- historic battle on the field of Kossovo on 15 June 1389; Turks and Serbs stood face to face...Prince Lazar had an army from his own and Vuk Brankovic's lands and he received considerable help from his Bosnian ally, Tvrtko I... the Christians had a measure of success to begin with, and some confusion was caused in the Turkish camp by the death of Murad I, who was killed by a Serbian noble, Milos Kobilic, posing as a deserter. But the command was immediately assumed by Murad's son Bayezid, and victory was assured for the Turks and the country was forced to become a tributary state.
 - the danger to Hungary was greatly increased by the completion of the Turkish occupation of Serbia. Though pre-occupied with their domestic difficulties, the Hungarian king put up a determined resistance to the infidel. It was in the course of this resistance that John Hunyadi came to the fore as a brilliant commander and a determined champion of the Christian cause against the Turks. His victories in Transylvania and Wallachia (1442) made possible the great assault in the Balkans which the papal legate, Cardinal Julian Cesarini, was trying to organize (but which failed miserably at the battle of Nicopolis, 25 Sept. 1396).  - the Ottoman conquest of the northern part of the Balkan peninsula continued with vigour. By 1393 the Bulgarian empire had been finally subjected. After a severe siege the town of Trnovo capitulated on 17 July.
 - the Wallachian prince Mircea the Old, strongly supported by Hungary, proved however a much tougher proposition. A fierce battle was fought on 17 May 1395 on the plain of Rovine. The military victory appears to have gone to Mircea but he had nevertheless to submit to the sultan and to pay tribute. Moreover, the Dobrudja fell into Ottoman hands and Ottoman troops controlled the bridges of the Danube.

     After they had destroyed the Bulgarian state, the Turks came into contact with the Romanians. The history of this people down to the later middle ages is obscure; and its origins are the subject of much discussion. Romanian historians, with rare exceptions, resolutely defend the point of view that the Romanians are the descendants of Roman settlers and ancient Dacians, who were romanized during imperial times. Outside Romania, however, the more probable view is generally held that the origin of the Romanian people is to be found south of the Danube, in the romanized population of the Balkan peninsula which, after the Slav settlement, took themselves to the mountains to become a race of herdsmen. Some of these 'Vlachs', as they were known from the end of the 10th century, remained in the Balkans, and they were gradually assimilated into the people amongst whom they were living. The last traces of them are the Cincari in Macedonia and northern Greece. They are frequently mentioned in medieval documents. In Serbian archives they are referred to as herdsmen, to differentiate them from the farming population; in the course of time the name 'Vlach' lost its ethnical significance and became a synonym for shepherd. We have already seen that the Vlachs played a part in the development of the second Bulgarian Empire. By virtue of their great numbers in Thessaly this province became known as Great Wallachia, whilst Epirus was known as Upper Wallachia. Others crossed the Danube and settled in the Carpathian region, and infiltrated slowly into the neighbouring plains. In the thirteenth century the first indications of political activity became apparent, and it was soon clear that attempts were being made to shake off Hungarian rule. At the beginning of the fourteenth century (1324) a large political unit developed south of the Carpathians under the leadership of the voivode Basaraba, a Hungarian vassal ('ad Basarab, Wayvodam nostrum transalpinum'); Basaraba soon began the struggle for emancipation from Hungarian control. King Charles¹  led an expedition against his mutinous vassal but the Hungarian army was surrounded and destroyed in the Carpathians in November 1330; and this victory assured the independence of Wallachia. Charles Robert's successor, Louis the Great, was also unable to impose his authority permanently on Wallachia; and the temporary successes that he achieved were quickly effaced by another Vlach victory over the Hungarian army in 1369.
    Soon after the appearance of Wallachia, yet another principality, Moldavia, appeared on Romanian soil. Moldavia originated in the Hungarian mark which Louis the Great established on the eastern slopes of the Carpathians for defence against the Tatars. The voivode Bogdan, who had freed himself from Hungarian hegemony (1365), played a similar role in Moldavia to that of Basaraba in Wallachia. King Louis' efforts to frustrate the formation of this Romanian principality only resulted in Moldavia's recognition of Hungarian sovereign power and the paying of an annual tribute, an arrangement which was essentially of a temporary nature. 
    The emergence of these Romanian principalities and their wars with Hungary had far-reaching consequences in the religious field. For Hungary's efforts to impose and preserve its authority over the Vlachs and Moldavians went hand in hand with its endeavours to organize the Catholic Church in the districts behind the Carpathians. Liberation from Hungarian rule virtually put an end to such efforts and ensured the establishment of the Orthodox Church. The voivode Nicholas Alexander, Basaraba's successor, turned to the Patriarch of Constantinople (1359), who appointed a Metropolitan for Wallachia, with his seat at Arges (Curtea de Arges). A little later Suceava, the principal town of Moldavia, at last obtained its Metropolitan (1401). In both principalities Slavonic was the official language in the national administration as well as in the Church. In Romania, Slavonic played a role similar to that of the Latin language in the West, and in the middle ages it hindered the development of literature written in the native tongue. 
    Slav influence, particularly that of its nearest neighbours, the Bulgarians, is reflected in both the character and the nomenclature of Romanian institutions. The ruler's court was organized on a model which had its origins much earlier on in the south, though there was some Hungarian influence. In so far as the titles were of Byzantine origin (such as logothet, protovestiar, comis), they did not come direct from Byzantium, but by way of the Slavs. The dvornik (lord steward) was the supreme judge at the court and in the country. The posteljnik (chamberlain), paharnik (cup-bearer) and the stolnik (table steward), were all known at the courts of the southern Slavs. The power of the ruler (voivode) was theoretically absolute. He was the supreme commander of the army and chief justice, he endowed nobility and Church with lands, had coins minted bearing his own likeness, and drew the revenue from taxes. Every act of public life was connected with his person. In practice, however, the nobility exercised a powerful influence on national affairs. They determined in their own assembly who should occupy the throne, since no established line of succession existed. Such a system had obvious disadvantages and conflicts arose between pretenders and their supporters, usually complicated by outside intervention. All this inevitably diminished the authority of the ruler and hindered the consolidation of the state.
     The peasants were mainly dependent on the feudal lords. They owned the land, and were not bound to the soil, but they had certain obligations, such as working on the land of their masters, or handing over one tenth of their produce. There were also completely free peasants, who were subject to no feudal lord; these appear to have been fairly numerous in Moldavia. Like the dependent peasants, they also had to pay a national tax (bir), for which individual villages were assessed as a taxable unit, the sum being again divided amongst the peasants according to the size of their holdings. As the needs of the boyars grew, the position of the peasants deteriorated, and by the sixteenth century they had lost their freedom and were bound to the soil. 
    The Romanian principalities came to birth in the struggle against Hungary, though Hungary could not prevent their development, it did not abandon its claim to them, and from time to time it succeeded in imposing various obligations upon their voivodes, and even on occasion brought its own candidate to the throne. Moldavia was also exposed to Polish pressure, and for sometime had to recognize Polish authority. But the greatest danger to the independence and future of the principalities came from the south, where the Turks, after the fall of Bulgaria, had pushed their frontier to the Danube. By the reign of Mircea the Old (1386-1418), Wallachia had become a theatre of war in which the Turks played the leading part. One section of the boyars, who were discontented with Mircea, with the aid of the Sultan Bayezid I, proclaimed Vlad voivode. Mircea had to seek refuge with the Hungarian king, Sigismund² . An allied army advanced into Wallachia in the spring of 1395 and defeated the Turks at Rovine (17 May); this drove the usurper Vlad to place himself under Polish protection. Mircea, for his part, remained with Sigismund, and accompanied him on the expedition against the Turks which ended in the catastrophe at Nicopolis (1396). He succeeded in saving himself, and freed himself from his rival, Vlad, who was captured in 1397 by Stibor, voivode of Transylvania; he drove back fresh Turkish attacks and retained control of the Danubian crossings. The Turkish defeat at Ankara (1402) and the civil war between Bayezid's sons brought some relief to Wallachia. The voivode Mircea strengthened the defenses of the southern frontier by occupying a belt of land on the right bank of the Danube, notably the town of Silistria: in his title he now held that he was `lord and ruler of the land from beyond the Danube to the Black Sea and Silistria'. When Sultan Muhammad I restored Turkish unity, Mircea was soon forced to pay tribute. The Turks, however, were still not sufficiently powerful to impose their authority on Wallachia. Hungary, which had taken the leading part in the Christian war, tried, as with Serbia and Bosnia, to draw the Vlachs into its camp. The attempts of both the Turks and Hungary to secure their supremacy over Wallachia and to bring their vassals to the throne, resulted in constant changes of ruler and fierce internal strife.³ But as Hungary abandoned its offensive attitude towards Turkey and went over to the defensive, Ottoman control over Wallachia was gradually extended.

