Romanian soul, became even stronger. It must be taken into account.

Our historical connections with the Turks are the most powerful factor that determined on a purely social scale the fate of our people and the path of its development. Our submission to the Turks is the most important moment of our history. All the despair and all the trials our people faced derive from it. Even the national preservation and the causes of the Romanian social degeneration derive from it.

The sequence of violent and savage trials ends with the Turkish-Tatar invasion.

The barbarian invasions stop to let in some half-civilized invasions and influences. These invasions and influences are those of the Greeks and of the Russians.

Indeed, with other means, the modern Greek element invaded slowly the soul of the Romanian people. They first came here as merchants, and could be found, in the years before that in the towns near the Black Sea: Cetatea Alba, Chilia. “The fall of Constantinople, determining many Greeks to leave their country, an important part of them – the educated – emigrated to western countries, where they could make a living from their wisdom, and common Greeks went to the Romanian countries.” (Xenopol).

The invasion of the Greeks in the Romanian land took place after this element left Constantinople. Besides trade, religion was the formal reason under which the descendants of the corrupt and degenerated Constantinople sneaked into our countries.

In the modern era of the history of our country, besides the submission to the Turks, there cannot be cited another event of importance causing the unhappiness of our people as the peaceful and insidious invasion of the Greeks. However, the influence the Greeks had on Romanians is closely related to that of the Turks. The Greek influence on the Romanian people was social, cultural and economic. There is no doubt that the Greeks had an important contribution, good or bad or maybe both, to the spiritual material that makes up the Romanian conscience.

The connections with the Russians, their invasions in the Romanian countries, as well as their vicinity had an influence upon our soul as well. That was especially because this Slav element found in the composition of our soul a great part of psychological material identical to the Russian one. The Russian elements reinforced in our conscience the old Slav influence.

At last, in modern times, and especially in the middle quarters of the 19th century, there appears a powerful French influence. This influence took place in special circumstances. It wasn’t brought to us by the ethnic invasion of the French population in the Romanian countries, on the contrary, it was due to the settling in France, for various periods of time, of the Romanian youths. This influence is a phenomenon unique in history. No other people has ever imitated the characteristics and the culture, some forms of culture, of another people in such a spontaneous, natural, profound and persisting way. Obviously, French spirituality, itself the result of a long evolution of Roman spirituality, was for the unpolished soul of the Romanians, which was also an altered deviation from the Romans, like an explicit model is for a beginner in the art of drawing. The Romanian people began to make up its spiritual portrait according to French spirituality. Its spiritual material tended to follow the firm lines, whose shape tried to imitate that of the French, so big were the affinity and the relationship of origin of these two souls.

Our language, grammar and syntax were profoundly modified by this influence. Not even the Slav influence was so general and so fundamental. If one compares a fragment of Romanian prose from the 17th and 18th centuries with a fragment from the 19th century, one will notice a truly profound difference between these two different ways of thinking and of expressing themselves of the Romanians, in such a short period of time.

The French language and spirituality were for the Romanians’ unfinished language and spirituality like a crystal that falls in a chemical solution with a similar composition, which tends to crystallize and forms identical crystals under its influence. This is how we can explain easily the powerful influence, through imitation, of everything that is French.

The last decade of the 19th century and these first years of the century we live in are marked by a German influence, that tends to replace, managing to do so very little, the French influence.

The reality of these influences and our sense of imitation are so true that an anonymous French writer said: “The Romanians borrowed the manners and the vices of the peoples that governed or protected them, as one of them confessed; they borrowed from the Greeks the shrewd spirit in doing business; from the Phanariot princes their mixture of low manners and vanity. They borrowed from the Russians their debauchery, from the Turks laziness; the Polish rendered them their divorce.”[…]

It is very interesting to see the Dacians’ way of life because it seems to be exactly the same as the one our population has had until recently. They bred and grazed domestic animals, that’s why they were nicknamed milk-eaters. “The national food of the Dacians was millet,” although it is proven that they had wheat that they kept in holes in the ground, which is actually the way it was kept in our country until quite soon. “Millet, says Mr. Xenopol, seems to constitute the basic food of the inhabitants of the Romanian countries until modern times. In the same way, a catholic missionary that visited Wallachia around 1670 says that the entire people feeds itself on millet bread and Michael the Brave is nicknamed by the Sashi [Saxons], who were mocking him, King Maize. As drink the Geto-Dacians had wine, as they had been growing vine for a long time. They built their houses out of wood or of walls made out of tree branches, painted, just as we can see today with the greatest part of poor peasants, especially in Moldavia. As for the clothing, it is enough to watch carefully a Dacian carved on Trajan’s Column in Rome, to see that the clothes of our peasants, especially in the mountain parts are almost the same as those of the Dacians. “The primitive inhabitant of Dacia, says Mr. d’Haussez, appears even today with his braca and his hat, with a broad sash and the peasant sandals tied with leather lacing, the clothes that characterize the Dacians in the bas-reliefs of Trajan’s Column. The women kept until today the piece of cloth (marama) that covers alongside with the hair, the chin and the neck.”

Unlike other ancient people, the Dacians wore large trousers, long up to the ankle, that are no others than the trousers of our people from Olt. “On their feet they wore a sort of peasant sandals tied with leather lacing; the head of the nobles was covered with a sort of Phrygian cap, but which is not made of lamb skin… The body was covered in a tunic, long up to the knee and tied at the waist.” But the greatest resemblance between the Romanians and the Dacians is in the hairstyle “that seems to be today as it was then, with a fringe and long in the back.”

What was truly overwhelming in the spiritual life of the Dacians was the idea of immortality that can be found with the Scythians. “This idea made up the foundation of all the peoples of Thracian race the Dacians were part of.” “…While with all ancient peoples this idea was surpassed by the development of the secondary results of the religious idea… with the Getae it became the center around which orbited all the religious ideas, their entire moral life.”

The legend says that a prophet of the Dacians, called Zamolxis, a slave from Samos, slave to Pythagoras, coming back as a rich man to the Thracian countries, where he belonged, built there a settlement where he gathered the most important citizens, gave them to eat and during the feast he would teach them that those received by him as guests at the table would never die, but they would be moved in a place where they could enjoy all the things they wanted, forever. While he was teaching them these he had a room built secretly underground, and when it was ready he disappeared for three years. The Thracians mourned him like a dead but in the fourth year he appeared again confirming himself the things he taught his fellowmen.

The idea of the immortality of the soul was so powerful in the mind and the character of the Geto-Dacians that a great part of their moral and spiritual life, the manners, their spirituality, their character derived partly from this idea. It explains, for instance, the Thracian custom “that when a child was born, all his relatives, surrounding him, wept at the evils that it would have to suffer, from the moment he was born, and they counted all the sorrows that lay ahead of him. But at the death of one of their fellow citizens, they enjoyed, and covered him with earth joking, and congratulated him on being free of the evils of this life.” As Mr. Xenopol notices, this custom is still in use today with the Romanians in Macedonia, for “at a baby’s baptism the old women cry, taking into consideration the misfortunes that lie ahead in life, after it becomes mature.”

This characteristic and basic trait of the Geto-Dacians’ psychology explains their behavior, and especially the way they fought and died at war. “The idea of immortality, says Mr. Xenopol, deeply rooted in them, must have engaged with difficulty their strength in the earthly life… So they couldn’t fear it (death), but they wanted it and blessed it when it came, especially on the battlefield, where they fought for the country and freedom. That’s why all the ancient writers say that these peoples were very brave and almost unbeatable, through the contempt for life and their wish for death.”

The case of a Getic king, Dapyx, is quoted who, being betrayed by a Greek, and having to surrender with his army, kills himself together with his comrades. From this trait comes the pride that this people showed in different circumstances. So, they preferred death instead of the shame of being taken in the triumphal parade of the winner. Instead of giving themselves away as slaves and their country and the capital to the emperor Trajan, “they set themselves and the capital on fire, and at the light of the flame they gather around the poison vessel, thrust the daggers into their heart or ask their friends to do them this last favor.”

The idea of the immortality of the soul generated the cruelty that characterized the Dacians. Killing enemies was, in their opinion, doing them a favor; that’s why they had to torture to punish. In the war with the Romans the prisoners were tortured in the cruelest way by the Dacian women.

To this deeply-rooted belief in the immortality of the soul they owed, on the other hand, the fasting and the abstaining from the pleasures of this world, the asceticism of a certain class of monks. They lived unmarried and they didn’t eat meat. In their asceticism they reached even the Buddhist idea of Nirvana.

Related to this part of their character, we should consider the fact that the Dacians had an admirable will power, and an admirable power of self-control, of fixing a limit to their habits, especially when they weren’t good. So, the word is that Boerebista with the help of the prophet Deceneus, to stop the wine lust, ordered the Dacians to destroy the vines. The Dacians received this order and carried it out precisely. The same way, it is said that being once defeated by the Bastarns, the Getae were condemned by their king to sleep with their head where they put their feet and to serve the women.

Besides the character of warriors, which was fundamental for the Dacians and which came from their belief in the immortality of the soul, the Dacians display in their history an active, keen mind willing to learn from the enemies and to imitate Roman civilisation. So, they appear as a people open to the civilizing influences coming from abroad, from other peoples whose superiority in war was obvious. As a people of warriors they hated working the field, and practiced agriculture as little as they could. It is said that they considered the greatest honor to be that of not working: to work the land was for them the lowest form of existence, to live on prey, the noblest one.

The Geto-Dacians lived in tribes that were always quarrelling or having internal fights. They were an intelligent people and many of the circumstances in their history show their swiftness and ingenuity. So is the lunch Dromichetes served Lysimachus in gold vessels while he and his party used clay and wood vessels. That was to scold him because he wanted to conquer the poor and primitive Dacians, as Lysimachus came to rule the Geto-Dacians’ lands. We must also mention the example given by Oroles to the different scattered tribes, to teach them to unite in front of the enemy. He made two dogs fight one another, releasing a wolf in front of them the moment they were the most absorbed by the fight. The dogs stopped their fight and chased the wolf.”

