My American Lectures/The Background of Roumanian History
THE BACKGROUND OF ROUMANIAN HISTORY
Each country is interesting in itself, but it is often more interesting still to consider what is its significance for the development of mankind, for the culture of humanity as a whole. The older school of historical writing concentrated on establishing individual facts, while the broad lines of historical development were often neglected. For this reason the public, while buying the books, was but little impressed by them. Nowadays the main attention of the historian shall be directed towards tracing the great currents which penetrate and inspire natural societies, and the syntheses created within their limits.
I will try to bring before my audience the significance of Roumania’s past in different ages: in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in the more recent periods of Continental history.
Firstly, Roumania can show an unbroken continuity of those elements which dominated European pre-history. Her soil is rich in treasures belonging to the millenia which preceded the appearance of written language. The manner of construction of the small huts and of the better houses in the village — and such elements were transmitted to later forms of art —, the superstitions, the character of the popular arts, as displayed in the rugs and carpets, in the shirts, in the wood-carving, the ornamental spoons and spindles, the metalwork, belts and the like — all go back to pre-historic times. The colours themselves in their nuances and blending and in their technical preparation form a part of the same primeval heritage. Scattered fragments of this art are to be found throughout all Southern Europe, from the Basques to the Slavs of the Balkans, among the Greeks and the Turks. They extend into Asia Minor and up to the boundaries of Persia (at least as regards the linear forms); they are found in Little Russia, in Slovakia and Bohemia, in some parts of Hungary and as far as Sweden and Finland, whither they were transmitted by the Goths who, in their old homes on the Dnieper, borrowed them from the Thracians. The principal features of this highly developed art passed through Asiatic channels, across Siberia — which in remote antiquity was much more densely inhabited than it is today — to the American Continent, where it descended as far as Mexico and the neighbouring republics; the penetration extended by unknown routes, and to a limited degree, as far as the Polynesian Archipelago. But the region in which this art presents itself in the most highly developed form is undoubtedly Roumania. It is characterised by the transformation of natural objects and aspects into a system of geometrical lines: it is an abstract, mathematical, stylized conception of beauty.
The race itself, the ancient Thracian race, whose tribes, the Getes and the Daces, occupied the basin of the Lower Danube and the slopes of the Carpathians, in close union with its neighbours, the maritime Illyrians, lives on today, Romanized in speech, in the countries inhabited by the Roumanians. More closely than the other descendants of the same ethnographical stock they have preserved the physical lineaments of their barbarian ancestors, despite all additions to the aboriginal stock effected by the slow, unnoticed penetration of the Roman invaders.
It is certain, however, that the element introduced by the Romans, the Latin influence, was a large one. Trajan was not the first to introduce this element among the villages of the conquered Dacians. Before his organised measures, and on a far larger scale, a popular immigration of shepherds and ploughmen had taken place, which transformed the etnographical character of the Balkan and Danubian countries. The immigrants re-cast the original inhabitants in a new mould. These too, became Romans; they acquired the habit, and the right to be called by that glorious name. The colonists of the victorious Emperor found the ground already prepared by their explorers and pioneers. The Roumanians, who, despite their partition into two principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia), bear the common name of Roman, constitute the most striking example in history of the Romanisation of a rural population through ethnical infiltration ignored by the official world.
In the course of time, the Empire was divided into an Eastern and a Western half — although the theoretical conception of unity did not, and could not, change. At this epoch, under the reigns of Constantine and Theodosius, the greater part of the Balkan peninsular could be considered as definitely Romanized. In some cases the funeral inscription employ Greek letters for Latin words ; the poor had no occasion to commemorate on their gravestones nationality to which they belonged. Only the sea-coasts were populated by Greeks. The flood of Slavonic invasion brought important changes. Out of this Roman unity of the East, the Roumanians alone survived. They are the only representatives to-day of the whole Eastern Latin world.
They were abandoned by the Empire during Aurelian’s reign, but not in the common acceptance, by a sudden withdrawal of the legions and officials. This was only a practical and temporary concession to the threatened danger of invasion. The Emperors retained all political rights. The barbarians were tolerated in a province which was kept on the registers of the State, and they could figure as mere «foederati». But there was no Roman force to protect the citizens, and no German or Touranian king was interested in ruling over poor districts where the cities had vanished, over a population living on a patriarchal system. The «Romans» were forced to organise their life of purely popular lines; wholly free, subject only to patriarchal rule.
This is no isolated example. The campagne of Rome was a «Romania» at the end of the classic age, and the name of «Romagna» has clung to it to this day. The island of Sardinia was divided into small popular units. Venice, in its origin, was merely a miserable haunt of simple fishers obeying no rulers beyond their own humble chieftains. The South of Italy can show a long list of similar communities. So, too, the «Romanches» in the Alps, who call their language «Ladin».
The Danubian Romans, in their «Romaniae», recognized the supreme authority of the distant Emperor, the Imperator (the mbret of the half-Romanized Illyrians of Albania), but it was very seldom that they enjoyed the opportunity of seeing him. In their homes, therefore, they entrusted the first duties of administration to the «good old men» (oameni buni și bătrâni: homines boni et veterani) similar to the old senators of Venice. As in Sardinia, judges (Roum: juzi; sing.: jude) decided all matters of justice. In time of war, the territories of several judges combined in a duchy, under a duke, who bore the Slavonic title of voevod; the duchies coalesced into counties (țeri: terrae) and, in the absence of an Emperor, a peasant Emperor, a domn (dominus), who could not assume the full title of the Caesars, took the first place among the various popular chiefs. The oldest democracy of Europe was alone able to create a State of its own which preserved the name of «Roman Country» — «Țara Românească».