 - the Cumans and Tartars drove the Rumanian population to the mountains; a Slav population dwelt in the plains, the banat of Craiova, or "little Wallachia" was Hungarian

 - around 1290 the Rumanians came from Transylvania into Wallachia to escape religious persecution by the Hungarian king

 - the foundation of the principality is falsely ascribed to a colony from Fagaras, under the leadership of Radu Negru (Rudolf the Black), established itself at Ca^mpulung and gave the name of  "land of mountains" (Tara Munteneasca) to the flat country of Wallachia

 - Radu's successor Ivanko Basaraba strengthened his position by marrying his daughter to the Tsar of Bulgaria

  - over time its territory extended towards the Black Sea, occupying all the area comprised
in the delta of the Danube (Dobrudza) and part of Bessarabia; the chief town was Silistria

 - stock-raising was about the sole industry; wealth measured in terms of horses and cattle

  - Rumanian nobles were excessively fond of velvets and silks

  -Voivodes Gelu Glad and Menumorut who led over Romanian bodies politic set up in the
Transylvanian territory in the 8th-9th centuries

 - Voivodes Balica, Dobrotita and Ioancu of the ancient Romanian lands of the lower
Danube and the Black Sea

 - Basarab I, Vlaicu Voda, Mircea the Great, Bogdan I, Petru Musat and Alexander the
Kind⁴ ensured the domestic strength of the Romanian countries so that their followers Iancu of
Hunedoara, Vlad, Radu the Great⁵, Stephen theGreat⁶, Radu de la Afumati, Petru Rares, Ioan
Voda and Michael the Brave⁷ could resist the Ottoman pressure

 - Alexandru Lapusneanu - ruling Prince of the Romanian county of Muntenia (in 16th
century)

