Chapter I: The Teritorial Foundation of the Romanian Nation
Translation from the French "Histoire Des Roumains Et De Leur Civilisation" by Nicolae Iorga, 1920
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Between the centre of Europe and the Russian steppe, between the misty lands of the North and the sunny southern lands of the Balkan Peninsula – lies a region which lacks a clear geographical unity in its natural traits. On the contrary, it presents striking contrasts: The harsh winters of northern Moldavia, rich in snow, hardly resemble the temperate climate of Wallachia, where during these months only a few rare squalls coming from the North-East may give the fertile countryside a winter appearance, but where the next day, the moist thawing warmth makes February seems rather more like a happy start to spring.
The valleys of Oltenia – with a very special orientation – have a truly Mediterranean atmosphere compared to the plains of Wallachia, which are subject to gusts of wind that are so sudden that nothing can stop their assault. It often snows at Iasi when the clouds covering the pink sky of joyous Bucharest barely let out a couple warm waterdrops.
These differences are not owed only to the nearness to mountains and plains that each of these regions has, regions which collectively make up a country so varied in appearances, but which is still so unitary. Because, if Transylvania represents little more than narrow valleys between the peaks of the Carpathians and the series of hills which crisscross its entire surface, if its only arable land are the “lunci”, the fertile river valleys of the Olt, the Târnave, the Someș – Wallachia (including Oltenia), and Moldova (the way it was before the dismemberments of 1775 and 1812) have all the traits of a complete territory; and these provinces form a kind of artificial museum of the different aspects of a fertile land which has at once a little of the cold West, with its green fields and its frequent fogs, and of the blue sky, burning sun, and fabulous harvests of the East. In Wallachia, in a couple hours, one traverses a region of naked rocks, pine forests, and streams that find their spring up in the hallowed heights of the mountains and gush towards its gorges and one reaches the hilly sub-Carpathians where there are smiling orchards like those of England, framed by old white houses whose timber has blackened with age. A little lower down and one finds oneself under a scorching sun, on a plain where wheat that broke soil only in April already bends under the full weight of its golden ear at approximately the middle of June; all this while the early flowers of spring in the mountains have not yet withered, and the lilac flowers next to the windows of the village huts is still in bloom. Finally, once one traverses the mountains, the hills, and the plains of Wallachia, a new world is sure to fill the traveler with astonishment. The Danube region, with forests of knotty willows that seem at first sight impenetrable, though full of clearings where the fisherman cleans and mends his tools as well as prepares the fish he caught in his net. In Dobruja, this region extends across the river to the right bank, where it passes through a wild, masterless country of immeasurable antiquity, as far as the great lakes, the inextricable delta of the Danube, and, ultimately, the sea. There, another fishing region awaits both native and the foreigner, who has for ages come both from north and south to exploit this infinite wealth.
One meets the same traits in Moldavia. Descending from the rugged summits of the Ceahlău one finds himself amongst orchards full of joyful villages and old monasteries, the domes of which quietly sit above the immense forests. A little further on, the broad stream of the majestic Șiret with its clear waters occasionally dotted by small islands; there, the sunny hills near its banks bear magnificent harvests every year; amidst the pastureland which at one time reared one of the noblest races of cattle in Europe — a breed of broad-headed cattle with long, straight horns — are the lakes which the former boyars made to supply their “court” with fish during the long fasting months of Orthodox Lent. Then, beyond the slow-flowing Prut, almost hidden behind its tall clay banks, stands the gently undulating plains of Bessarabia, with excellent pastureland. This thinly populated region which everywhere has the same character of steppe-land, a memory of the ancient “desert” it once was, leads to the great lakes of the Danube – which are like those of the adjacent Dobruja – and to the “liman of the Dniester. There ends the principality which its fourteenth-century rulers proudly claimed, in their title, to have extended “from the mountains to the sea”.
Oltenia – which is in many respects like the adjoining country of Serbia and belongs more to the lands which tend towards the Adriatic and not the Sea of Marmora – affords us another example of this charming succession of every variety of climate, landscape, and produce, from the solitary peaks of the Parâng to the lovely hills of the districts of Mehedinți, Gorj, and Vâlcea, the rich plains of the Dolj and the Romanați, and the fisheries on the Danube, near Celeiu, a place which is of little importance today, however rather famous in the 13th century.
Resembling each other in this harmonious variety, the different geographical zones of Oltenia, Wallachia, Moldovia and Transylvania (with its annexes), are nevertheless separated by marked differences which give each a distinct and peculiar character. As I have said, Oltenia resembles Serbia, – the Olt, from which it takes its name, is a kind of Morava of the eastern Danubian bank. But, if Wallachia and Moldavia share a common element in the steppe which, covering the entirety of the Besserabian south, extends beyond the Prut to the district of Galati and further downwards towards Braila and the old “desert” of Ialomita, not unlike the rich ephemeral vegetation of southern Russia,– one will nevertheless find in Moldavia nothing of that soft and fertile plain, open to all winds as to all human migrations, invasions that were as devastating as they were transforming. The hills succeed each other, cross each other, mixing the capricious lines of their ancient forests with multicolored carpets of human cultures. If the Siret, Prut, and Dniester have the fine straight courses of the Wallachian rivers, of all the Wallachian rivers (Vedea, Arges, Dambovita, Prahova, Ialomita, Buzau) – in Moldova, the Bistrita and Putna rivers, after descending the eastern mountains of the country, do not head straight to the Danube; they cross the elevated part of the country and mingle their waters with those of the Siret, which is one of the main arteries of Moldavia. On its right bank the river receives only the scanty waters of the Bârlad, which pursue a tortuous course through the valleys and seem to be ever in danger of disappearing in its yellow friable soil. The Prut receives only the waters of the Jijia on its right bank; and two other streams, not inconsiderable in volume, cut their way across Bessarabia and flow into the Dniester.