Another characteristic of Roumanian history is the way in which, thanks to geographical conditions, it was able to combine all currents of Art, and, to a lesser degree, all tendencies of thought, Eastern and Western alike, in an ethnographical synthesis. Before the Slavs of the 7th century altogether disappeared as an ethnical component, such tendencies as could form a corresponding synthesis in the moral field of artistic creation were retained. The primitive popular tradition formed a common basis connecting them all.
Byzantine art was transplanted into this new soil immediately after the foundation of the earlier southern principality of Wallachia. Hence it passed naturally into the northern principality of Moldavia, and into that part of the Daco-Roumanian heritage which was still enslaved: Transylvania. It was forced, however, to adopt the basic local characteristics: the love of bright, striking colours, invariable in Roumania. Thus the frail wooden improvisations and stones dipped in cement — the former serving as a frame for the latter — were replaced by better, larger stone buildings with a narthex — later doubled by an open peristyle — a nave and a secluded, mysterious altar, in front of which stood a wall or wooden screen covered with religious scenes and figures. The Gothic of Transylvania added only ornaments of carved stone round the windows and doors: crossed lineals of window frames and a series of tall, interlacing ogives. The outer walls were covered, after the manner of popular art, with materials of variegated colours, including discs of ceramic at the point of intersection of the arches and under the eaves, and with religious paintings. The gracious shape was crowned by a small turret, the belfry being set in the surrounding walls, which were as thick as those of a fortress.
Literature kept its popular character. Monks and nobles worked on the unchanging foundation of the ancient peasant tradition. A style common to all provinces was created as early as the 16th century, the Gospel being translated under the influence of the spreading hussitism in the early years of the fifteenth. The old rhythm of the popular ballads and lyrics of love, desire and sorrow continued to set the tone for all poetical work. Byzantium contributed only literature dealing with the Orthodox religion, a type for chronicles, works of rhetoric and world histories and, incidentally, the old Indian tales adopted into Greek literature. In the 16th century the renaissance came less from decaying Transylvania than from Poland. In the middle of this period came a complete translation of the difficult Herodotus, while the Moldavian Metropolitan Dositheus issued a Psalter in folk ballad form, in rhymed verse. Literary individualism began to manifest itself, the propensity to write personal memoirs in a desultory and capricious form, as shown by Miron Costin, a pupil of the Polish school. His son Nicholas, another historian and champion of the Latin origins of the nation, was a scholar in the sense of the Western Latinists. In Prince Demetrius Cantemir, who was forced to take refuge in Russia after the catastrophe of his great ally the Czar Peter, unexpectedly defeated by the Turks in 1711, the Roumanian race had an universal genius, able to treat in different languages— Roumanian, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Slavonic — all topics, from the Oriental songs to a geography on the lines of the anthropogeographical essays of our own days, and to a history whose lines of original development preceded and inspired the parallel ideas of Montesquieu. French philosophy was introduced by a large number of émigrés, who were employed as teachers of languages and secretaries by princes and nobles; freemasonry had some adherents, including members of the clergy, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. French romanticism, French liberalism swept over the Roumanian cities in the past century, while German thought, which later exercised a strong influence, combined to form a new modern synthesis.
Withal, the fundamental elements in the traditional intellectual and moral training were not lost. Mihail Eminescu, the greatest Roumanian poet, and one of the foremost poets of modern Europe, shows the influence of the Germans in his enunciation of the fatal emptiness of all being; of Alfred de Vigny in the defiance which he hurls at human destiny; of the popular mind in his use of the most picturesque legends of his nation, of all the charms inherent in the rich and delicate Roumanian nature.
It was through Roumanian channels that new currents of science and arts began to flow in South-Eastern Europe; it was Roumanian intellectuals, such as Nicolae Milescu in theological studies, Demetrius Cantemir, Fellow of the Berlin Academy, in the new lay directions, Antiochus Cantemir in classical French poetry, Herescu (Cherascov) in the theatre, who introduced Russia to spheres of knowledge other than the Byzantine. Serbia was a subject country under Turkish domination, Bulgaria did not exist; the Greeks were long tutored by the Moldavians and Wallachians, who paid for and controlled their religious organizations, in the holy places, from Thessaly and
Mount Athos to Jerusalem and kept up, for the benefit of Greek scholars and pupils, schools which had been built for the sons of the native nobles in Jassy and Bucharest ; who printed, in their capitals and convents, books which were distributed as a work of charity to all the Christians of the East: Greeks, Slavs, Caucasians, Arabs and Syrians. The natural majesty of the Eastern Empire shed its glow upon the Courts on the lower Danube. And by those same capitals, in those same schools, under the guidance of those same ambassadors of Western thought, the ideas of political revolution, of radical reform, of national liberty, were transmitted to all the nations of the European South-East, living before Byzantine influence.
And to-day, too, when any influence has to penetrate to those countries, it must necessarily begin by making its way to Bucarest, the centre of all Roumanian life and activity, the true intellectual capital of South Eastern Europe.