Romanian Origins
     Romanian territory was originally inhabited by Scythians, Cimmerians and Getae, probably akin to the ancient Illyrians in the West, and so to all the earliest strata of Balkan peoples. These races "drove back Iranian invaders eastward and Celts to the west, and founded the greatest barbarian empire ever known in this part of Europe. The Getic kingdom of Burebista included Bohemia and Western Hungary, as well as Bessarabia and Bulgaria, but the Transylvanian Carpathians remained the basis of its power. Even the Roman conquests beyond the Eastern Alps and the Adriatic were not complete until Dacia submitted."⁸ The history of the Daco-Roman people begins as early as the third century BC. Already under Burebista, the great king who was at the height of his power about 50 BC, there was steady infiltration of Roman citizens and traders, finding their way across the Julian Alps and down the Sava and Danube valleys, but also through the heart of the Balkan peninsula - as is suggested by the fact that numerous coins of Apollonia and Dyrrachium have been discovered in Moldavia. Burebista was strong enough to threaten the Roman organization of Thrace, and Caesar not long before his death appears to have contemplated an expedition to the Lower Danube.The civil wars that followed Caesar's death postponed all danger to Dacia from without, but the loosely-knit realm of Burebista soon fell prey to internal dissensions, as a consequence of which the victorious Octavius was able to expel the Dacians from Thracian soil and even to send a punitive force across the Danube.
     During the first century of our era the Romans consolidated their rule in Thrace and Moesia and left the Dacians unmolested on the northern bank of the river. It was not till the reign of Titus that serious hostilities broke out between them, and by this time Dacia again had a ruler of exceptional merit, Decebalus, "a worthy opponent of the Roman power". After two Roman generals had suffered serious reverses, a third, Julianus, forced his way to the Dacian capital, won a victory at Tapae (in the east of the Banat), and forced him to sue Domitian⁹ for peace. That emperor's defeat by the Marcomanni prevented him from following up this success, and not merely did he leave Decebalus to all intents and purposes independent, but in the end purchased immunity from Dacian raids by the payment of an annual tribute. Meanwhile the influx of Roman settlers steadily increased: the Dacian king welcomed skilled workers, engineers and craftsmen of various kinds and constructed fortresses according to Roman technique. Even apart from these newcomers, there were already "a sufficient number of natives who understood the language, for letters to be written in Latin."
     With the accession of Trajan¹⁰ the humiliation of a tribute was speedily rejected by the Romans. In 101 war broke out between Decebalus and Trajan, who massed his army at Viminacium (in northeast Serbia), crossed the Danube into the modern Banat and after a stubborn resistance dictated peace in the Dacian capital, Sarmizegethusa. Decebalus retained his crown, but had to accept a Roman garrison and a civil adviser. To secure his communication with the newly conquered province Trajan built his celebrated bridge across the Danube - the work of the architect Apollodorus of  Damascus, but the strategic point which he chose for it was no longer Viminacium, but a point below the cataracts of the Iron Gates¹¹, near the modern town of Turnu-Severin, from whence there was easy access to the heart of Oltenia, and to Sarmizegethusa up the valley of the Cerna. In 105-106 war broke out a second time, Decebalus made desperate efforts to shake off the yoke, and Trajan, warned of the danger by special messengers, embarked at Ancona and hastened back to the Danube, equally determined to crush all resistance finally. Forcing his way through the Carpathian passes, he took the capital by storm after a prolonged siege. Decebalus escaped in disguise, organized a fierce guerilla warfare, but was at last made prisoner and saved himself by suicide from the fate of gracing a Roman triumph. This triumph, when it came, was to be immortalized beyond all others by the Column of Trajan in Rome and its long series of reliefs of Dacian captives and victorious legionaries.¹²
     The Dacians had not been a mere collection of barbarous tribes, but had a rudimentary culture of their own, and a well-marked social and economic structure. They did not therefore accept Roman rule willingly, and many of their warriors withdrew to the free north and coalesced with the still migrant German tribes. For this reason Trajan organized the new province of Dacia on very special lines, bringing large numbers of colonists from every part of the Empire, and technicians to develop the rich gold, silver and salt mines of the future Transylvania. The inscriptions which survive show that some came from Greece and Asia Minor, some from Spain, some perhaps from Persia and Egypt, for there are altars to Celtic divinities, while on the other hand the cults of Mithras and Isis are represented. Trajan's main object seems to have been to erect a strong barrier against the wild tribes already stirring in the steppes of what is now Southern Russia. Dacia, then, was above all a mountain massif, a fortress intended to dominate the Wallachian plain in one direction and the valley of the Theiss in the other: but these were neglected and only thinly populated. A wall was built from the Carpathians to the mouth of the Dniester, near the modern Cetatea Alba (Akkerman); and the inhabitants of all that lay between it and the river Olt were merely in a loose tributary relation to the Romans. The capital town, Sarmizegethusa, on the southwest fringe of the great sickle-shaped Carpathian range, was rechristened Ulpia Traiana: Apulum (Alba Julia), Napoca (Cluj),and Porolissum (near Gherla) were also towns of some importance.Under Hadrian¹³ Dacia was divided into an Upper and Lower province, and the name of "Dacia Felix" became current: under Marcus Aurelius it was even split into three sections, though a "concilium trium Daciarum" continued to meet at the common capital.
     The provincials of Dacia extended the traditions and culture of Rome towards the northeast, building upon an essentially agricultural basis, and no less certainly intermingling from the very first with the native population. It must suffice to state that the latest results of research show that the process of colonization and penetration was much more gradual, more prolonged and more effective than was supposed by earlier writers. A new and transformed nation was already in the making, when the Empire fell into decay and was driven on to the defensive.
     The middle of the third century witnessed those first mysterious migrations of the peoples which were gradually to transform the ancient world and lay the foundations of modern Europe: and it was but natural that the pressure should first become acute upon the Danubian frontier. It was no mere accident that the Empire in its hour of danger should have been saved by a succession of able soldiers and administrators whose native province was more immediately threatened. The Illyrian emperors, from Claudius II to Diocletian and Constantine, seemed to be transferring the Roman world's centre of gravity from Italy to the Eastern Adriatic and the Middle Danube.
      As the Gothic menace grew, Decius¹⁴, himself a native of Syrmia, rallied the forces of the Empire and won the title of "Restitutor Daciae" by defeating the invaders near Nicopolis on the Danube. But his triumph was short-lived: in 251 he and his son went down fighting in a great battle at Abritum, which has been roughly identified as in a swamp of the modern Dobrogea. The Goths on their side had suffered so severely as to lose for a time all powers of serious offensive: but a decade had not passed before civil disorder reduced the Empire to dire extremity and positively invited invasion. A last memorable rally was achieved by Emperor Claudius, who won a decisive victory over the Goths at Naissus (Nis in Serbia) in 268, after they had penetrated into the very heart of Moesia Superior and seemed about to establish their strategic control over the entire peninsula. But Claudius, at once a great soldier and a just and constructive statesman, died prematurely after the briefest of reigns, and it became obvious that the situation could only be saved by a bold policy of cutting losses and a reorganization of Empire strategy and defence. This was the task undertaken by Claudius' successor Aurelian¹⁵, yet another successful and ambitious soldier of Syrmian peasant stock. In his brief reign of barely five years he took decisions which were to leave a permanent mark on history - checking the advance of the Alemanni and the secession of Gaul and Britain, destroying the short-lived empire of Palmyra. It was Aurelian, then, who also decided the future of the Romanian race by his decision to evacuate Dacia in 271. He had come to the conclusion that the province formed too exposed a salient amid the waves of advancing barbarism, and that its strategic defence could not easily be combined with that of the wide Pannonian plain, in which the Danube formed a natural boundary. The legions and officials were therefore withdrawn to the south of the river, and the name of  Dacia was transferred to Upper Moesia (corresponding roughly to the central portions of modern Serbia). There is of course nothing that can be described as evidence regarding the extent of the abandonment. It is safe to assume that the wealthier settlers withdrew, but the great mass of the population remained behind.
     Henceforth the territory which now forms Greater Romania¹⁶ stood exposed to the shock of repeated invasions from the east. Beginning with the Goths and Gepids, almost all the many peoples who flooded into Southern Europe between the third and tenth centuries passed first over the Romanian soil. But it is to be noted that in every case the objective of invasion lay beyond: the glittering plunder of Byzantium and of the rich Italian cities beckoned the barbarians onward. The Dacia of Trajan was a mere stage on the road, and nothing is more surprising than that the Goths in particular should have left virtually no trace throughout the territory in question.

