It would otherwise be easy for us to assign the phrase ‘about the matter of worship’ the syntactic meaning ‘with regard to worship’ – but that would be to disrupt the order intended by the poet: Bayezid himself was acting in accordance with the will of fate: ‘It is written in the book of life, and of ages and of stars’; ‘The meaning of the dream reveals that beneath the tree there shall be born / An empire whose fate is known only to the prophet’ (Variants); ‘For from his worldly love an empire shall be born / Whose years and boundaries only the prophet knows” (variants) – and in the final text, “only heaven knows them”, a generalisation that brings the empire’s “fate” even closer to that of other peoples. Only the prophet knows the boundaries (not because he sets them, but because he can question destiny); his representatives in life, ‘sultan after sultan’, verify through successive victories the successive boundaries, the successive ‘signs’ of the prophesied expanse. Man knows only the signs of divinity, not its ultimate will.
However great this empire may be, it has its ‘years’ and its ‘borders’ – something Bayezid forgets when he claims to have conquered ‘the whole of the West’, ‘all that lies in the shadow of the cross’, when he says that ‘the world is open to him’. In version B, the sultan declares after the victory at Nicopolis: ‘Just one more to go! Across the Danube, lads!’ Just one more would be a step towards everything, towards the absolute. In fact, it is the step beyond the limit, the ‘hubris’ he commits – for ‘everything’ is impossible; it means confusing the ephemeral human being with eternal divinity. His fate holds sway right up to a step away from this ‘everything’, right up to this final step at the Danube, which is a limes, a landmark around which the sultan’s ‘signs’ turn against him. Mircea ‘blocks’ the empire’s path by defending his estate. Up to this point, Osman’s dream had spread ‘like a vulture’, ‘the green banner rises year after year’, ‘generation after generation’, ‘people after people’, ‘country after country, they open the path to glory’ – the armies come from the deserts ‘at a sign’ from the sultan, which proves divine will. The signals given by Bayezid beyond the limits of his own destiny (Osman’s dream ends at the Danube) no longer have the power to instantly trigger the actions they imply. On the contrary, following his destiny by virtue of inertia, he signals to a lord who is the master of the place, whilst at the same time ‘initiating’ a process in which, imperceptibly – ‘without warning’ – he himself becomes, in part, the accused. And, as if by a spell materialised to prove the immutability of this boundary of the empire, the heraldic symbols of the beginning are repeated in reverse after the Battle of Rovine: the virgin moon, the goddess of victory (‘And borne by victory…’) assumes the role of the active principle of the cosmic order – ‘the lady of the seas and of the night pours forth tranquillity and sleep’ (a symmetry to the ‘Lord of Wallachia’, the instrument through which the order preceding the ‘dream of grandeur’ – the order of sleep; calm – was restored). And her words: ‘Written in the book of life, of ages and of stars / That I may be your mistress – you the master of my life’ (here we see the same reflection of the feminine element in the masculine that we shall find in the young lord’s fortune-telling slip – with the caveat that here the landscape is astral, whilst in the fortune-telling slip it becomes earthly, vegetal; the ‘round’ here immediately brings to mind the moon – whilst there it is the ‘glades’; visible here, hidden there; symmetry compels us to see in the ‘Lady’ of the fortune-telling slip a term of opposition to the ‘maiden’ in the ‘written word’ of the empire) – these words come true: ‘Until stars spring forth from the ages, one by one…’: one after another, of course, ironically contrasting with the earlier clusters: ‘year after year’, ‘people after people’; the gradual horizontal expanse is countered by a depth foreshadowed vertically within the setting. The signs of the beginning reappear at the end, suggesting the idea of a cycle, of a completed cosmic action: a pair symbolising impetuous youth – ‘the tempestuous Bayezid / the maiden moon’, the impetuous yet uncontrolled force, unguided by norms, acting impulsively – is countered by another couple, representing the age of wisdom: ‘Lord Mircea / Lady Moon’, who restores the ‘status quo ante’, the state prior to the dream – sleep – thereby negating its significance. These are precisely the ‘signs’ that the prince had demanded from the divine in the presence of the sultan; they appear on the same side—that of victory—yet are ‘against’ Bayezid, even though they had once belonged to him. The struggle between the protagonists is, in fact, a struggle between and for coats of arms, and in this passage the poet’s irony reaches a level of sarcasm that only Aeschylus had achieved in The Persians. There, the chorus of the faithful described the vast armies marching towards Europe with such confidence and grandeur as if they were already being glimpsed returning victorious. From time to time, the fear of the future—systematically fuelled by the author, who develops the theory of ‘hubris’ precisely where it has no place (the Orientals being, even to the ancients, the people of excess par excellence)—still holds the elders back, but they quickly recover, rising sublimely into dithyrambs – and, in fact, the Persian army is simultaneously routed. Precisely what seems impossible to them becomes possible; precisely the symbols they invoked turn against them…
But let us return to Bayezid’s reply. We first noted his astonishment: ‘What?!…’ – then we see an attempt to organise the elements symmetrically in relation to Mircea’s speech. There can be no question of communication between the king and the sultan, each referring to distinct realities, the former speaking of ‘this country’, the latter of personal victories. Their words converge only at the key junctures of the discourse. ‘When the world is open to me’, the sultan repeats the slogan under which he was acting. The poet had intervened in the meantime with ‘At a sign, the way is open’, using the term with the opposite meaning: the ‘opening’ that Bayezid had before him from the ‘world’ now becomes an ‘opening’ towards Bayezid, a breach in his defensive heraldic system – into which freely enters the one who will ‘block’ his path. In variant B, the poet had been ‘on the side’ of the sultan regarding this term: ‘Until the gates of history open with a great clamour / And Bayezid appears on the stage of our world’ – where the rhyme ‘deschid/Bayezid’ carries a magical significance. It is a veiled ‘alliance’, which sets the stage for the other ‘magical’ rhyme in Mircea’s prophetic utterance. There, too, Bayezid’s name features in the other dominant rhyme: ‘They rushed to erect a proud barrier and wall / When Bayezid appeared to them on the distant horizon’. This will be used in the final text, after the term ‘wall’ has entered the repertoire of the sultan’s praises: ‘At Nicopolis you saw how many camps had gathered / To stand before me like an invincible wall’. According to the ancient rule of cleidomancy (the active principle of the name), the sound structure of a word determines the action it contains or related actions; Aeschylus finds, for example, in the name of Helen the meaning of the entire tragedy she has unleashed, whilst the name of Polyneices is broken down into its constituent elements (‘poly’ = many and ‘neikos’ = quarrel) in order to nullify its effect: ‘How can the goddess of justice, Dike, help him, when from the very beginning he was a quarrelsome man?’. Mircea’s retort – ‘We have no armies, yet love for our homeland is a wall / That is not daunted by your fame, Bayezid’ – falls into the same category of foretelling the future through a character’s name. The historical allusion within the context of the Persian Wars refers to the oracle at Delphi sought by the Athenians prior to the invasion by the Persian armies: ‘The wooden wall will save Athens from destruction,’ declared the oracle (Herodotus, VII, 143) – and Themistocles interpreted it as: ‘The ships are the wooden wall’, convincing his fellow citizens to abandon the citadel and build up their naval fleet. Taking up the oracle’s maxim from the Persians’ perspective, Aeschylus elaborates as follows: ‘Who could erect a wall to halt the onslaught of the Persian armies? Can you hold back the waves of the sea with a barrier (wall) – however strong it may be?’ (The chorus of the ‘loyal ones’ speaks of the Persian army. By giving concrete form to the metaphor – the oracle’s ‘wall’ – the Persians simultaneously idealise their own army, calling it a ‘tide’ precisely so that the oracle’s prophecy might not be fulfilled; in the same vein, the knights of the West put up a ‘barrier’ against Bayezid – and the sultan, in order to ‘defeat’ them, becomes a ‘hurricane’.)