But the most important trait of the Geto-Dacians is their duplicity, cunning, simulation and the cleverness to cheat. The embodiment of these traits was maybe Decebalus, the great hero the Dacian history talks about. Dio Cassius portrays him as follows: “Gifted in the art of war and a good warrior, knowing when to strike and when to withdraw, cunning in setting traps and quick, knowing how to use the victory, and to make up for defeat…”

The following deeds of the Dacians reinforce and prove these spiritual characteristics. It is said that Decebalus, to prevent the Romans from moving forward to Sarmisegetuza [his capital], had a forest cut to a man’s height and dressed the trunks with clothes and arms so that they looked like a big army that deceived the Romans. The humble way in which the Dacians asked the peace from Trajan is deceiving. “They fell on their knees, stretching their hands towards him as a sign of despair and begging his mercy.” But the prerequisites for peace were daring. As the war went on, Decebalus, cornered, begs on his knees for peace under the most humiliating terms ever. “But he wasn’t thinking of respecting the prerequisites, he just wanted to escape the difficult situation he was in.” Trajan had hardly reached Rome when Decebalus broke all the oaths and conditions. We must also take into account all sorts of traps that Decebalus set for the Roman emperor: the deserters sent to kill him, the capturing, by deceit, of Longinus, a commander very much loved by Trajan, etc.

In short, the Geto-Dacians’ psychology was this: a people of shepherds showing great faith in the immortality of the soul, brave, extremely cruel, balanced, defying death, with a strong will and a keen mind, open and sharp; they had, besides these traits, a cunning, a hypocrisy, a simulation capacity renowned in the whole ancient world. These data about the Geto-Dacian psychology are very valuable, we will see them bursting out later in the character of the great heroes of our people, be it in Moldavia or in Wallachia and in the other countries inhabited by the Romanians.

The Romans

 
If the traits of the Dacians passed into our character, as we will see in detail in the following pages, those of the Romans, that left us the language and its spiritual contents, must have passed especially into our intelligence.

Let’s see first of all in short to what extent the Romans have contributed with psychological material, with spiritual traits of their own to the making up of our soul. If we measure the spiritual traits that we have from the Romans according to the spoken language, it is certain that our mind is like the language, made mostly of Roman elements. The spiritual Romanic element must be predominant in the Romanians’ psychology, because the predominant linguistic element in our language is Latin. “The Romanian language, says Mr. O. Densusianu, as it is today, shows that the Romanization of the country, in which it appeared, must have been rather profound. Everything that is characteristic in it is purely Latin. However numerous the foreign elements in its vocabulary may be, the Romanian language wasn’t changed in its foundation, it maintained its character of Romance language, in spite of the less auspicious circumstances in which it developed.” The philologists agree that the Romanian language derives from the vernacular Latin brought by Trajan’s colonists to Dacia. To be clearer, our language derives especially from the common Latin, developed in the entire Balkan Peninsula, before and after the conquest of Dacia. That’s why, as the language is the vehicle of the spirit, our mind will maintain the traces of Roman intelligence, as it developed in the Latin world of the Balkans.

So, let’s summarize the essential traits of the Roman character and mind that passed in the composition of our soul.

According to Mr. Bovio and Mr. Puglia, cited by Mr. Fouillé, the Romans’ temper was violent, they had an energetic and tenacious will, in turns restrained and unleashed. “The really characteristic trait of the Romans, that constituted their strength as well, was this will, impulsive and at the same time sure of itself.” “Ploughmen, soldiers and lawyers, this is what the ancient Latins were, a settled and uniform race, mean and greedy”… “The tenacious and prudent Roman. Here bent on the plough, there equipped with the spear, he always worked; he didn’t fight for the pleasure of fighting itself: the war was for him a work, more difficult than the fight with an arid soil.” The Romans were, indeed defeated in more battles, but never in a war. They had not as much as military genius as political genius. They had a stubborn nature, distinguished themselves through discipline, perseverance and cautious stability, through calculations and slow combinations, through the effort co-coordinated towards a certain goal. “The great intellectual virtue of the Romans was the profound feeling they had about the general aspect, the universal embodied the virtue that had to make of them the organizing and legislative people par excellence; their great social and moral virtue, parallel to the first one was the individual’s total devotion and sacrifice for his country. This is where the vigor of their political unity and the increasing universality of their domination came from. If manly strength was the first trait of the Romans, the second was order. No other people knew, better than they did, to organize force. Their ruling spirit mixed tradition with progress”.

The Romans liked what was arranged in order and greatness, what resembles to the rule, to stability. Wherever they went they brought order and “even the severity of the order, the safety of the person, the feeling of discipline, the respect for the authority, a kind of fundamental ascetic simplicity.”

The Romans’ ease to discover the general in the particular things rendered their spirit a strong tendency towards generalizing and encyclopedism. It never became metaphysical, transcendental, as it never was mystical. The Romans’ generalizing and co-coordinating spirit was opposed to the Greek spirit, analytic and subtle. The Romans’ mind was attracted, in science as in politics, by universal points of view.

Like the Roman spirit in general, “the Latin language, richer and less flexible than the Greek one, has neat shapes, more rigorous limits.” “It avoids everything that is arbitrary and confuse, deals with the normal, regular things… The prevailing traits of this language are the force and energy of the words, their harmonious layout, the balance, the exquisite distribution, the beautiful co-ordination.” “The rounded sentences are arranged in order, like the soldiers of the legions. Roman solemnity appears even in the language: concision, force, majesty, these are the characteristics that express so rightly the military and juridical genius of Rome.” (Iorga)

These traits made out of the Roman writers remarkable prose writers. Their patriotism, the seriousness of their manners, their practical political and juridical sense, found their natural expression in their prose. That’s where the power of eloquence came from, which was the most original part of their soul and literature. “There is nothing more Roman than rhetoric and eloquence.” “As for satire, which is an army of ideas and of words able to punish the persons, change the manners, this literary genre was successfully used by the Romans. They had reached here great originality. “The Romans had the genius of the farce and of mockery; that’s why they said: Satira tota nostra est.” (ibid.)

The positive character of the Roman people triggered the predominance of the sensual, material part of the art. In the theatrical performances, the music and especially the mimicry seduced the Romans… They preferred the dance of the bears, the clowns, the parade of the great triumphs, the gladiators instead of the comedies and tragedies.”

The Roman spirit and character, besides the favourable parts, summarized above had other parts of shadows and flaws. We must consider among them the lack of poetical sensitivity, their prosaic spirit. “In Rome, the agricultural and war life were all important, the poetry and literature couldn’t develop, lacking favourable circumstances… This was another impediment in their development, that basic trait of harshness and rigidity of character that couldn’t be found with the Greeks… Romans despised graecum otium and opposed to it ocupatio fori. With Romans it was not the inner feeling that prevailed, but its superficial and social form. Romans treated with infinite indulgence foreign religions, because they didn’t interfere with the interests of the state. That’s why religious crimes and profanation are very rare and unimportant in Rome. The Romans’ feeling being more exterior and social, it explains very well this indulgence. The same superficiality explains the concrete and utilitarian character of their religion. The cult of the various divinities that we know didn’t have for them the importance of a purpose but that of a means with political purposes that is, in other words, earthly purposes.” That is why, in Roman religion, the priests could introduce, in time, moral and social aspects. “They took advantage of the fear they had of their gods, to strengthen the moral and social duties, especially those for which the law didn’t have enough punishments.”

The good part of this kind of religion is that it doesn’t produce fanaticism with all its evils and exaggerations. Its bad part is, from a psychological and moral point of view, that of “being sterile for the life of the soul, stopping the flow of the feeling and of the thought, not encouraging speculation, or poetry or art.” Roman gods are not individuals but abstract signs of beings and things, they don’t have a biography. On the contrary, Greeks’ gods have movement, life, they are born, love, have their joys and sorrows. “Instead of searching, like the Greeks, a more and more complete anthropomorphism, that had to reach its perfection in ancient sculpture, the Roman doesn’t see in the divinities but personified abstractions; that’s why he leaves them there in a chaotic state, without precise meaning, without characters.” Even in Roman theology only necessity, order, rigorous uniformity prevail.

“But what characterizes Roman religion is the innumerable ideas, more or less abstract, seen artificially as divinities. Each man has his genius, each woman her junona; each circumstance in the social life, each agricultural aspect… has its divinity… The cult, this was important in a religion: the doctrine was without importance: a name is enough only if rites accompany it. Overlooking the smallest practice destroys the power of the sacrifice, the ritual is inflexible; everything is ruled by the authority. The government’s control is exerted upon the rite and upon its supreme chief.”

To sum up, the religious character of the Romans was practical and formalist. “The Latin spirit is not taken in by the abstractions of pure theory for too long. The Roman feels for the metaphysical fund of the regions a natural indifference. It is because of this indifference that the observation of these purely external practices was so great in Italy…” But “this state of religious disbelief does not exclude the belief in superstitions.”

Chapter III. The Social and Historical Conditions of our First Ethnical Formation

Regarding will, the Latin people was a violent one, with a tenacious, stubborn will, impulsive and self-controlling, consequently very careful. Loving freedom, because jealous of their freedom they submitted the world and strangled the liberty of the ancient world, they were at the same time a people of order, discipline and very organized. The Romanized populations, coming over the Thracian ones, must have strengthened even more the energy and the tenacity of their will, as well as the aggressiveness and self-control. Also, they must have completed and modify to the better the sense of freedom they were animated by. From their mixture with the populations from Dacia, their will must have come out more disciplined. A spirit of order, of regularity and of discipline should have been born in the Romanian people that came out from this mixture.

This agreement and this process of strengthening and of completion is troubled by the arrival of the Slavs. These brought in the composition of the soul the contrary traits. They weakened the effect of harmony between the Thracian and the Roman will. Indeed the Slavs appear as a people with a weak will. A people with a changing will, impulsive but not controlled, incapable to sustain itself more than a moment, the Slavs were not disciplined, careless, inconstant and loved freedom up to debauchery and anarchy. They hated the constant effort. With these traits they must have modified and altered a lot the spiritual result of the Thracian-Roman mixture. This way the Romanians’ will, in this first phase must have come out altered, their energy diminished, the self-control and the caution somewhat weakened, the aggressiveness increased, the sense of order and discipline altered to the worse, and that of liberty a little exaggerated and anarchic. The Thracian-Roman violence and cruelty again, must have come out of the mixture with the Slavs, a little decreased. This alteration shouldn’t be considered as something deep and radical at all.