The Barbarian Invasions
     As the Goths moved steadily onwards, their place was filled by the first Slavonic tribes, who permeated the whole Balkan peninsula and submerged more than one city of note. Following again upon their heels in the sixth century, the Avars settled in the Pannonian plain and penetrated to the Adriatic coast, only to be decimated and submerged in their turn by the advancing Croats and Serbs in the seventh century. In all this early period the fate of the native populations is quite obscure: conditions were, of course, rendered altogether fluid by constant invasion, yet it seems probable that the provincials were already akin with the natives farther north, and constantly intermarrying with them. At the same time the towns rapidly decayed, the highways became unsafe and neglected, and rural life was primitive in the extreme. Many centuries were to elapse before the foundations of ordered government could be established. The Slavs had to come in order to render possible the formation of a Roman people in the East. In the face of common dangers, the two peoples seem to have fraternized, abandoning the great plains for the remoter Carpathian valleys: and it may be supposed that the numerous Slav place-names in Romanian territory date from this period.
     Much more important than the Avar invasion was that of the Bulgars, a kindred Ural-Altaic tribe who swept across the plains of what we now call Moldavia in the second half of the seventh century and soon established themselves firmly between the Danube and the Balkan range, taking as their capital Preslav - the already Slavised Marcianopolis. The Bulgarian empire reached its zenith in the ninth century under the savage Krum and the politic and calculating Tsar Boris, who accepted Christianity at the hands of the Slav apostles, Cyril and Methodius. It is, however, to be noted that the Daco-Roman population, which was subjugated by the Bulgars as they passed through their territory, had already accepted Christianity before their arrival - though probably in an imperfect and superficial manner.
     During the eighth and ninth centuries the Bulgars extended their sway, not merely over the future Romanian principalities on the Lower Danube, but also over much of Moesia and of the central Pannonian plain. They thus became the neighbours of those ephemeral Slav states which preceded the Magyar conquest, and in particular of the Great Moravian empire, whose capital was at Nitra in Western Slovakia, but which at its height stretched far to the north and to the south also.
     The Romanians, though already Christianized in a somewhat superficial manner, owed to their early subjection to Bulgar rule the adoption of a Bulgaro-Slav rite which they did not shake off till the middle of the seventeenth century. As late as the middleof the nineteenth century, Romanian liturgical books were still being printed in Slavonic characters. There is no evidence whatsoever as to the exact period at which the Bulgarian rite was adopted by the Romanians, though it seems reasonable to suppose that it took place under Boris or Simeon. That it provided a strong rival influence to that of Byzantine hellenism, or in acertain sense a buffer between the two, cannot be doubted.
     In the closing years of the ninth century (896 is the traditionally accepted, but somewhat arbitrary, date) the Magyars (another tribe of Ural-Altaic stock, akin to Hun, Gepid, Avar and Turk) crossed the Carpathians, broke to fragments the loosely knit Moravian state, and, by occupying the old paradise of the Huns, the great plains of the Danubian basin which they hold to this day, drove a permanent wedge between the Northern and Southern Slavs. At first retaining their nomadic habits, they seemed bent on following the track of earlier invasions into Italy and Germany. But Otto the Great's decisive victory near Augsburg in 955 checked their marauding raids and drove them to rest content with Pannonia as their home. Late in the ninth century they too had accepted Christianity, but this time definitely from Rome rather than Byzantium: and their Duke Stephen in 1000 accepted the kingly Apostolic Crown from Pope Sylvester and laid the foundations of the royal power on mainly feudal lines. It is not until the beginning of the thirteenth century that history breaks its long silence and reveals the existence of a "Vlach" or Romanian nation.
     The Magyars were the last of the conquering hordes to establish permanent settlements in Europe. Their successors, the Petchenegs, were no less formidable in their day, but their name has vanished as completely as that of the Avars and Gepids. They seem to have perished in internecine warfare, in strife with Byzantium, and in quarrels skilfully fomented by the empire with other neighbours. There remained yet another Asiatic tribe, the Cumans, who followed the Petchenegs across the Moldavian plains and were eventually welcomed as settlers in Hungary by King Bela III.

...the modern Romanians, who fall into two main groups - the so-called Daco-Romans and Macedo-Romanians - owe their survival in each case to the shelter provided by high mountain ranges, inhospitable and difficult of access in early times - in the south the Pindus, in the north the Carpathians. Transylvania stands out as a mountainous island on the physical map of Europe, surrounded on three sides by great plains. What more natural than that it should serve as a refuge during the long centuries of invasion,and that the survivors should issue forth into the plains when at last the tide of invasion began to subside?

 ...note that Wallach - the name which soon attaches itself to the first organized independent principality of the Romanians - is a foreign word derived from Vlach, the Slav word for Romanian, which has passed into Latin as Valachus, into Magyar as Olah, and into German as Wallache. The native tongue has always employed the words Roma^nia, Roma^n, Tara Roma^neasca.

