My American Lectures/Roumanian Origins and Problems
ROUMANIAN ORIGINS AND PROBLEMS
Perhaps the best way to become acquainted with a country, instead of reading books, often grounded on other books, without the truthful accent to be found only in the uncorrupted and ancient sources, is to search personally the historic places to obtain a knowledge of the past and to link together the present aspects of nature with the memories of forgotten ages. Therefore would it not assuredly be preferable as a method of initiation into the true soul of the Roumanian and into the real meaning of his country?
It is such impression about Roumania that I propose to create as an historian who, during his life, has had many opportunities of visiting all parts of his native soil. Of course, if it is too unusual, I hope my readers will forgive the indiscretion. There is nothing so difficult as repeating a certain collection of ideas under one and the same form. However, I may achieve my end, for I would lead the reader along the very paths trodden by the peasant, the prince, the founders of states, the conquerors and other great figures of our historical progress.
On the green slopes of the Oltenian and Wallachian mountains with swift-running rivers and charming little white huts clustered round the imposing belfry of the humble church with its brightly-coloured wallstraces are to be found of the primaeval life of this hardy race, on which the waves of foreign invasions have broken in
A Roumanian woman (Macedonia) vain, and the oppression of ruthless masters has been relentlessly wasted. Thus are be conceived the first groupings of the peasant communities.
Rome had withdrawn its legions and the simple elements of provincial administration. No barbarian was eager to conquer these abandoned people who could offer them no promise of rich booty, no accumulated riches, nor any opportunity for reaching the inevitable goal of all invaders, the imperial Rome of the East, Constantinople. The cities have disappeared, as they were new and not consolidated, being mere fortified places affording barracks for soldiers, markets for the neighbouring peasants and — though seldom — administrative centres offering opportunities of life at a higher level. But the former Dacian villages persevered notwithstanding the hardships of the time and they maintained, in a Roman form, the tradition of a very ancient popular civilisation, bequeathed to them by their Thracian forbears. In them no warriors now dwelt and the warlike qualities of the following of Decebalus no longer existed in their patient souls: only when attacked were the military virtues of their fathers awakened. Long and peaceful centuries began to be for this Latin-speaking race of shepherds and tillers of the soil. They had no history worthy the chronicling, no laws to be codified, no stone memorials to be preserved through the ages. The great battles were fought in the Balkans, on the main road to the City of the Caesars, where new frontiers were traced and new lines of demarcation were established. Withdrawn from the noise of conflict and the making of history, treasure of energy were transmitted from generation to generation.
But later, in the fourteenth century, under the Apostolic crown of Hungary, which had assumed the mission of converting all pagans, another people formed themselves.
When one comes from the former country of Maramureș, now divided between Roumania and the Carpathian Ruthenians under Czechoslovakian rule, and descends into the valleys of the so-called Austrian Bukovina and, further, into the larger settlements of the vanished principality of Moldavia, one encounters representatives of another race — tall men of war-like appearance with long hair and swarthy skins, with the dignified demeanour of true aristocrats. They possess a certain courtesy of manner and dignity which no injustice or opression has been able diminish. Knights under the Angevin banners, defenders of the marches against the pagans of the east, counsellors of autochton princes: such was the Moldavian chivalry.
And a new state has sprung up whose monuments are not only churches, but ancient strongholds, scattered at all strategic points of the principality and guarding the homes of the princes. Everything in the principality has a war-like character.
From the feeble political beginnings of Wallachia a stronger organisation was slowly shaped. First judges over groups of small settlements throughout an entire valley: then, in times of danger, dukes after the manner of the Frankish rulers of Central Europe under the Carolingians, the armed apostles of the Catholic faith; finally, greater than any of these, was the popular emperor, ruling oyer a whole country, the domn, whose title derived from the Latin dominus. These last were capable of defending themselves from the ambitions of the Hungarian kings who had, at that time, conquered that part of the Roumanian territory of traditional right known as Transylvania. In the mediaeval ensemble they attained a yet more advanced stage of development. The tomb of Bassarab, the reigning prince of the first decades of the 14th century, yielded to the fortunate discoverer of a later period a diadem of pearls, a red silk surcoat embroidered with the lilies of the French dynasty then reigning in Hungary, besides a golden belt and rings of the same metal. All these were evidence of a monarchy, unique in the Europe of its time, which combined such imposing borrowed symbols of royal rank with the truest traditions of its rural descent.