In Transylvania, the river-system, so defining when it comes to the character of a country, is even more different. Despite the dividing line of the Carpathians, it is obvious that the southern part of the province, with its “Olt land,” its “Bârsa land,” and the Sibiu district, really belongs to Wallachia, where these rivers spring up from. The Wallachian princes have often succeeded in annexing it, just as the princes of Moldavia have repeatedly endeavored, through Bucovina and Pocuția, to reach the sources of the Siret, the Prut, and the Dniester. But the other large rivers — the Mureș, the Someș, the three branches of the Criș, the waters of the Banat and Timișoara — turn westward and empty in to the great collecting channel of Tisa, which pours its mingled waters into the Danube.
A broad unity lords over this apparent diversity. It would be difficult even for a geologist, who assigns the constituent elements of a chain of mountains, to determine, not the point where the line of the Carpathians itself commences, but that at which it begins to dominate the landscape — which is the essential thing from the point of view of “human” geography, and particularly of historical geography. He certainly will not find it in Galicia, where the mountains do form a chain without however defining the character of the country, be it in the aspect of nature, be it in the aspect of economic, social, or political conditions of human life. The land and its population do, indeed, lean upon the mountains which fringe the great marshy plain of Poland in the west (whose name means “plain land”), but it is not the mountains which determine the limits or, at once protecting and inspiring, are responsible for the physiognomy of all that is found beneath their shade.
Everything changes as soon as the Carpathians reach the regions which represent the old fatherland— the traditional land of the Romanian race, native to its cliff faces and to the deep valleys which furrow the last wooded outliers of the mountains. Take, first, their names: the Carpathian fortress, dominating the entire region with its ridges that are like convolutions bearing thought and life, was known to the Magyars – a late invader incapable of colonizing the forest themselves – as the “the king’s forest.” It corresponds, in the East, to the great forest of Serbia which stretched from Belgrade to Nish and wasted so many a crusader by its hidden perils; or to the great forests of the west, the Hercynia of Caesar and Tacitus, the Forest of the Ardennes of the Middle Ages. All that lay beyond was, in medieval Latin, a “Transylvania,” a term which in time became generalized and embraced the entire province. From this “land beyond the forests” one descends to the “Transalpina,” the Havasalföld of the Magyars, “the land beyond the Alps.” For the Romanians of adjoining Moldavia, which has a later origin, it is called “Muntenia,” the “land of the mountains,” inhabited by the Munteni, or mountaineers. When the Byzantine patriarch made Wallachia an archbishopric for Romanians in the 14th century, the new seat received the title of “Ungrowallachia and the mountain tablelands” (Romanian: plaiuri). The richly forested land of Moldavia, the future Bucovina of the Austrian usurpation of 1775, appears for the first time in the Polish chronicle under the name of “Plonyany,” or “the mountains.”
The shepherds, whose wandering about the valleys marks the beginning of the history of the Romanian people, are just as much the children of the mountains as are its pine and spruce forests. The first political formations of the Romanian princes were achieved under the shadow of their lofty peaks, close to the mountain passes, not in order to be able to quickly invade neighboring lands, but in order to check at once any invading forces seeking to attack the natural borders of their polity. That’s where the first stone churches and stone fortresses were raised, around which the merchants built their houses. Even as it concerns agriculture, is it proven that after the civilizing work of the Romans was interrupted, its activity was restarted on the high tablelands of the Carpathian Mountains that were safe from invading forces.
The mountain surrounds and embraces the Romanian lands on all sides. Three great rocky boulevards dominate their make-up, and each one of them will serve as a cradle for a state. It seems indeed that the heart of the old Romanian principality preceding the Hungarian invasions in Transylvania was the Bihor massif that dominates the western province. The political life of Wallachia started at Arges and in the Jiu mountains. Finally, without Bucovina and without the county of Maramures, which is its natural western continuation and without which there would have been no Moldavian dynasty – a necessary condition for a creation of a state – and Moldovia would have never come into being as the second state of Romanians, and the one which was for long the more vigorous of the two. Even in Bessarabia, which is nothing but the eastern half of Moldavia that was taken by Russia in 1812, if it wasn’t for the rows of hills which keep the valleys fertile by sheltering the forests and keeping them cool by means of their streams – this entire land would’ve remained but a poor piece of forgotten and deserted land in the great sea of the empty steppe.