The First Princes of Wallachia
     Little or nothing is known of the first Romanian princes, beyond their names. In Oltenia in the second half of the thirteenth century, Litovoiu was sufficiently strong to refuse the tribute demanded by Hungary, but in the end was overthrown and killed in battle by Ladislas IV. His successor Ivancu, or Tihomir - a name suggesting that Slav and Romanian were still intermixed among the leading families of the infant state - profited by the internecine troubles in Transylvania and Hungary in the last decade of the century, which continued after the extinction of the House of Arpad in 1301. A disputed succession between the foreign princes who could claim maternal descent from the national dynasty was a heaven-sent opportunity for the Romanians to loosen the ties that bound them, and the fourteenth century witnessed their steady national consolidation, despite the parallel expansion of Hungary under the Angevins.
    Early Romanian chronicles assign the foundation of theWallachian principality to the year 1290, and assert that a certain voivode of Fagaras, named Negru-Voda, crossed the mountains with his many boiars and followers, established himself at Ca^mpulung in the southern foothills, and was recognised as "Domn" or Lord. This story was accepted by Romania's first great modern historian, A.D. Xenopol, but more recent research rejects it altogether and suggests a confusion with Radu Negru-Voda whodid actually rule in Wallachia a whole century later and was the father of Mircea the Old.
     The most that can safely be affirmed is that the whole trend of Romanian political life was in this early period from north to south, and that this was due at once to the growing hold of the Hungarian crown over Transylvania, the stiffening of the feudal regime, the advent of German and other settlers, and the renewed proselytizing zeal of the Roman Church, of which the Apostolic king was as a rule the willing exponent, so long as his own rights were not unduly impinged upon. That there was a definite movement from the hills into the southern plains is shown by the title assumed by the first Primate of the new state, and ever since borne by his successors - Metropolit al Ungro-Vlachiei si Exarh Plaiurilor (i.e. of the High Mountains), and yet again by the native names under which Wallachia and its people have always been known - Tara Munteneasca¹⁷, Munteni, though it is in main a low, at most undulating, plain. Most significant of all is its choice of capitals - first Ca^mpulung, then Arges, both in the mountain district, then Tirgoviste by the foothills. Thus we find a gradual tendency to move away from the shelter of the mountains and, as the state consolidated, to venture step by step further into the plain.
     A further factor which contributed to the growth of an independent Romanian state was the increasing importance of the trade routes from Poland and northern Europe generally to the Black Sea - which at the same time explains the rise of the Saxon towns, notably Hermannstadt (Sibiu) and Kronstadt (Brasov). From the latter town the route passed to the Wallachian Ca^mpulung, and there forked into two, straight south to the port of Giurgiu and eastward to Braila, which has ever since been one of the main centers of Danubian trade. The road from Hermannstadt went through the Red Tower pass towards Arges, and so to Calafat, at a point halfway between Vidin and Giurgiu. Meanwhile the great "Tatar" route, as it was called, passed through the future Moldavian state to Caffa, the famous Genoese emporium on the Black Sea, while another led to Chilia in the Danubian delta and Moncastro, also a  Genoese colony, but better known under it's later Romanian and Russian names of Cetatea Alba and Akkerman. As the Romanians themselves, in these early times and for centuries to come, were entirely agricultural, the trading class consisted almost exclusively of strangers, Germans and Poles, and Jews from the north, Greeks and Ragusans from the south, Genoese in the Black Sea ports, and Armenians, who gradually penetrated inland and formed settlements in such Transylvanian towns as Dej and Satu Mare. These foreign merchants used Hungarian, Byzantine and Polish money: among the natives most transactions were in kind, and land or luxuries were bartered for produce and livestock, and service rendered to the prince and his boiars in the same way.
    The first consolidation of the Wallachian state may be said to date from the reign of Basarab (1330-1352), but there is not a single document or charter in existence from which we can supplement our scanty knowledge of him. Finding in Hungary the chief menace to his power, he naturally allied himself both by treaty and by marriage with his Bulgarian neighbours across the Danube. But Bulgaria was now in rapid decay and eclipsed by the rising star of the Serbian empire. Basarab found that he had backed the wrong horse: he came to the aid of his kinsman, Tsar Michael of Vidin, and shared his defeat at the hands of the Serbians at the disastrous battle of Velbuzd in 1330. Michael fell fighting, and Bulgaria, weak and disunited, lingered on as little better than the vassal of Serbia, only to fall at last into the hands of the Turks.
     Basarab's misadventure encouraged Charles Robert of Hungary to reassert Hungarian supremacy, and he invaded Wallachia with a large army, but at Posada suffered a severe reverse and barely escaped with his life by changing clothes with one of his retainers. As compensation for this failure he managed to recapture Severin, which now remained in Hungarian hands for most of the century.