The peaceful Moldavian peasant of today appears just to have returned from a hard-fought battle with the invaders of his fatherland, be he Tartar or Turk, or those neighbours who dreamed of extending their boundaries to the shores of the broad Danube or the Black Sea. Impoverished the Moldavians might have been, but they were not humiliated by a vassalage which was never true serfdom in the occidental meaning of the word. Their « boyar » was the descendant of their former leaders in the battles for the common heritage. In him they revered their own past of suffering and revenge. A village was not, as in Wallachia, the homing-place of a clan descended from the same ancestor, the founder of the community, but was a military unit as well. In time of danger, when beacons burned on the hills to herald the approach of hereditary foeman, they assembled under the leadership of their vătăman («captain» from a Slavonic derivation of «hauptmann») eager to fly to the assistance of their supreme lord, the Domn, an untiring defender of the Christian faith, as was Stephen the Great, for instance, in the 15th century.
Today the Wallachian peasant indifferently regards the passer-by clad in dark garments of orthodox cut, which contrast strangely with his own picturesque white shirt and cream tight trousers: to him he is merely an interloper, much as the crow in his near-by corn. In Moldavia any «foreigner» apparently of a superior station of life is invariably saluted by the peasant or his woman, but this is no servile gesture towards a master, it is rather the outward manifestation of welcome and, in an untutored people, an exquisite courtesy. In the South-East of Europe, and perhaps in other countries as well, there is no nobler gentleman than the rustic, for whom the present-day, despite all its constitutional legislation, has been ungrateful and a cruel deception. In the neighbouring « county » of Maramureș—cradle of Moldavian dynasties and of its most ancient nobility—the peasant, on whom the strong drink peddled by the Jews has had such dreadful effects, still considers himself a born knight and addresses his equals in the terms of the 14th century, used at the Courts of their relatives and ancestors, the Moldavian princes.
Thus there were two originally very different groupings. One was that of the free peasants in the districts of the judges, slowly uniting to form a state in the manner of the Swiss federation, or the clan kingdom of Scotland—a mediaeval popular « Romania », maintaining until the dawn of the stronger political organisation of today the expressive quality of Roumanian principality, of a « Domnia » (empire) over the entire Roumanian country. The second, in the beginning, was only sovereignty over the Moldavian valley, a collection of strongholds arrayed against the Turks and Tartars, a dependency of the defensive works in Transylvania, a march of the Hungarian kings, which, after being consolidated, asserted its rights successfully to independence. The aboriginal peasant was not a conquered subject, merely because he had offered himself as a collaborator in the arduous task of destroying the peril from the East.
A rivalry between the two states was unavoidable. It was a consequence of their principles, and endured long and, in the main, disastrously. The union of all Roumanians was thereby impeded for five hundred years.
Had there been a single ruler for the north and south, they would have been able to resist not only the rapacity of their Christian neighbours, the Hungarians and the Poles, but also the onslaught of the Ottoman Turk who considered himself the legitimate heir of Byzantium. What is more, that division into different and rival states was, a hindrance to the revival of a Roumanian political life in Transylvania, where the Magyar kings to whom an Apostolic mission of conquest, and of proselytism had been entrusted, had established their dominion since the beginning of the 12th century, though maintaining, a local «voevode» and respecting the country’s ancient customs.
Many were the times when the Moldavians and Wallachians, either of their own accord or following the commands of their Turkish suzerains, have entered this fair province, winning victories over the Hungarian nobles and Saxon bourgeoisie, settled there in the nth and 12th centuries. But they always returned, retaining only places of refuge or useful markets in this region which was never alien ground. Had it not been for the dual character of the Roumanian life east of the mountains, Transylvania, which for the Roumanian had no separate entity, would long ago have been incorporated in the Roumanian state, as it is now, by a natural consequence of the Roumanian unity.
Austrian diplomatists foretold this result, even as remotely as 1859, when Moldavia and Wallachia were united under the rule of Alexander Cuza.
But Transylvania remained a country of peasants, and exclusively so. It had no ancient leaders other than the priests, themselves of rustic origin and character, there being no class-distinction between the bishops and their congregations. The former Wallachia was partially transformed under the influence of the neighbouring Moldavian chivarly. The first principle of the free village in the autonomous valley remained, however, not only within the archaic bounds of the state, but above all in the very hearts of the people.
Today, Roumania's greatest problem is to mould all these tradition together: Moldavian aristocracy, organised Wallachian peasantry and the Transylvanian free yeomen. Second in importance is the problem of bringing the minority population: Hungarians, Saxons (both of ancient descent), Russians and Germans (newly settled), into the great movement of a new economic and cultural era. But this latter problem can never be solved until the first becomes reality.