As far as intelligence is concerned, the Geto-Dacians brought in the common intellectual patrimony an open-minded spirit, welcoming civilization, a keen intelligence, full of ingenuity, creative, an imagination rich in sources and expedients, as the famous episodes in their history prove it. As they absorbed in the mass of their population the remaining Scythians and Agatirsh from their territories, they must have had the elements of the artistic sense, and especially the practical sense inherited from the latter.

Roman intelligence, much more developed and richer than that of the Geto-Dacians, came, of course, to complete and to enrich it. The Romans brought with them in the intellectual inheritance of the Romanian people their generalizing and abstract spirit, the juridical spirit, the eloquence, the regularity and the harmony of the language and especially their mocking spirit so powerful with the Roman people. But they cast a shadow over the spiritual portrait of the Dacian-Romans: their prosaic spirit, their lack of poetry, the hardly original approach on the beautiful arts in general.

This little shortcoming was compensated by the poetical sense very much developed in the Slavs. They brought with them, to enrich even more the Dacian-Roman intelligence an abundant imagination, bold, inconstant; an artistic malleable spirit that fits all subjects and forms; a simplistic, keen intelligence, bold and inconstant.

All these traits complete and harmonize with the psychical contributions brought by the Latin or Latinizing world. From their colonization results that the Romanians, as far as intelligence is concerned, must have appeared as a people with a very open, very rich mind, with a keen intelligence, full of ingenuity, with a rather powerful generalizing spirit. Its imagination must have been one of the richest and able to allow a vigorous development of the creation, especially of the satirical one.

As far as religion is concerned the three great ethnic materials from which the Romanian people came out are very characteristic.

However, in this domain, things appear very clear. If there is something overwhelming, important and considered as the surest trait of the Thracians’ soul this couldn’t be but the belief in the immortality of the soul, which was the basic trait of the entire Geto-Dacians’ soul, and out of which came almost all the other traits and inclinations of this people. And, this belief already too overwhelming with the Thracians was added to or maybe exaggerated by the identical belief that was brought later by the Slavs. The deep belief of the Slavs in the after life, in the immortality of the soul and the role this belief has today are well-known. The Slavs brought the belief in all kinds of superstitions, in the good and evil spirits, in wizards, that were widespread and very powerful also with Thracians and Romans.

But what the Slavs brought different from the Thracians was the cult, the religious ceremony, the spirit of pure and empty formalism, lacking all mystical tinge, all metaphysical conception, all inner, deep, intellectual ground. Regarding this Slav contribution, it engrafted on the Roman foundation, which being of the same nature, was much more powerful and more general. Indeed the religious feeling of the Latin peoples is in general very superficial, practical, opportunist and confined to external formalism, absolutely empty and totally lacking a deep, inner foundation. With the Romans as with the Slavs, the forms of the cult, the external ritual baffled the development of the profound inner feeling, and the metaphysical and mystical feeling that is natural for all religions. The letter of the religious law, with Romans and Slavs, obliterated its spirit. On the other hand, the belief in wizards, in pagan superstitions, came to baffle even more and to mutilate the Roman-Slav Christianity of the Romanians.

That’s why, to sum up, what is and must be characteristic in the Romanians’ soul, as far as religion is concerned couldn’t be anything else than a powerful, incontrovertible belief in the immortality of the soul, in the after life, a natural consequence of the first, the deceiving formalism of a cult totally lacking inner life and mysticism, limited and spiced with all kinds of superstitions, ever more absurd, strange and mysterious. This form of religion was preserved unchanged throughout the centuries. It is the only trait of our soul that survived the trial of times. The Romanians today didn’t leave aside or add a thing to this form of their religious faith. We see them the same today as they came out, religiously speaking, from the marriage through centuries of their ethnical nations.

Over 160 years elapsed from the transformation of Dacia into a Roman province to the year when Aurelian left it. This first age of the Dacian-Romans, in Dacia, was relatively calmer. Even if the province was always attacked by the Sarmatian tribes, united with a part of the Dacians that ran away to escape Roman domination, Trajan’s Dacia led during this time a prosperous life, defended by the Roman legionaries, numerous and powerful, that the rulers of Rome kept here. This rather long age allowed the birth of the Dacian-Roman people that appeared from the Romanization of the original populations. This process of Romanization encompasses not only the all powerful influence of the Roman institutions but also the physical mixture of people, the engrafting and fusion of the Latinized or Latin races with the indigenous inhabitants. The colonists intermingled with the indigenous people, the races mixed, the Latin blood and the Dacian blood united.

The social and psychological consequences

The Byzantine historian Priscus, who visited the Roman lands, plundered and submitted by the Huns, recounts in detail the consequences of the barbarians’ invasions. “Thus, he says that, going along the Western coast of the Balkan Peninsula, he arrived at Sardica, a city which they found turned to ashes by a previous invasion. In the same way they found in ruins the city of Naisus (today Nis in Serbia), the country of Constantine the Great, where he found only a few sick people that couldn’t run away, sheltered by a church, and that were sought by the nearby peasants. At Sardica the havoc was so complete that the ambassadors couldn’t find a place to take shelter in. From there to the Danube, the ambassadors passed through a field whitened by human bones, the remnant of the dreadful killing the population was exposed to.”

The flourishing Moesia and Thrace, after the coming of the Huns “were completely changed, says Mr. Iorga, to such extent were they savagely plundered and depopulated. Only the biggest cities sill lasted; the poorer populations escaped to the mountains as the Transylvanian inhabitants did and how many peaceful agriculturists were not turned into shepherds… In the ports to the south there weren’t left behind the Huns but demolished houses and temples, in the towers of which lingered a few sick and wounded people waiting to be healed and rescued. The Roman rule ceased to function…”

The barbarians’ invasions aimed at first only at the rich cities that attracted them through their riches and their gold; that’s why the cities were the first to be ruined. The rich people that inhabited them withdrew to the center of the Roman Empire to take shelter. But when the cities were totally destroyed, “given to the flames, their poor population was forced to leave them and to seek shelter elsewhere.”

“What did this population together with the one that inhabited the Dacian plains become? Did they leave the province as well?” Mr. Xenopol wonders. “They couldn’t, he says, remain exposed to the tumult of the invasion that produced for the peaceful inhabitants the effect that a pack of wolves has when they jump at a flock of sheep. They too ran away when they heard that the barbarians were coming.”

Where did they run? That is the question.

Mr. Iorga thinks that the inhabitants of the impoverished Dacian land already half turned into barbarians, remained where they were, without bothering whether the province was still part of the states.

Mr. Xenopol answers thus to this question. The peaceful populations from villages and cities withdrew from the middle of the plain to the mountains and hid themselves from the fire and plunder on the peaks of the mountains and in the woods that covered them. This flight is an irresistible and universal act of the people that find themselves in circumstances like those in which the Dacian-Romans were, overwhelmed by the Goths, Huns, Avars, Gepidae, etc. But this flight assumed to have taken place naturally and logically by Mr. Xenopol, is still based on decisive evidence. For example, the fact that “almost all the vocabulary related to the mountain is Romanian.” “If we were to enumerate all the names of the ranges, of the peaks from the Romanian Carpathians, starting with the Banat Mountains along the south rim of Transylvania and then towards north, along the Moldavian border to the end of Maramures, where the great plain of Tisa ends… these names, as well as those of all the nearby hills as well as those of all the rivers and rivulets that flow on their slopes are without exception Romanian.” Also, there is the lack of Romanian names for cities from the flourishing Dacian-Roman age and the lack of Roman names for the places in the field. Then, there is the habit of withdrawing to the mountains before any invasion of the barbarian peoples or of enemy troops, which is so well established with the Romanians that it became instinctive and took on the character of an almost reflex act. This habit is really a social phenomenon of the rarest type: a social instinct. As such it must have been practiced from the oldest times. Otherwise it couldn’t have established itself here so well as to be preserved for the times to come.

The scattered and few documents that talk about the Romanians from the darkest periods of the Middle Ages envisage them as inhabiting the highest parts of the Carpathians and of the Balkans. These documents present the Romanians as having the habits of those living in the mountains, as being swift as the deer.

The Romanians couldn’t have done it another way, considering the barbarian invasions unleashed over Dacia, totally different from the way they took place in the west of Europe. “The western part of our continent was invaded only by German peoples, at least only by these for a longer period. The Huns only passed by, the Avars and the Hungarians, even if they plundered sometimes Germany, France and Italy, didn’t choose to live there, but in Pannonia, near Dacia. The German peoples themselves, before settling in the western countries passed through the eastern ones where the invasion came from, and hitting them, with all their fury, unleashed their savagery upon these parts, and first of all upon Dacia and only then, calmed and heading for civilization, most of them christianized in the east, went on towards Western Europe. While in the west of Europe there came barbarian peoples indeed, but capable and willing to civilize themselves, Dacia was overwhelmed either by these peoples at their first invasion, or by others, Turanian, and incapable of civilizing themselves, that didn’t come to settle in the Roman Empire but plundered with fury everything that came in their way… In Dacia the invasion was always like the dashing of an immense gang of thieves that set on fire, pulled down, plundered and killed as if they wanted to destroy any living soul from these lands. And this invasion didn’t last as in Western Europe for around two hundred years, but refreshed itself continuously for almost one thousand years.

Due to these exceptionally cruel circumstances for the inhabitants of Roman Dacia, there wasn’t but one possibility left: that of running or scattering in the Carpathians and in the Balkans, and of hiding in the folds of these mountain ranges, to escape death and the plunder of the barbarians. After them, “in Dacia everything was pulled down, plundered; there wasn’t a wall left standing from the beautiful Dacian cities […], the cities plundered by the barbarians weren’t rebuilt and moss covered their ruins, and with them disappeared the names that marked them in the conscience of the Romanian people.” Their inhabitants, “that at first left them only temporarily, seeing that the barbarians’ raids became more and more frequent, with each day, accustomed themselves to living in their hideouts in the mountains, and they settled here.”