Louis the Great and Wallachia
     In 1342 Charles Robert was succeeded by his young, brilliant and energetic son, known in history as Louis the Great, under whom Hungary may be said to have celebrated her golden age. Never was the net of Hungarian foreign policy thrown so widely and so successfully, but this very fact was the salvation of the Romanians, for his major efforts were directed towards Venice, with whom he contested the Dalmatian coast, towards Italy, where his kinsmen of the Angevin house held the throne of Naples, and his brother became the consort and victim of the licentious Joanna; towards Serbia, under Tsar Dusan, with whom he was tempted to contest the supremacy of the Balkan peninsula and in particular the suzerainty of Bosnia; and above all, perhaps, towards Poland, whose throne he inherited by marriage in 1370 and in whose ambitions in the now decadent kingdom of Galicia and even in heathen Lithuania, he allowed himself to become involved. Speaking broadly, Hungary under the Angevins may be said to have had two main ambitions - to extend her domination at the expense of the still fluid Balkan world, to supplant the now obviously decaying power of Byzantium and prevent any of the young Slav states from usurping its place, and at the same time - and this was in full accord with the Guelf traditions of the new dynasty¹⁸ - to spread the Catholic faith throughout southeastern Europe at the expense of schismatic, heretic and infidel alike. The constant diversions which all this involved doubtless prompted him to evolve a special policy on his southwestern frontiers, not altogether dissimilar from that adopted by the Frankish empire five centuries earlier towards the unsettled territories that lay to the east. In otherwords, he set himself to create a series of marches, that of Severin controlling the Iron Gates and the difficult country on either side of it; that of Vidin, farther down the Danube, as a point of vantage from which to extend his sway over northwestern Bulgaria and take Serbia in the flank; that of  Fagaras, which he granted to Vlaicu, the grandson of Basarab, as "Ducatus Omlasii et de Fagaras", in the hope of bringing the "Transalpine" lands into the same sphere of influence as the Transylvanian; and, finally, the voivodate of Maramures, in the mountainous and thinly populated districts that separated the north of Transylvania from the kingdom of Halicz or Galicia.
     In the end the great king was prematurely aged and worn down by such varied and exacting ambitions. But though he attempted the impossible, in certain directions his policy was clearly defined and relatively successful, namely in his zeal for the interests of the Church and in his efforts to extend Hungarian influence to the south and southeast. He was in close and almost uninterrupted alliance with the Papacy, co-operating in many schemes for the extirpation of Balkan heresies and for the reunion of the Eastern Church with the Holy See, in return for help against Asiatic invaders. On one occasion the Emperor John VI himself visited him at Buda and employed his good offices with the Pope. Louis, it should be added, showed from the first a clearer perception of the Turkish danger than many contemporaries. This is shown by his expedition to Vidin in 1365: for it was a prompt and energetic countermove to the transference of the Turkish capital from Broussa to Adrianople in that year. Bulgaria was falling into two weak principalities, the more easterly of which had hastened to become the Sultan's vassal, and Louis was anxious to prevent Tsar Stracimir at Vidin from following this fatal example. His bold seizure of Vidin won him the ready support of Vlajko of Wallachia and led to the first direct encounter between Turk and Magyar. But Vidin was recovered by the Bulgarians in 1369, and Louis was absorbed in Polish affairs when the disastrous news of the Marica reached him in 1371. He was again swift to recognize the growing danger and ready to make war upon the Turks, but only on a grand scale or not at all: and in his negotiations with the Pope for this purpose, he imposed as his conditions that a crusade should be preached and that the Church should make special contributions. When Gregory XI boggled over such concessions and the other Powers with one accord found excuses for providing very inadequate assistance, he desisted from his plan and the Turks were left free to strengthen their stranglehold upon the Balkan peninsula. It is in Louis the Great's colonising policy on the northeast frontier of Hungary that we find the germ of a second Romanian state. For about the year 1349 the Voivode Bogdan revolted against his strong overlord, and crossing to the eastern slopes of the Carpathians established himself in "Terra Moldavana" around the river Moldava, which rises in the modern Bukovina and eventually flows into the Siret at Roman. Here he was relatively safe from attack: and Hungary had no special incentive to push beyond the Carpathian watershed.

     That Moldavia took shape somewhat later than the sister state was doubtless due to the fact that it had suffered far more from the great onslaught of the Mongols in 1241 and from the persistent inroads of Cuman and Tatar tribes both before and after the event. The new prince, on whom Wallachia looked askance without being able to hold him in check, adopted the oxhead and star as his coat of arms and circulated rude coins (stamped in the Polish mint) bearing the title "Bogdan Voevoda Moldaviensis". It is here that the title of Hospodar, which is simply the Slavonic "Gospodar" or Lord, first arises. Here too the centre of gravity is at first in the north - at Baia, at Cimpulung¹⁹, Radauti and Suceava: only in much later times was it transferred to the modern capital of Iasi (Jassy), in the plains west of the river Pruth.
     There can be no doubt that the withdrawal of powerful Romanian nobles from Transylvania to the two young principalities weakened the position of the Romanian population which they left behind them. The remaining nobles were in process of time Magyarized, and their blood may still be traced in some of the great feudal families of Transylvania, such as Teleki, Mailath and Josika. Class interests proved stronger than blood, and from the fifteenth to the twentieth century the position of the Romanians in that province was that of mere helots.
    Conditions of both Wallachia and Moldavia remained extremely primitive for a long period after the first foundation.There were no real towns except a few market centres on the main north and south routes to which we have already alluded, and even they seem not to have been of sufficient importance to be walled. Very little money was in circulation, payments were mainly in kind. Both countries were completely isolated even from such general culture as then prevailed. Education was almost unknown. Even the Church was backward and unorganized, served mainly by Slav priests, using a Slav liturgy, and for a long time dependent on the Bulgarian bishops of Silistria and Vidin. This extreme weakness of the Orthodox Church in Romanian lands was an incentive to Catholicism, powerfully fostered by the Hungarian kings as an instrument of policy: and for a time the Catholic bishopric of Milcov seemed likely to perform the function of Lubeck or Magdeburg in Baltic lands in earlier times. The Wallachian Domn Basarab and more than one of his family were influenced by Catholic doctrine, intermarriage playing its part, and Pope Urban V making special efforts to win them over. But the political danger turned the scale, and in 1359 the Domn appealed to Constantinople and obtained from it the nomination of a "Metropolitan of Ungro-Wallachia and Exarch of the Mountains." The first metropolitan of Moldavia (or Moldo-Vlachia as it was first called in Constantinople) was established at Suceava in 1374 and consecrated by the patriarch of Ochrida - a see originally Bulgarian, but hellenised by the Emperor Basil after his reconquest of Bulgaria. It soon became a tradition of the prince's states to show great liberality in the endowment of monasteries - in which learning was virtually concentrated till quite modern times. But it was a long time before they could rival the noble example of the Serbian rulers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, or of the great Rilo monastery of Bulgaria.