The mountains are so familiar to Romanians, that they have no special name for it. It is possible that it was called the “Caucus” in very ancient times – but this name signifies nothing more than the word “Alps”, both meaning “rocks”. It is in schoolbooks that we learn the name “Carpathian” – the great illiterate mass of Romanians knows them simply as “the mountains”.
In order to fully grasp the geographical unity of these lands one must consider one other element: the river Danube; for it is the combination between the chain of mountains and the river which gives unity to a country so rich in variety.
There is no one single Danube: there are several – at least three. The fast stream originating in the Black Forest long maintains the romantic character of a German river. Even when it carries large boats on its powerful stream of mountain torrents, it still doesn’t have the imposing appearance of a river. It doesn’t dominate the city in Vienna, which, even with its “blue waves” gets none of its character from the river. Between the old historical Buda of the Magyar kings and the Turkish pashas, their successors, and modern Pest, the parvenu city with great big tasteless stone buildings – the Danube starts being imposing; the gigantic bridges crossing the river are the most significant ornament and greatest technical achievement of the Hungarian capital. However, even in this great size, which makes the Danube one of the primary river arteries of Europe, it still lacks some of that reach, that urging vitality, due to which it became not only one of the great channels of European commerce, but at the same time, the immense channel that gathers in it the waters of an entire great geographic region, the most active element in the life of a country, its defense and support, its supreme beauty and the greatest glory of an entire race which see the figure of this great river as a legendary ancestor and as a symbol of a great future that is coming to melt the memories of its troubled past, to energise its present, to harmonise, and finally, to become part of the destiny of this nation.
The Danube doesn’t have this character not even in the moment in which it sharply drops its great cascade south unto the great Hungarian steppe. On both of its banks, it is not the plains which are dominated by the river, but the river itself gets lost– even with its large proportions and imposing stream – within the immensity of a region which has no defining elements. In order to become the Danube that poets enthusiastically sung about, and heroic young nations deeply loved, it needs the vicinity of mountains, which, immediately after the Tisa, squeeze it into the narrow gorges of the Iron Gates.
From this point onwards, an unbreakable bond forms between the Danube and the mountains which give birth to the streams that hurry to join it. It is in their association, and it alone, that one finds a unity in the entire region inhabited by the Romanian race. The Carpathians are in constant touch with the river through the tributaries they produce, and the Danube outlines the last series of hills that spread southwards from the mountains. At one time, in order to reach the sea, the river followed the dry bed that runs along the Cernavoda to Constanta railway. The entirety of Dobrogea used to belong to the same geographical formation as Wallachia and even Moldova, which it tries to reach to through the hillsides around Galatia. Today, the river avoids the old tablelands of Dobruga (totally unique in their character) and follows the depression of the plains, the margins of the steppe and the last fertile lands which spread from the foothills of the Carpathians.
The right bank of Pannonian Danube that belongs to the steppe, and thus to the Hungarian race, is devoid of any significant tributaries, as if the river was not meant to flow through this vast plain region. The Balkan right-bank has only a couple secondary tributaries which cannot be compared to the Tisa, with all its huge capacity, nor to the completely exceptional contribution of Wallachia and Moldavia. Being closer to the river when it comes to the peak of their mountains and hills, the Balkans do not have that same close ties that define the relationship between the Carpathians and the Danube; the narrow strip of plain that sit between the Danube and the mountains is much less vast and incomparably less fertile. If the Danube plays a significant role in the poetry of the Serbs, it is not a great tutelary river for the Bulgarians; their folklore mentions it rarely, and in an even more casual fashion that the Russian one. The Romanians states, being born in the mountains, hurried to reach its banks, and through quick and successful efforts, came to own them in a couple decades; political Bulgaria, however, starting from the Russian steppe and reaching the Danube deltas, quickly abandoned these desolate lands incapable of granting daily loot to their warriors, and hurried to the Balkans in search of the imperial paths of Byzantium. The Balkans themselves remained merely an easy to defend spot for warbands seeking plunder; in respects to the river, it was only a launching ground for the ambitions of Bulgar khans and their progeny, Slavic-tongued Tsars of Orthodox rite, who quickly abandoned it and forgot in their desire to conquer the Bosphorus.
The Greeks called this river Istros, from where we get the name Istria for the ancient city at its mouth; the Romanians call it Dunare, a name they borrowed from their oldest ancestors, the native inhabitants of its shore. Out of all rivers that are glorified in our folklore, there is none that can compare to the deep veneration the Romanian race surrounded the Danube with. One cannot imagine the destiny of the Romanian people without the Danube, as without the Carpathians themselves. If the mountains sheltered generations facing unending invasions, the Danube gathered all the ethnic elements the merger of which gave birth to the Romanian nation. Without the contributions of this river, the Carpathians, like the Swiss Alps, would have merely offered a safe shelter in its valleys for different races which would’ve lived next to each other without merging, while without the Carpathians, a merger would’ve happened at its mouth, the way it did in the Low Countries at the mouth of the Rhine, but this new national creation would not from the start have had the firm and permanent outlines of a political foundation.