The observers of the time that knew the Romanians left us, sometimes, the impressions they made upon them. Among others, Nicolas Chalcondyle, around 1574, recounts that the Romanians that “are really courageous people, are too rude and too little civilized.” This was their image until even later. Thus it is known, among others, how Michael the Brave’s people offended Emperor Rudolf’s people, through their lack of delicacy and good manners.

The Dacian-Romans’ soul caught in the torment of the barbarian invasions was almost emptied of its rich and sparkling content. Their generalizing tendencies, their classic regularity, as much as they could have inherited from the Romans, were effaced because they weren’t used due to the lack of favourable circumstances. Roman intelligence, under the barbarian menace, was emptied of ideas, as one squeezes the juice out of a lemon and leaves only the skin. To be even more precise, the effect of the barbarian invasion on the Romanian mind is similar to the machine that through its circular movements takes the honey out of the honeycomb and leaves only the empty cells. In the same way, the content of the Romanian mentality was diminished and emptied during the life in the mountains, and there wasn’t left from the sparkling Roman inheritance but the empty honeycomb of the Romanian language.

In the social and moral circumstances of the Dacian-Roman populations during the invasions, maintaining their autonomy couldn’t have involved but these traits of their ethnical character. History couldn’t leave our soul physiognomy so shallow. That’s why it returned upon the first modification, and with colors and shades borrowed from the soul of our neighbors, the Slavs, it refreshed again the picture of our mentality. The physiognomy of the Romanians that was for a moment more a Latin one, being modified in the unprepared hands of history, modified itself even more and ended in resembling in many respects to the Slavs.

The imprint of our spiritual physiognomy resembled so much to the Slav one that for a long time there was incertitude regarding the status of our people. Many considered it as coming from Slav ethnical parents and having only Slav blood running through its veins. Others doubted our Roman descent. By many, and for a long time, we were considered illegitimate sons as false descendants of the Romans.

Our written language borrowed the means of the Slavs, the Cyrillic alphabet. Until the 17th century, the written language was Slav. With the written language, almost the whole organization, rudimentary still, of the Romanian state was borrowed from the Slavs through the Bulgarians. Our institutions, as they were in their first form, were of Slav origin and bore the marks of the Slav pattern. Thus history put in the moral portrait of the Romanians Slav colors and drew Slav lines and contours instead of the Roman ones that were, many of them, shadowed by the trials of times. Even the name of Romanians was turned into the Slav language as “Wallachians” which is but its translation. This age of formation of our people ended, let’s say, with the invasion of the Hungarians and of the Tatars.

Once born, this people enters a new phase, that of education.

Chapter IV The Romanian Soul and its Social and Historical Circumstances until the Formation of the Principalities

If we are allowed to prolong the metaphoric presentation of the state of the Romanian people from the beginning of its foundation we could summarize the state of affairs from that age in the following way. The Romanian people, the result of the Dacian-Roman union and marriage near the Carpathians and the Danube, is a baby who remained an orphan at birth, as his parents died the day it was born. The Romanian people, thus born, was an orphan without family, relatives, left in the way of the barbarian invasions from Asia to Europe. Some of these travelers, who were more generous, picked up the baby from these roads, adopted it in their numerous family, cared for him. These travelers are the Slavs and the Bulgarians that nurtured on their milk, on their own spiritual substance this ethnical orphan and set him on the first steps on the way to peace and to a settled and organized life. The Hungarians, arrived here around the end of the 9th century, tried to take the Romanian people away from the middle of the Slav family and partly succeeded in seizing it. For two centuries, the Romanians fought to remove any foreign government and arrived at an autonomous, free life. But, towards the end of the 14th century, the Turks appeared, which with the Tatars, as they ventured in the Romanian countries many times succeeded in enslaving again the Romanian people. The Turks submitted the Romanians, after heroic fights. Right before becoming adolescent, the orphan was made an apprentice to the Turks. This apprenticeship had visible consequences on its social and spiritual development. We’ll see what the Romanians became with this apprenticeship.

Maybe less than two centuries after the Turks repressed the stubbornness and the warrior temperament of the Romanians, they put the orphan under the leadership of the Phanar pedagogues. These corrupt and hungry tutors almost ruined the material and moral heritage of the Romanians. The orphan left behind this ruin around the year 1821, and almost an adult, he chased away the pedagogues arrived from Phanar.

A little while ago, when the orphan showed swiftness and will he found out that he still had some noble relatives in the west of Europe that recognized him and gave him their support to escape from the submission to the Turks and from the claws of his adoptive relatives, the Russians. Thus the Romanian people gained its freedom around the middle of the last century with the benevolent support of the French. Today, after borrowing very much from the knowledge and wisdom of its occidental relative, becoming an adult it tends to establish a home, a soul and an honorable social position in the society of contemporary European peoples.

Here is how we can summarize in short the legendary history of our people, from the end of the first period of invasion till today. There is still left to examine more closely the reality behind this metaphor. For now, let’s stop at the historical development that influences the development of the Romanian people until the foundation of the autonomous Principalities in Moldavia and Wallachia towards the beginning of the 14th century.

The Slav-Bulgarian influence

From the settling of the Bulgarians in the country they occupy even today, to the coming of the Hungarians, towards 900-1000 A.D., for more than two centuries, the Romanian countries enjoyed relative peace and quiet. The Slav and Bulgarian tribes invaded the Romanian populations from the Balkan Peninsula in a peaceful way. The problem is of knowing the connections between the Romanians, the Slavs and the Bulgarians. What was the result of their cohabitation?

What seems today to be certain is that the Slavs, chased to the mountains after the Romanians by the Avars, Huns’, etc. invasions were absorbed and disappeared in their mass, leaving in their language and mentality very numerous elements. In the quiet age that followed the first savage invasions, the Romanians, mingled with the Slavs, already assimilated, came down from the mountains to the plain either in Moesia, or in Wallachia. Here they were absorbed by the Slav element or absorbed and assimilated them, according to the local circumstances.

In Oltenia [north of the Danube], the Romanians assimilated the Slavs, in Moesia (Bulgaria and Serbia) they were Slavonized. The fact is that, if, before the compact settling of the Slavs in Bulgaria and Moesia, the Romanized population formed a continuous mass on both banks of the Danube, when the primitive Romanian language was formed, after this event the Latin population split in two parts that took, one to the east, to the Balkans, the other to the north, to the Carpathians, reinforcing the Romanian element that was already here.

Regarding the religious and cultural influence of the Bulgarians on the Romanians, Mr. Xenopol, who deals with it in detail, considers that it was done in the following conditions. After a life of 500 years of Christianity in the Roman form, the Romanians had to adopt the Greek rite, under the violent threat of the Bulgarians. Indeed, “as soon as the Bulgarians were christianized and introduced the Slav form of Christianity, there started a very active propaganda for the spreading of this religion all over their kingdom that stretched to the north of the Danube over Wallachia and Transylvania, the place where the Romanians took shelter.” Mr. Xenopol cites the legend according to which “Asan went and put both Romanian lands under his rule and made the Romanians, that had until then read the Latin language, quit the Roman confession and read not in the Latin language but in the Bulgarian one, and ordered to cut the tongue of those who would read in the Latin language, and so the Romanians started to read Bulgarian.” Whence, Mr. Xenopol ends of course that “the Romanians’ turn away from Roman Christianity to the Bulgarian one was due to external pressure, for there is no reason to have made the Romanians quit a form of religion they understood and adopt one they had no understanding for.”

As for the political influence of the Bulgarians upon us, Mr. Xenopol, getting into details here too, believes that “long before the organization of the Wallachian and Moldavian Principalities, there were some Romanians settlements that were obviously of Bulgarian origin, because their names are derived from this language. Thus we find the organization of the first Romanian states put under the rule of some rulers called voievod (hospodar). The word comes from the old Slav dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula, voda = ruler, voyavoda = war leader, from voi (war).” Mr. I. Bogdan, who studied especially the institution of the voievodat, could establish even better its origin and the time when it must have been borrowed from the Slavs. Discussing Mr. Xenopol’s opinion he says that “this opinion is true to a certain extent; and very probably the hospodars appear for the first time in the Romanian countries during the Bulgarian rule north of the Danube; the question is if they appear as administrators imposed by the Bulgarians or as chosen rulers of the Romanians.” About this topic Mr. Bogdan draws new arguments from the parallelism between the institution of the voievods and that of the kinez or cneaz. Mr. Bogdan notices that nowhere in the nearby countries the ruler of the state had the title of voievod. “The Bulgarians, with whom we had the oldest and the closest relations, had as rulers from the beginning khans, then cneji, and from Simion on, tsars.” The same with the Serbs, the Russians and the Poles. From these it is clear that the organization of the institution of the voievodat was not taken from the Slavs from the time of their organization into states, but “was borrowed from a much earlier age and that is before the arrival of the Hungarians, between the 6th and the 9th centuries. Like the knezat, the voievodat is one of those Slav institutions that, borrowed early by Romanians, developed with them in a particular, national way, resulting from the particular circumstances of their political life. If the Romanian voievods appear in documents a little later than the cneji who were mentioned at the beginning of the 12th century, this is a pure coincidence; they are as old as the cneji.”

Regarding the way in which the voievods were chosen, Mr. Bogdan believes that they “were chosen from the cneji and namely from the families of cneji that distinguished themselves through their richness or moral authority; they were acknowledged by the kings as voievods of the Romanians, with the duty of gathering and paying to the king the customary taxes from the Romanian population.”

“The voievods, adds Mr. Bogdan, were, from the Hungarian conquest on, the chiefs of the cneji, chosen by them to represent their common interests in front of the sovereign. In the earliest times, before the Hungarian conquest and during the Bulgarian rule, they were the chiefs of a confederation of cneji; in times of peace they settled the misunderstandings between them, in times of war they led them… the voievodat could have appeared with the Romanians as the similar institutions of other peoples, independently from other peoples.”