Early Romanian Institutions
     The close personal connection between the nascent Romanian court and those of Bulgaria and Serbia naturally enough led to the imitation of high dignities and administrative offices. The Logofet or Chancellor, the Vistiarnic or Treasurer, the Dvornic²⁰, who seems to have been at once Chamberlain and Supreme Judge, the Stolnic (Master of the Bedchamber), the Paharnic (Cupbearer), the Cluciare (Keeper of the Keys), are for the most part Slav titles, though of course the Slav States had in the first instance simply borrowed such functions from the elaborate ceremonial of Byzantium. The most important military office seems to have been that of Ban or Governor of Oltenia, who was responsible for defence against invasion.
    It was a narrow oligarchic society in which the prince exercised virtually absolute power, and his council (or "Divan", as it came to be called in the Turkish days) was merely advisory. He alone could admit to the boiar or noble class, or make grants of land: and this he often seems to have done, not only at the expense of the subjected peasantry (dorobanti), but even of the free peasants (calarasi), when they failed to pay the contributions laid upon them.
     The boiars were exempt from all direct taxation, exactly as the nobility of Hungary: but at the same time they were liable to dues on several of the most vital sources of agricultural wealth - sheep, cattle, wine, bees (always a great Romanian industry), etc. They exacted from the subjected peasants one-tenth of their crop, corresponding to the feudal "robot" further west: but despite all the miseries of their lot, the peasants never entirely lost the right of property or the right of moving to a new home.The prince drew his revenue from these dues, and taxation only became really oppressive when under the Turks he was in continual need of squeezing more money from his subjects. Meanwhile the prince owed his election to an Assembly of the Boiars and higher clergy, and there was a recognised practice of submitting its decision, in a rough and ready way, to the acclamation of the crowd. But this practice, and the lack of any regular law of succession, gave rise to endless intrigues and rivalries and prevented internal consolidation. Election was open to every member of the reigning family, including illegitimate offspring, and the central fact of Romanian history from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries is a recurrence of palace revolutions and the overthrow of one ruler after another by rival factions, only too often supported by foreign influence. There was, of course, the added complication of rivalry between two thrones, which partly explains the arrogant titles assumed by the one to outbid the other, and at a later date offered constant temptation to intrigue and invasion.
     In the period of three centuries between 1400 and 1700 the number of princes who occupied each of the two thrones was about sixty-five. In other words, the average duration of a reign was barely seven years, and if we allow for the fact that at least a quarter of the rulers were driven out once, or even twice, the average will fall still lower. It is unnecessary to add that most of these flitting figures were mediocre and obscure to the last degree. Only a dozen of the more outstanding among them deserve to be rescued from oblivion.
     No clear theory has as yet been evolved by native historians to explain why the two original dynasties, which survived for nearly three centuries in circumstances such as rendered despotic rule inevitable, and which admittedly produced one or two men of very high ability, such as Mircea the Old, Vlad Tepes, Alexander the Good, Stephen the Great, Peter Rares and Michael the Brave, should none the less have signally failed to establish the royal power on sure and lasting foundations. The lack of any worthy successor to two such notable princes as Stephen and Michael was a contributory factor of the first importance: and of course the geographical isolation of the two states, and their peculiar relations with Constantinople after the Turkish conquest, played a decisive part. But it would also seem as if some of the qualities essential to constructive political life had been lacking to the Romanian ruling class in those early centuries and counteracted the amazing virility and persistence to type to which the Romanian peasant owes his survival through centuries of oppression. The absence of a native middle class naturally left the nation more than usually dependent upon its nobility, and in this case they did not prove equal to the difficult task before them.

The Turkish Advance
     Perhaps the answer to these speculations will suggest itself as we follow this brief thread further. Certainly as the fourteenth century closed, the two thrones were occupied by men of more than usual ability - Mircea the Old of Wallachia (1386-1418), and Alexander the Good of Moldavia (1401-1431) - who were able to give certain stability to their dominions at the very moment when Bulgaria and Serbia were on the point of extinction. Romanian history can only be understood in its geographical setting, and it is essential to remember that the rise of the two principalities coincided with the decay of two powerful Slav states immediately to the south of the Danube and with the victorious advance of a new military power of the very first order, the Ottoman Turks. Bulgaria had already lost its power of resistance since the defeat of Velbuzd in 1330, and had fallen into three weak and loosely knit states, with their centers at Vidin and Trnovo and in the Dobrogea. Serbia, which had reached its zenith under Stephen Dusan (1332-56), "Tsar of the Greeks and Serbs", rapidly declined after his death: in 1371 even a combination of Serbs and Bulgars was crushingly defeated by the Turks, in a great battle on the Marica river: and henceforth the latter were faced, no longer by a strong and expanding Serbian empire, but by a whole series of ephemeral petty states, stretching from the Adriatic to the Danube and the Black Sea, badly organized and mutually suspicious.
     In 1387 Sultan Murad I resumed his advance into the heart of the peninsula, and though defeated in that year, he won two years later the memorable victory of Kossovo, which is generally regarded as the death blow to medieval Serbia. It has been frequently maintained that Mircea of Wallachia sent a contingent of troops to the help of the Serbs, and though there is no evidence for this story, it is certainly a fact that the new Sultan Bayezid followed up his victory by invading Wallachia. Mircea was made prisoner, sent to Broussa and only released in return for an annual tribute. Thus the year 1391 marks the first appearance of Wallachia on the register of vassals to the Sublime Porte.
     On his return Mircea sought new allies. In 1393 the last trace of Bulgarian independence was overthrown, and only the Danube now separated the Romanians from the rapidly expanding Turkish empire. It was natural enough that Bayezid should next year direct his attack against Mircea, who more than held his own in a battle in the marshes of Rovine, on the Danube, and thus saved the country from actual conquest. It seems to have been on this occasion that King Marko, the hero of Serbian legend, met his death, ignominiously fighting in the Turkish ranks. But Mircea felt his situation to be desperate and in 1395 fled to Transylvania, where he concluded a treaty of alliance with the new king of Hungary, Sigismund of Luxembourg, the husband of Louis' daughter and heiress.
     By this time western Europe was acutely anxious as to theTurkish advance, though unhappily its desire to help the Christians of the East was tinged by political ambitions not dissimilar to those of the notorious Fourth Crusade, and by the proselytizing design of Rome against Orthodoxy. In 1396, then, it came to a new crusade led by Sigismund himself, with many thousands of French, Burgundian and German knights. But all their gallantry and fine equipment could not avail against the foolhardy and arrogant tactics which had led an earlier generation to disaster at Crecy. On the field of  Nicopolis the Turks again won a crushing victory, the flower of French and Burgundian chivalry was wiped out or held to ransom, and Sigismund himself, after barely escaping with his life, was stripped of financial resources - a handicap which was to remain with him throughout life - involved in a disputed succession in Hungary and Croatia and irresistibly tempted to dabble in the politics of Bohemia, where his brother Wenceslas was rapidly making himself impossible. In a word, the prestige of Hungary, which under Louis the Great had stood very high in all the Danubian states, and which between Kosovo and Nicopolis had seemed to offer the main guarantee of salvation from the Turks, now fell under a sudden eclipse.
     Small wonder then, if Mircea of Wallachia, deprived of active support from his northern ally, should have found utmost difficulty in holding his own against the Turks, or that in their search for a substitute both he and Stephen, the voivode of Moldavia, should have turned to the more distant Poland, the latter even acknowledged it as his suzerain.
     What secured to the Romanians a much needed respite was theMongol invasion of 1402, in which Sultan Bayezid was defeated and made prisoner by the redoubtable Tamerlane, his death in captivity being followed by a prolonged civil war between his sons. Unhappily it was merely a respite; there was no real possibility of a counteroffensive. For on the one hand Sigismund was absorbed in the struggle against a rival claimant in Hungary, his own cousin Ladislas of Naples, and also caught up in the first throes of religious and political unrest in his native Bohemia. Bulgaria was by now under the yoke and past helping, Serbia under the impotent successors of Lazar was already a liability rather than an asset to the Christian cause, while Bosnia was torn by religious dissensions. On the other side, Moldavia was in much closer connection with Poland than with Hungary: and Alexander the Good married as his third wife a kinswoman of King Wladislaw Jagiello, and even sent Romanian troops to fight under the Polish flag at the great battle of Tannenberg in 1410. This did not prevent the two brothers-in-law, Wladislaw and Sigismund, from contracting a secret treaty which envisaged a possible partition of Moldavia.
     Mircea's adroit speculations in the Turkish civil war ended in disaster; for his ally Musa was eventually overthrown by Mohammed II, who seized the three strong strategic points of Giurgiu, Nicopolis and Isaccea and very nearly captured the Genoese port of Moncastro also. Already the position of the Romanians was precarious, but as yet the Turks were concentrating their efforts upon the main line of advance through the Morava valley to the Middle Danube, determined that first Serbia, then Hungary, should share the fate of Bulgaria. In 1417, then, Mircea found it necessary to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Porte, to pay a regular tribute of 3,000 ducats, and to surrender all territory south of the Danube mouths (the modern province of Dobrogea). A year later he died, after one of the few normally long reigns in Romanian history.
     For several decades after Mircea's death Wallachia was convulsed by the faction fighting of his sons and other rival claimants, and on Alexander's death in 1432 Moldavia fell into similar anarchy. It was doubtless this which forced Sigismund, who had so long been absorbed in the affairs of the West, to turn his attention once more to the Balkan peninsula. The brunt of the defence of Europe against the Turks thus came to be borne by Hungary, which now earned the proud title "propugnaculum christianitatis".
     Meanwhile Stephen Lazarevic and George Brankovic, the rulers of what remained of Serbia, sank to the level of Hungarian vassals, and Belgrade was garrisoned by Hungarian troops. Dan II of Wallachia also recognised Sigismund as his overlord, and it was his inability to maintain his throne against the rival Turkish candidate²¹, that brought Sigismund himself to the Danube after an absence of almost thirty years. In 1427 he led an army through the Transylvanian passes, reinstated Dan and established a new fortress at Giurgiu...But he found a more serviceable tool than Dan in the latter's younger brother Vlad, commonly known as "Dracul", who was once more allowed to hold fief of Fagaras and Amlas. Vlad, however, was unable to stem the ever-recurring Turkish raids from the south of the river and was in the end carried into captivity.
     On his death in 1437, Sigismund was succeeded by his son-in-law Albert of Habsburg, who won the allegiance of Hungary and with more difficulty, of Bohemia and was almost at once elected king of the Romans. He seems to have understood the need for defence far better than the factious nobles of his Hungarian kingdom, and when in 1438 Murad II invaded Transylvania - this time with the aid of Dracul - he found that Magyar distrust of his German advisors was stronger than the flair for a neighbours burning house, and had to look on impatiently while Semendria, George Brankovic's Danubian stronghold, fell before the Turks.

 - 1446, John Hunyadi invaded Wallachia, ejected Vlad and established Vladislav, son of Dan II

 - 1456, Hunyadi ejected the insignificant Prince Vladislav Dan in favour of his own nominee, Vlad (the Impaler)

- 1462, Sultan Mohammed²² invaded Wallachia, and Vlad after an unsuccessful raid on his camp, fled to take refuge in Hungary

 - 1476, Vlad was reinstated on the throne of Wallachia by Matthias of Hungary but died within the year

 - the current Sultan (Mohammed the Conqueror) put Vlad's younger brother Radu cel Frumos on the throne

 - 1471, Stephen the Great (of Moldavia) invaded Wallachia, routed Radu at Soci and put his own nominee Basarab Laiota on the throne

 
¹ Also 'Carol Robert d'Anjou'.
² Sigismund will eventually also become the king of Poland (1370) and the Holy Roman Emperor.
³ From the death of Mircea the Old (1418) to the end of the fifteenth century, Wallachia had
fifteen voivodes. On the average each reign lasted barely five and a half years.
⁴ Alexandru cel Bun
⁵ Radu cel Mare
⁶ Stefan cel Mare
⁷ Mihai Viteazul
⁸ V. Pârvan, DACIA, p.2.
⁹ Titus Flavius Domitianus.
¹⁰ Marcus Ulpius Trajanus.
¹¹ Portile de Fier in Romanian.
¹² Another monument of victory is the great circular ruin of the Tropaeum Traiani at Adam Klissi, in the Dobrogea.
¹³ Publius Aelius Hadrianus.
¹⁴ Gaius Messius Quintus Traianus Decius.
¹⁵ Lucius Domitius Aurelianus.
¹⁶ Namely Wallachia and Moldavia.
¹⁷ This term generally applied to the area east of the Olt river. The area west was called Oltenia.
¹⁸ Charles Robert was the grandson of Charles of Anjou, founder of the Kingdom of Naples, and champion of the Papacy against the last of the Hohenstaufen, Conradin and Manfred.
¹⁹ In what is now Bukovina - to be distinguished from theWallachian Cimpulung.
²⁰ From dvor or Court.
²¹ Radu II Prasnaglava.
²² He was called Mehmed in Turkish.
 

 
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