According to Mr. Bogdan, the originality of this institution with us resides in that whereas the Romanian voievod had functions more of a ruler, or governor, with the Slavs he was simply a commander, a general of the army, ready to fight.

Mr. Xenopol adds that, besides the institution of the vioevodat and that of the cnezat, we also borrowed from the Slavs that of the boyars. A word also of Slav-Bulgarian origin names the class of the boyars, which word comes from the old Slav boliar = nobleman. Characteristically, the term of boyar is used pretty often in our old sources, and that corresponds to the old Slav boljarin. These two institutions: the voievodat (kingdom) and the noblemen, a class that appears on its own and after a process of social selection from a people, must have existed even before the settling of the organized societies as they are the condition of a new organization.”

The Hungarian Influence

There is no doubt that in an incredibly small proportion, the Hungarians exerted an influence upon the Romanian character. It is natural that this influence should have exerted itself more upon the Romanians that live in the countries that are even today [1907] subjected to them. If we bear in mind that within the Hungarian influence we must take into account the Kumans’, the Avars’, the Pechenegs’, etc., this influence becomes more important.

The Hungarian influence upon all the Romanian countries lasted for about two centuries. It started around the 12th century and lasted until towards the 14th century and even later. Domination, even when it is reduced to mere suzerainty, cannot but leave a certain echo in the soul of the vassal people. “Numerous exchanges took place between the Romanian population in Transylvania and that in the old Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Meanwhile, the Hungarian elements introduced in the Romanian language from Transylvania were brought to the Romanians in the Kingdom, where they form a part of the popular language.”

Chapter V. The Romanian Spirit and the Foundation of the Principalities

Whatever the foreign influences might have been, especially the Slav one, the truth is that the basis of the Romanian mentality always remained Latin. “For the foreigners that see only words, without minding their spreading and use, the Slav elements seem predominant.” However, things are different. “Article, pronoun, adverb, conjunction, preposition, even the fundamental verbs, namely everything that renders a language its own physiognomy, are mostly of Latin, Greek-Latin or Thracian-Latin origin.” (N. Iorga)

This was the impression that Romanians made around 1550, in the times we are referring to: “As far as the Romanians’ language is concerned, it would seem at first sight that it is the same as that of the Italians, but it is changed in such a degree that there are actually differences which make their speakers be hardly able to understand each other. Using the same language, the same customs and ways of life, they came to settle on those fallow lands. Nowadays we can see that they do not differ much from the Italians, both in their nature and in their tools, weapons and equipment…”

The spiritual traits corresponding to the social activities left from the Romans, which in any case must be similar to the ones of the Romans, can be considered the following: a will that is strong, invincible and sometimes uncontrolled, but always tenacious and cautious. The Lund bishop writes about Mathew the Treasurer that he was “a very modest man, very kind and especially cautious and agile as no one else in Hungary.” Also, about Stephen the Great a Venetian letter mentions that he looked “in death as he did in life: terrible and cautious.” Mr. Xenopol characterizes in this way the two great rulers of the Romanian countries, Stephen the Great and Vlad the Impaler: “Stephen – clear-sighted, deft and knowing how to exploit all circumstances, The Impaler – daring up to madness, brave and stately.”

The element of will, naturally notched a little because of the hardships of the invasion age that couldn’t keep it intact, became stronger during the two centuries of the nation’s rising and heroism. The juridical spirit, the intelligence and especially the richness and the refinement of these qualities were much encroached upon with the Romanians because of the poverty and barrenness of their social and historical life. We have seen that what mainly characterizes the social and political life of the Romanians, even at the time of the consolidation of the principalities, whose organization kept improving and complicating, is its patriarchal simplicity, the scarcity of forms, their reduction to a few extremely simple formulas. The Romanians’ juridical spirit, basically the same as that of the Romans, will be totally simple, primitive. Also, the Romanian soul, basically the same as that of the Romans, will show a simplicity that gives it a primitive character, a rudimentary tinge, unrefined, rough. Their will, rid of the refined spirit control, will be even more vigorous, and especially will be more hot-blooded and less disciplined than the Romans’. The Romanian character, untamed by a culturally enriched mind, will be more violent; its perfidiousness will be more striking; the artfulness, in its unabatedness, will be rougher.

“The Romanians, writes Chalcondyle around 1550, as we have seen above, are indeed robust and fiery men in war, but very rough.” As far as their artfulness is concerned, the same author mentions Romanians’ duplicity towards the Hungarians, at Varna, when some of their allies against the Turks leave them and offer their help to Amurat, in order to destroy the Hungarians and ingratiate themselves with the Turks.

Thus, it is said that Romanians’ revolt in the Balkans is due to the fact that Peter and Asan brothers presented themselves in front of Emperor Isaac II Anghel, in such a rude and unrefined manner that Asan was slapped on his cheek. Avenging this blow was the starting point of Asan’s powerful Romanian-Bulgarian empire.

It is also known the deceiving manner in which Peter and Asan proceeded. They say the brothers “erected a church in Hemus where they gathered several epileptics whom the people thought to be possessed by evil spirits and they were taught to say that, after the terrifying fits they experienced, saint Dimitry, the miracle doer of Thessalonica, would have moved there in order to rid them of the yoke they carried.” (Xenopol) The revolt was thus stirred, but in the first meeting the emperor dispelled it and the Romanians got away only by cheating with their prayers of forgiveness and their promises given to the emperor that they would submit. However, later on, at a pinch, Romanian archers crushed the emperor’s army, and he hardly saved his life by running. Hence, this is how the portrait made by Kekaumenos comes true: big liars and famous bandits, they are always ready to swear the greatest commitments to their friends and then easily encroach upon them, making sworn brotherhoods and alliances meant to deceive the foolish ones.

According to this moral portrait must be seen the defeat experienced by Charles Robert from Alexandru Basarab, who deceived the former with peace and destroyed his army in a gorge where he is said to have led them. Also, the same feature of cautious and clear-sighted character accounts for Mircea’s interference in the quarrel between Baiazid’s sons for inheriting the empire and the help he provides in complicating the Ottomans’ affairs. The numerous and various sources testify on the tenacious, violent and deceiving character of Romanians from that age, on their primitive, rudimentary and rough manners. Among others there is the description of the Jew traveler Benjamin of Tudela who mentions the Romanians from Tesalia, around 1170, whom he met in his journey to Palestine. “In swiftness, they are like the deer. They climb down the mountains in Greece, for booty and robberies. Nobody dares confronting them in war and no king has been able to defeat them.” The memory that Nicolas Choniates records about Romanians corroborates this view: “The emperor found their fortresses and villages fortified by new bulwarks and their defenders, climbed on heights as the stags, jumped over precipices like the deer and did not receive any open fight.” It was natural for the cruelty, the violence and the artfulness of the Roman character to become more prominent with the Romanians, who endured over the centuries the wrath of invasions. As for surviving, few as they were compared to the huge forces unleashed by barbarians, they couldn’t have done it unless they were endowed with such qualities. The inhuman conditions which the barbarians confined them to, strengthened them, made them rougher and almost savage, up to the state the above mentioned sources illustrate them. Vlad the Impaler’s savage cruelties and Vlad Dracul’s deceits, rough and primitive in their violence, were the result of some long centuries of terror, barbarism and savagery.

As for Romanians’ intelligence, this spiritual function was obviously an admirable tool. This spiritual organ was of a superior essence, strong in itself, but simple and simplified. Romanians’ brain must have always been strong, since it was the extension of the Latin brain. However, weakened, drained for centuries, the intelligence that they developed was in itself poor, as poor were the circumstances in which it had functioned to no avail for such a long time. Hence, Romanians’ intelligence, at the beginning of the principalities’ foundation, must have been very exhausted, but capable of being enriched, numb, but susceptible of a powerful efflorescence. It must have preserved only the traces, the outline and the direction, the commanding drain of the Roman intelligence.

The barrenness of the intelligence, its complete lack of refinement is noticeable from the totally simple way of life that the Romanian peasant, shepherd or farmer, led in his empty hut whose whole furniture was represented by several rudimentary pieces of wood.

However, once state life was founded, between the Carpathians and the Danube, once the Romanians, shepherds and farmers, descended the mountains and thoroughly settled in the villages, so that they were reconstructed as well as the free thriving village life, the Romanian intelligence warmed up and, stirred mostly by the ardency of the Slav imagination, started sparkling and enlightening the dark depths of the Romanian soul.

The village life gathered our forefathers around the church, which was the first means of rousing the sparks of the Romanian mind. The usual annual religious holidays, the celebrations, unfailing at weddings, baptisms, funerals closely gathered the people around the invalids, at feasts, meetings, and socials. The minds started competing, the spirits enlivened and stirred. From this competition and mutual incitement appeared the inventions, the literary creations, the stories, the ballads, the anecdotes and the songs that enrich the treasure of Romanian folklore. Indeed, when the political and social life of Romanians took shape in more solid institutions, when the class of boyars was chosen from among the people, in the course of fights and battles with the Turks – as butter appears from churning the milk – when the princely and aristocratic courts were created, real centers of complex life and conglomerates of people, Romanians’ cerebralism became more complex as well, its functions developed, its activity enriched, the content of the Romanian mind enlarged. This organ, once strong, became strong again. The vessel of the old Roman intelligence was again filled with a tumultuous content. The Romanian language came undone and started talking and expressing the fruit of the Romanian mind derived from the touch, the pressing and the collision of minds on various and numerous occasions that life brings in villages and at the court.

A great part of the literary creations of the people are inspired by the church and thus, they have a religious topic and content, and others are inspired from the parties at courts, baptisms or weddings, socials, meetings or other such events.

In accordance with the focus of the social life in different place or time circumstances the various genres of popular literary creations appeared, coming out of the touch, concentration and clash of minds. Illustrated in several guiding lines, the social life of the old times was confined firstly to the feasts organized at the boyars’ houses for Shrove Tuesdays and the usual holidays of the year: Christmas, St. Vasile, the Epiphany, St. John, the Easter, the Holy Trinity, St. Peter, St. Mary and St. Dimitry. These celebrations were the so-called wakes for the name day or for the end of the fasting period. In such circumstances the literature with clerical religious character was created: the carols, the Plough-Song [a traditional procession with a decorated plough on New Year’s Day], Vasilca [a carol sung by lads on New Year’s Eve while carrying an adorned pig’s head on a tray], The Star, the Nativity drama, the Herods. All the legends whose heroes were name-day saints and whose content was some mirroring, sometimes quite notched, of their lives were invented in these circumstances.

At the celebrations organized on the princely and aristocratic houses for baptisms, weddings and other occasions of social life there were born the legends, the ballads and the so-called old songs. In these songs they praised the life of the nation’s heroes in decisive circumstances from our history, great deeds were immortalized such as: the craftsman Manole, the Ewe-Lamb, and so on. A significant part of the so-called worldly songs were invented in the same period. They merely characterize, in lively images and feelings, the moral happenings of these familial and social circumstances. The bride’s song, the groom’s song, the mother-in-law’s song, the godfather’s song are all old creations in which one can clearly notice the echo of the circumstantial feelings.

If we examine the social life of the villages, as it was on those occasions, we will find all sorts of rhythms, Romanian ring dances, girdles, with their unsophisticated fiddlers, with their extremely monotonous songs that the dancers had to make interesting by very witty stories. Hence, the literature of extempore songs or witty couplets.

In the long autumn nights, at socials, around some family with beautiful girls, was gathered and centered the life of the entire villages from the ancient times. In these gatherings of young and old lives thrived the world of fairy-tales and anecdotes. The old folks told old fairy-tales which they tailored and developed from a rather simple and little encompassing core. Their imagination embroidered on this first ground all its inventions and learned to embellish it more and more. The young ones listened and new versions were already being created. Also, at that time, from the clash of spirits, from their competition, the flame of the sharp anecdotes appeared, the ingenious invention of riddles.

When working the land, the Romanian peasants never went alone. They worked the land on borrowings that allowed them to gather in groups of 8-10-15 persons. When their bodies and their arms were exhausted by overturning the furrows, the spirit got a distance for a moment, took of, and, depending on the circumstances, it created those killing remarks, headed towards its enemies, or those social worldly songs, in which its type of social and familial life is mirrored in all its aspects. But especially in the evening, after the sunset, when leaving the field – which was several kilometers away from their home – the lads and the girls descend giggling on the paths and blossomed hills in the magic confusion of the twilight and their souls are animated by the flame of an intense emotional life, which is expressed in lasting inventions and feelings, in formulas and lines of an unsurpassed beauty. In such a moral and material frame and from such a spiritual core the melancholy Romanian folk songs appeared.

At the head of the invalid or in various unusual familial and social circumstances, the wishes of the friends and relatives gathered changed into rhythmical, metaphorical and sometimes rhymed formulas. These formulas invoke the layer of faith and superstition and these evocations are compatible with the nature of the invalid’s sufferance or with that of the social circumstances it deals with. Hence the literature of exorcisms.

Around the coffin, at the dead person’s funeral, the Romanians always gathered, for no other event affected them more deeply than that of death. The old unshaken belief in the souls’ immortality, kept and strengthened by Christianity, made possible a continuous dialogue between the dead and the living. The social relations between Romanians were continued and mirrored in their society beyond death as well. The dead and the living discuss every Sunday at the cemetery and tell their troubles and sufferance. This way, finally, the literature of laments was born.

It is interesting to see how that part of the Dacian-Romanian soul develops, that very profound part that we illustrated as the belief in the soul’s immortality, and hence in the after life. This deep and constant foundation of Romanian soul and life, strengthened and greatly enhanced by Christianity became the point of reference of Romanians’ psychology, around which their social, political, moral and intellectual life evolved. The belief in the after life was kept intact during the entire time of the invasions and immediately after the Romanian principalities were settled under the protection of Christianity, this belief spread, grew, enlarged and took unusual proportions. It prevailed over all the details of our nation.

This spiritual event absorbed everything, colored all the manifestations of our being, our entire mental and moral foundation. The superstitions, the prejudices and the pagan practices became embodied in this strong belief. The latter was strengthened by the former, the former employed themselves in the latter’s benefit. It is on this background that our warlike, political social and cultural life was founded. This belief came to be considered one with our national being. Preserving our ethnical being means rather preserving our right Christian belief.

Hence, the reason for making war with the Turks was not so much that of preserving the nation and the property, but of preserving the Christian law and the church from the pagans’ profanation. The hate for the Hungarians was mostly the hate for some heretics. After every lucky or unlucky fight, the Moldavian and Wallachian rulers erected a monastery. The heroism that enlivened the Romanians at the beginning was the result of following the belief in securing the preservation of the Christian law and through this, the means of becoming worthy of the after-life and of sins’ exemption, which alone led to this after-life.

So much were the rulers worrying about the after-life that their activity and their endeavors always headed towards pious works, such as building and adorning the monasteries from the country and from abroad as splendidly as possible. These monasteries and their rich endowments with villages and properties were as many sure bridges over the abyss of destruction from the after life. They ensured the after life and, together with the intact preservation of the body that was interred in them, the immortality of the soul for which these monasteries, villages and the estates dedicated to them pleaded. There were times in which this faith preserved and saved not only the body and the soul of the rulers, but even the soul and body of our nation.

Chapter VI. The Consequences the Romanian Countries’ Fall under the Turks’ Dominion. The Alteration of Romanians’ Character

We have seen so far what the spiritual attributes of Romanians could have been in the period of fights for independence. Let’s try to approach the way these attributes changed in the time following the fall of the Romanian countries.

The loss of independence was, for the Romanian countries since the beginning of the 16^th century, the most important and decisive fact for the meaning of their national history. The Turkish dominion, which, especially at the beginning, left room, theoretically, for an apparent independence, actually came to a real subjugation towards the 17-18^th century. This massive event of our history couldn’t but have deep and very sensitive consequences for the spirit and character of the Romanian people.

The heroic fights with the Turks lasted for almost two centuries. In Wallachia they began with Mircea and ended with Michael the Brave; in Moldavia they began with Stephen the Great and ended with John the Terrible. For Romanians’ character, the consequences of these fights, ended with the total, permanent defeat of the Romanian energy, were obviously the exhaustion and loss of that tenacity and obstinate steadiness of will of our nation from today’s independent Romania. The daring, the manliness and the usual bravery of our ancestors were destroyed and disappeared mostly in the overwhelming fights with the Turks, at the feet of the sultans to whom, as it is known, neither the strength, still barbarian, of the Bulgarians or the Serbs could resist, nor the Byzantine thought and civilization or Hungarians’ war power, famous in the old times. The essential element of the Romanian character, the will, simple unrefined, but profound, stubborn, obstinate, unleashed, undefeated and strong, this basic attribute of our nation, weakened, faded and melted in the fire of the terrible fights with the Turks. Instead of the courage and dare from old times, a sort of instinctive fear penetrated the Romanians’ soul. As marshal Moltke noticed, “resistance, proving to be almost always in vain, the Romanians couldn’t think of any means of defense but to run.”

Mircea’s boldness at Rovine and Stephen’s at Podul Inalt, Vlad the Impaler’s daring, Stephen’s and Michael’s energy and courage at Calugareni and The White Valley, Peter Rares’s loftiness or that of John the Terrible at Rascani will never be found with the Romanian rulers that followed Michael the Brave. Mathew Basarab and Brancoveanu, no matter how much brightness they could throw upon their reign, didn’t resemble at all, in this respect, Stephen, the Impaler or Michael. A kind of coward submissive passivity, that doesn’t even dare to rebel, that doesn’t even consider resisting or opposing and which, finally, tries to guess and even forestall the master’s will replaced the daring, the revolt, the bravery and loftiness that used to characterize the Romanian rulers from the times of glory.

This first element of the Romanian character – the tenacious will, so highly notched and smashed, was not the only one in this situation. Closely linked to the will is the spirit of independence, of freedom, what we call the character’s independence. The loss of independence for the Romanian countries had as a direct consequence the loss of independence of the Romanians’ character, the alteration, up to disappearance, of the spirit of freedom and independence in the good sense that characterizes our nation and its Dacian-Roman ancestors.

And this is how this dissolution process of the character, will and independence spirit is illustrated in history.

Not only did the Turks crush, in almost all their encounters with the Romanians, the military power of the latter, but, in the capitulations – Romanians’ submission acts – they forbade even the right of having a larger army than they considered. The military business made inaccessible to the Romanians, what else was there to do? Especially the boyars, who up to then had the role of fighting against the pagan enemy, and their rank, their privileged situation, as well as the lands that the rulers offered to them and were rightfully theirs as a reward for the bravery and the competence that was shown and would still be shown in wars – the boyars remained now a class of privileged people, that nothing, no merit justified any more. Having no part to play, no occupation for spending its energy and no merit for justifying their situation, the Romanian aristocracy declined and corrupted.

It is true that part of the aristocracy was absorbed by the services and high offices that always appeared at the rulers’ court, either by the natural development of the state organization, or by imitations of the natural development of the Turkish state. However, as these high offices were few, and the idle boyars that remained were too numerous and had no military activity, fights between them started to appear for high offices. These fights between boyars became then, fights between the claimants to the throne. Since each ruler, brought his boyars in the states’ high offices, taking their place was possible only by overthrowing the ruler. Hence the wretched fight and the machinations for the rule, which ruined and completely disrupted all the energy and independence of our nation.

To this complete ruin and corruption of the character and of the independence spirit contributed this very spirit of independence. It turned right against those that had it and destroyed itself by its outcomes that derived from the loss of the countries’ independence.

Losing the external independence, the old spirit of independence developed abnormally internally in such a way that it brought real anarchy and disobedience. The aristocrats endured the submission to the rulers with great difficulty. All the time, they tended to drive him away and take his place or the place of the aristocrats that he invested with high offices. They couldn’t stand being dependent of either the ruler or the aristocrats with offices, and this ardency of theirs, for the independence inside the country, brought complete ruin to the external independence. The fights and struggles for the throne immersed the countries into a real bondage that got deeper and deeper, while the formal terms of the treaties with the Turks, as a fatal irony, guaranteed their autonomy. The Turks’ interference in Romanians’ inside business increased daily. The autonomy, our independence, became, as days went by, more and more illusory and chimerical.

And, as if all these decays and declines of the Romanian countries had not been enough by themselves, to their moral decay was also added the moral decay of the Ottoman Empire, corrupted as to mores and which ruined and further corrupted the Romanian countries.

The Byzantine Empire was for the Ottomans, who conquered it, what Nessus’ cloak was for Hercules. The moral rottenness of this empire, aged and starting to dismember, created an evil vicious atmosphere that was breathed, from its beginning, by Ottomans’ new political formation in Constantinople. Breathing and assimilating this atmosphere, the Turks and their empire poisoned themselves, from their earliest times, with the spirit of corruption, intrigue, delation and betrayal that lived in clover for centuries on the Bosporus shore. The Greeks, refined in the art of deceit, deception and corruption, couldn’t have stayed in Constantinople but by corruption and by displaying from the beginning a refined spirit of discord, flattery and intrigue.

Especially the seat of ecumenical Patriarchate, the only prevailing tool that was left to the Greeks from their entire fallen greatness, became the apple of discord, the opportunity of intrigues and corruption for the Turks who wanted to take it.

This opportunity developed the Turks’ taste for accepting to be bought with sums of money. The system of corrupting the high officials, the Sultan’s women, and even the Sultan himself, was developed and perfected by the Byzantines.

Obviously, the system of corruption developed at Constantinople had its natural consequences on the relations recently established between the Porte and the Romanian countries. The situation of the latter evolved in such a way that, as I mentioned earlier, the intrigues and the fights for the rule had no limit any longer.

The serfdom which fell upon the Romanian peasants, together with the decline of the Romanian countries, had a very deep and painful echo, especially very damaging, for the character and spirit of the true Romanian people, composed almost entirely of peasants.

The uneven life that the peasants were confined to because of the endless wars and of the frequent Turkish and Tartar invasions had a strong impact on Romanians’ character and will. Their ardent will increasingly lost its tenacity, became fickle and inconstant. The violence of character weakened. The spirit of caution and constancy were much encroached upon by the anarchic conditions and the historical and political movements, which became impossible to predict. The Romanian courage, daring and loftiness gave way to a deeply rooted habit of submission, of obeying and effacing as much as possible in front of strangers. Finally, due to the context they experienced, that of fighting a totally unequal fight, against some world-wide dreaded enemies, the Romanians increasingly developed the spiritual attribute of concealing their thoughts and feelings, of deluding –the only weapon that remains to the weak in the fight with too strong enemies. This delusion and deceit did not preserve, with the ancestors of the Dacian-Romans, the aggressive, bold and rough character. It became, with the 17^th century Romanians, a defensive, passive, negative and even archaic delusion and cunning: it pushed towards the forest famous gangs of outlaws, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

We could hardly mention in the book of nations a people that is braver, more hardworking, more capable and better endowed by nature, whose fate had been so unfair and threw it in historical circumstances and conditions worse than the Romanian nation experienced.

There is nowhere to be found in the history of mankind a people that is admired for its energy, courage and enthusiasm and which was led by the misery of an absolutely unhappy historical life to the kind of decay that the Romanian people was led.

The mystery of our national history is to see what had become of those “brave soldiers, expert in defending themselves with the spear”, that “fiery, rather barbarian, but very agile” Moldavian nation, those Moldavians that were “harsh and fiery, brave warriors, always ready for fight”, “terrible and very brave, so that nowhere on earth is there to be found such a people that would defend, for war glory and heroism, a smaller country against several enemies and that would fight with such daring and such disdain for death”.

Hence, in short, the foremost psychological and social consequences that the fall of the Romanian countries under the Turks’ dominion triggered, were “the loss of these admirable qualities, the annihilation of Romanian people’s will and independence, the auctioning of the Romanian throne and the too often change of rulers.

Chapter VII. The Greeks and the Spiritual Traces of Their Influence

Which were the manners of the Greeks that settled in the country? We cannot answer better than by reading the chronicle first ordered by Leon Tomsa in 1630 and copied almost exactly, 36 years later, by Radu Leon, which proved that all this time, the behavior of the Greeks that came into the country had remained the same. This document ordered by two rulers reads as follows: “Seeing so much poverty and devastation in the country, my Lordship together with the entire country council have tried to find out the origin of these burdens that fall upon our country and it was found and proven that all needs and poverty start from the foreign Greeks who combine rules and mercilessly sell the country and stint it for oppressive usurious interests, and, if they come here in the country, do not deem it proper to obey the country’s customs, but destroy all good things adding bad oppressive laws. Also, they have increased some taxes so as to be able to pay their usury. Moreover, they have shown some other alienation to the people of the country, not considering any native of the country, alienating people from my rule with envies and evil doings, exploiting the poor mercilessly and showing enmity to all the inhabitants of the country.”

A document of Mathew Basarab from 1639 explains very well the legal way in which the biggest and the most beautiful monasteries of Wallachia had been alienated.

If we look closely and examine, in order to explain better, the content of these two documents, the foreign Greeks’ behavior in the Romanian countries appears in its entire hypocritical emptiness. They combine reigns, mercilessly sell the country and stint it for oppressive usury; destroy all good things and replace them with bad ones; don’t consider any native; alienate people from the rule with envies and evil doings; oppress the poor mercilessly and show enmity to all the inhabitants of the country; deeply corrupted, they stain their hands with the degrading bribe and in shrewd secret they sell and trade the holy monasteries of the country. Here we have, summarized in an admirably comprehensive way, from the content of these two documents left by the Romanian rulers, the soul and the behavior of the Greeks that came into the country in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. We must know that these documents can be neither false nor exaggerated for, especially regarding the chronicle from the time of Leon Tomsa and Radu Leon, it couldn’t be but milder than the truth, since the great bias these rulers showed to the foreign Greeks is well-known in history.

Regarding the rulers that the Turks sent to us from Phanar, we will present a description that the Englishman Adam Neale made. He characterized the Greek hospodars as intriguing, hypocritical and dishonest people. Thus, after they spend several months crawling over the Turkish vizier’s court, after they win them over with numerous gifts and flattery, defeating all their rivals by slander and evil talk, they are first appointed dragomans at the court and then, governors in Moldavia and Wallachia. Neale also writes that when they took over their rules they were full of debts made in order to corrupt the members of the Turkish divan and surrounded by a lot of apathetic relatives and starving drones and hence, they oppressed the poor peasants to fatten their creatures.

It is worth mentioning that the Greeks could only join the body of the Romanian nation by that part which we have mentioned as being of foreign blood, the boyars class. The low class was of no interest to the foreign Greeks. Poor and humiliated as it was, it couldn’t have attracted the newcomers’ greed. On the contrary, the large and fertile lands, the promised land from which springs of milk and honey flew, mesmerized the starving Greeks from the land of stones and raisins.

It is known how the Greeks came with nephews and all sorts of poor relatives whom they married in the richest families from the country. They hunted the opportunities and whenever a boy or a girl from the wealthy families turned of age, the Phanariot ruler, showing a paternal concern for his relatives, looked for a favourable occasion to marry them in these families.

There is no doubt that the Greeks, who usually had numerous families, filled all the aristocratic houses with sons and daughters-in-law. For more than two centuries, since the Greeks started flooding the countries, the whole Romanian aristocracy was crossbred with Phanar blood. Even nowadays there is still an overwhelming number of Greek names in our so-called aristocracy. If there are Romanian names as well, it is because our guests from Phanar didn’t have only boys, but also girls who, marrying the boys of Romanian aristocrats, had to adopt the latter’s name. The crossbreeding of Greeks with aristocratic families could be done not only once. Undoubtedly, during these two centuries, this crossbreeding could be repeated for 4-5 times in each family. In any case, we do not believe that there is one single family of Romanian aristocrats that was not crossbred with descendants of Byzantium at least once.

This fact changed completely the situation in our country.

The aristocracy, nationalized in time, became once more estranged from the masses. The thin line that separated it from the bulk of the nation started re-becoming an abyss. The scorn of the Graecized aristocracy for the Romanian peasant became stronger and more intense. The ethnic differences between boyars and the ordinary people became very accentuated and even today we can see that the Romanian people displays two races completely different, two superposed and juxtaposed races, that have nothing in common: the town people and the village people.

The fact is plain as daylight: the striking difference between the townsman and the villager, between the spirit of towns and that of villages, has its origin in this abyss that the circumstances of our history persistently traced between the people and the aristocracy. Undoubtedly the boyars, who had monopoly over all public offices in the country, had to live in towns, in the capital or in the capitals of the counties. On the other hand, it is known that almost all the towns had been founded by foreigners: Germans, Armenians, Hungarians and there, the aristocracy’s way of being, of feeling, of judging, completely different from that of villagers, became even more estranged, more Greek-like, and preserved as such in tradition, across centuries. The origin of the foreign blood isolated Romanian townsmen from the rest of the Romanian villagers. With the latter, the former had extremely rare and casual contacts. No deeper and solider resemblance could there be established between these two races. Therefore, the spirit and nature of our countryside inhabitants were and still are totally different than those of the townspeople. This discrepancy is obvious today as well, it strikes any observer.

Time and again has it been said and written in our press that the Romanian people is made up of two very different nations and that beyond the towns’ barriers, there lives a nation of people completely different from the nation of townsmen.

Easy to understand is the penetration of the Greek element and of foreigners in general in our country and in the Romanian boyars’ families. The Greeks, coming from a superior social background, having an ancient, rooted and refined culture and being familiar with all refined practices and all well structured tricks that a cultured spirit can conceive, found themselves in a completely superior position compared with the inhabitants of the principalities, boyars and villagers. In their peaceful life struggle with the Romanians, they resorted to all schemes, traps and tricks that their superiority allowed. In this fight, the rudimentary, unrefined and simple soul of the Romanian, boyar or peasant, couldn’t win and was soon defeated and overwhelmed. The extraordinary talent of the Greeks to insinuate themselves, to cheat under the mask of religion and the prestige of thriving distant Constantinople they came from, spread victoriously in all directions. Their culture, superficial as it might have been, the pretence of an old civilization, degenerate as it was, attracted the aristocratic families, captivated them and imposed to them a certain naïve admiration.

The exotic tinge of these weeds from Phanar deceived and confused the simple Romanians, captivated the ladies, the boyars, as well as the rough peasants, who welcomed them open-heartedly and made them masters in their own country.

For less than a century, the boyars, the ordinary people and the land of our ancestors were invaded by the corrupt and clever remains of mediaeval Byzantium. The Romanian vitality faded, became apathetic and vanished almost entirely for more than a century and a half.

The modern Greek influence left in the towns’ public spirit especially something from the duplicity, the scissional hypocrisy with the intriguing and corrupted equivoque, with the lack of dignity and the flattery doubled by a famous pathological vanity of Byzantium. If our public spirit suffers from these moral diseases, the origin is in the moral rottenness of corrupted Byzantium, for we were intoxicated with them by the Greeks that came to our country chased away by the Turks from the destroyed Constantinople. The Greek that inspires pity or contempt at Constantinople, says Thornton, is quite a sensation in Iasi and Bucharest and is full of contempt. One can easily imagine, in Thornton’s opinion, that such a deeply vitiated court could have been anything but a display of elegance… such a ridiculous combination of whatever is most grotesque in ceremonies, most vulgar in manners and most shameful in flattery with whatever is most abject in vanity and most repulsive in arrogance. These catching spiritual influences emphasized the unpleasant side formerly present in the Romanian soul, put to work the bad elements of Romanian character and inevitably stifled the display of the good ones.

However, it is true that under the same Byzantium influence, the Romanian’s rudimentary soul and mind, especially that of the boyars, started to develop, polish and refine step by step.

In the Romanian boyars’ spirit, something from the Greek spirit was transferred, a spirit that Desprez defines as follows: “Lucid and pliant intelligence, discursive and sophistic, expert in seeming enthusiastic in order to dupe better and to lure one with all the magic of pleasure in order to make one open-hearted to its skilful eloquence.” The background of the Romanian spirit, of superior origin and essence, felt rapidly attracted and trapped by the Greek influence, the latter bringing it some nourishment that the former yearned for. The Greek’s culture, superior to that of our North and South neighbors was mental nourishment that our ethnic soul was long craving for.

Something from the noblesse, the aristocracy, and the refinement of manners met with a people that developed in an ancient civilization, was noticed at our aristocracy by all foreign travelers that visited the Romanian countries. This mannered aristocracy, this borrowed noblesse in behavior, that refined and generous kindness and that delicacy of behavior towards foreigners came to us from afar, from the shores of the Bosporus. They strikingly separated the boyars from the uneducated peasants – simple, rough, unrefined and clumsy. Even nowadays they discriminate between the Romanian people and its neighbors across the Danube: Serbs and especially Bulgarians, as they discriminate between the Romanians in Wallachia and their brothers in the subjugated countries.

Up to present there is a finesse of manners, a spiritual sharpness, a refinement of noble almost aristocratic behavior, unknown to the Bulgarians and to the Romanians from Transylvania, that clearly characterize the Romanians, especially those that make up the upper class.

These features of character taken from the Greeks and assimilated together with the Greek language are the traces of the Greek culture influence on the Romanians’ spirit. “The civilization coming first from Greeks developed the Romanian’s natural finesse; the Romanian doesn’t oppose, he assimilates.” “The rather unrefined blood of the Romanians, says Mr. Bellesort, ran more easily in his veins when it was combined with Greek blood. The Greeks created those artful sophists, a finer spirit, a more flexible judgment, a more ingenious curiosity, perhaps also the taste for intrigue and for cunning hoaxes... Sometimes a Greek smile can be seen on the very lips that curse the Phanariots. And, if the Romanian character seems to me too difficult to define, the cause I suspect is in its precious complexity…the Hellenic delicacy often refines its lines and contours.” The Greek culture was assimilated since early times by our superposed class, as well as the Greek language, which, since Neagoe Basarab’s time, started to be learned by rulers and boyars.

Undoubtedly, Romanian boyars fluently spoke the Greek language, even since the late 17^th century. This accounts for the fact that the Romanian people got rid of the old Slavonic language in the 17^th century and the Romanian language replaced it, at least temporarily, in the state’s official affairs and even in church.

Chapter VIII. The Orient and Its Influence on the Romanian Soul

Let’s quote and analyze a few facts and dates from our past in order to understand better and more completely the unfortunate influence that the Orient had upon us. Let’s consider for instance the way of dressing that our ancestors borrowed from the Turkish and Phanariot Orient. On this, we will let D’Hauterive, Alex. Ipsilante’s former secretary and important French writer of the 18^th century, speak. This is what he says: “Since their (Moldavian) rulers, who became independent due to Stephen the Great’s bravery, obeyed the domination from which they received the orders (that is, the Turks), they borrowed, together with this way of dressing that encouraged laziness, which matched only with the superficial luxury of a nation richer than theirs and with the mildness of a special climate, with this way of dressing that simply excluded the possibility of diligence with anyone and it was useless for one to be well built and strong, finally, with these clothes that fitted only one man in an entire nation…the ruler I mean, they also borrowed from the same nation an indifferent and haughty way of living, which, if it hasn’t ruined the spiritual attributes of character yet, it changes them at least daily and eventually it will ruin them completely.”

D’Hauterive shows, in general characteristics, how the Romanians’ soul could change and be spoiled under the influence of the way of life borrowed from the Orient.

If we analyze and examine closer the influence of the Oriental costume on the soul of our nation, we could even more easily understand the way in which the moral ill-fated atmosphere permeated the spirit and the body of the Romanian people. “The outfit of the ruler and his lady, of the noblemen and noblewomen” from the Phanariot age “was almost exclusively Turkish, as well as their way of living… At that time, the large and floating garments were fashionable, white or red shalwars (worn by noblemen and noblewomen), or larger shalwars; and especially the caftan made from different materials according to the rank and worn by the ruler as well as by the last courtier. Over the floss silk shirt or the vest, the nobleman wore a surplice (also adopted by the ladies), long sleeved coat with broad margins […] ” “The fine woolen shawl, shaped as a long square framed with colored woolen embroidery, served as belt to men and as headkerchief to women.” The most frequent cover for the head was “the square bottomed fur cap and the kalpak, huge fur cap whose circumference was of at least 5 feet, made from 7-8 lamb skins.” What is very bizarre is that besides these kalpaks the noblemen also borrowed from the Turks the habit of shaving the largest part of their head.

Far from encouraging them towards an energetic living, this way of dressing determined Romanians’ life from old times in such a way that the Oriental laziness and indifference could permeate the deepest folds of character. We will again quote D’Hauterive, who describes the living of Romanian boyars of his time in an elevated and energetic manner. “To the drawback, perhaps good in itself, of a life devoid of intrigue, passion and parties outside the house, one could also add the unfortunate habit of idling, of spending the days and nights on the same divan, almost motionless, not knowing any other life, more active and lively, than that of half laying, with the body leaning on an elbow and the elbow sunk in a pillow. It’s a real misfortune that the costume of those from the North was lost, as, by tightening the body, it made a too long rest unbearable and urged the body towards movement, which is a source of health, power and beauty for both sexes. Then, when they put on a long-haired shepherd’s coat, excessively long, which falls back and forces the head to lean forward so as not to let it fall, they give their appearance a constrained air that makes them look ugly and their most common attitude a form that influences their entire build, for their shoulders rise and become round, the breast narrows and becomes thinner, everything that in other countries is hidden and preserved is not a pleasure any more, but an unpleasant burden. When they want to walk they notice their feet are weakened from lack of movement and swollen from too much rest, which, however, settles in such a way that only with difficulty can it be removed. The absolute disgust for movement derives from the difficulty of making it and continuously increases the drawbacks of this bodily laziness… The renovations in a simple nation’s customs are never meaningless and if men and women do not pay heed to those that match the circumstances, they will certainly be punished by the alterations that appear in their individual constitution and which will affect one’s virtue, another one’s pleasure and the happiness of both.”

This is how the clothing and the living imposed on the Romanians by the overwhelming influence and domination of the Orient altered, degraded and destroyed the bodily energy and afterwards the spiritual energy of the Romanians. In Bucharest and Iasi rich people didn’t even exert themselves to go on foot for a walk, they went out in a carriage. “In Bucharest, says a French chronicler, one doesn’t go on foot, but only in a carriage; there the feet represent a luxury object, the carriage is indispensable.” This terrible lack of vigor and this loss of the walking habit of the Romanian aristocracy unpleasantly surprised all foreigners that visited the capitals of the Romanian countries in the 18^th century. All of them competed in describing the lazy and more than Oriental way of living of the Romanian aristocracy.

The Romanians, says Raoul Perrin, know no greater pleasure than the elating sweetness of a farniente. Laid on their soft divans, cross-legged, men smoke idly for several hours. The conversation, having no topic and no core, is of no real attraction to them. In the evening they get into their imposing carriages and are taken for a walk or at parties. Women lead a totally similar life to that of men. “They live in the greatest idleness: half laying on the divan all day long, surrounded by the women from their convoy and engrossed in the contemplation of their own glamour. They go out so that people can admire their carriages…for them life is pleasure and idleness, the universe a boudoir, the country a divan; they pay and receive visits, and in these encounters, the little town stories and scandals are the center of any talk.

The most important preoccupation of rich Romanians, in this time of predominant Oriental influence, was to eat, drink coffee, and smoke tobacco. “The very numerous and spicy dishes, from 15 to 20, and at carousals or feasts even 30 dishes, succeeded each other rapidly, being brought by servants on plates while the guests sat cross-legged on the divan near a small round table with short legs.” “Regarding the drinks, besides wine and brandy (especially that combined with anise), the aristocrats used to drink sherbet, a sort of lemonade with various flavors and essences. However, the most popular drink for all classes, sexes and ages was coffee, the delight of the entire Orient, which was drunk in the morning, in the afternoon and ten times during the day.”