Grammatically, Bayezid’s reply begins with an anacoluthon: ‘How? When the world lies open before me to behold, do you think I can / That the whole army might stumble over a stump?’ The logical variants are: ‘the world is open for me to behold’ / ‘do you think I can behold as’. If we accept the first form, it follows that the verb ‘can’ must be taken impersonally: ‘it is possible’ – otherwise we see in the Sultan’s attitude a concession that amounts to a plea: can I do this? I would do it, but do you think I have the power when I am responsible for the whole of Aliotman? It would follow that Bayezid is submitting to a tragic twist of fate – which is not the case – or appealing to chivalric ethics to concede victory to Mircea! If we accept the second interpretation, it means that the verb ‘to regard’ must be understood as ‘to glimpse the logical possibility’, ‘to suppose’ – and ‘to think’ as ‘to believe’: do you believe it is possible, that it is possible to glimpse some obstacle? You, a stump, are a pillar of defence (as are the heroes of epics: ‘Hector, the pillar of defence of the Trojans’, ‘Aias, the wall of resistance of the Achaeans’; or Mircea is precisely that, a defensive wall that blocks Bayezid’s path; the sultan is forced to utter maxims of universal validity in which he alone does not believe). In any case, Bayezid describes his own defeat as: ‘That the whole of Aliotman might stumble over a stump’—a direct reference to the Romanian proverb ‘A small stump overturns the great cart’ (dialectal variants of ‘buturugă’; ‘cioturugă’). He calmly casts doubt on the validity of a proverb, being ready to prove the opposite through his own example. Yet the proverb is embodied in everything the sultan has done so far: when he speaks of ‘how many have stood in my way’, he himself reveals the general tendency on everyone’s part to ‘stand in his way’, to block his path. Summarising in a few words the entire rise of Ottoman power, Bayezid defines expansion as a series of successive breaches of boundaries; it is no longer a natural growth, like that of a tree—organic and biological—but a series of victories and oppositions which he, ‘the Lightning’, surmounts ‘majestically’, ‘without a care’; yet chance itself—the law of chance—demands a defeat amidst so many victories.
Faced with a Christian prince, Bayezid displays his victories over Christendom; ‘All who stand in the shadow of the cross, Emperors and kings gather /…/ Within an hour the whole plain is swept clean of Christians’ (version B). Through the opposition of ‘cross/crescent’, Bayezid implies ‘Ottoman/non-Ottoman’; in variant B of the poem, Mircea is conciliatory regarding religions: “No one in the world has yet grasped the full truth”, emphasising the idea of humanity – but in the final text, as the sultan’s attack is so decisive, the prince does not revisit this point. Mircea takes care, however, to repeat the sultan’s phrase in a slightly altered form by shifting its meaning: “Do you boast that you have previously overturned a whirlwind / Of armies as glittering as gold, led by emperors and warriors?”. ‘Emperors and kings’ have become ‘emperors and valiant warriors’ – the correction made being very close to the sultan’s phrasing: ‘And against my cruel tempest do you defend yourself with a staff?’ (Bayezid defines his fury, his rage – his thirst for blood: ‘fierce storm’ means, in the Aeschylean register, ‘rain of blood’ (psakas aimatoesa), representing the upper limit of cruelty). As Bayezid himself points out, the ‘emperors and kings’ who ‘stood in his way’ are heroes from the great gallery of the arrogant. They ‘shake the very foundations of the world’s deep-seated peace’ (in various versions, all the attributes of the knights of the West were attributed to Bayazid himself, emphasising the resemblance between the rivals) – just like the seven besiegers of Thebes, just like Clytemnestra and Prometheus, all of whom fight against the cosmic order established by Zeus, seeking to overturn this order ‘from its very foundations’ (ab initio). Then, the elements of nature are struck with fear: ‘The sea trembled in terror at the sight of their ships’: impiety towards the elements of the cosmos is compelling evidence of error in the theory of hubris – they parade their coats of arms: ‘They clad themselves in gleaming chain-mail…’, an expression which, by mocking it (but also with the aim of warding off the magical function of the armour—that of blinding the enemy, of taking their eyes; or the ruler says: ‘We have no armies…’ – meaning, of course, that the country’s army is not equipped with these glittering contrivances) – Mircea transforms it into ‘weapons clad in chain mail’; an expression which, ironically repeated a second time, we find in the poet’s description: ‘In vain did the emperor roar like a lion in a rage’. These stylistic shifts in terminology—far more numerous than we have been able to demonstrate (beginning with ‘the moon glides and descends’)—form part of the same system of Doric symmetries that are the delight of a subtextual analysis.
The Sultan abruptly interrupts his praise. ‘And against my fierce valour do you defend yourself with a staff? / And, carried away by victory, am I to be tripped up by an old man?’ Baiazid does not name the role of the staff, which is a royal sceptre, a magic wand in the hand of a priest-king. Mircea himself does not reveal the role of this staff with which – as the Sultan put it – he defends himself against an invading army. Moreover, the prince shrouds the meanings: ‘I would never wish for you to come to know us’. It is precisely this insistence on the part of the ruler to make Bayezid understand that he has crossed the line, that he finds himself in uncharted territory, which has the desired effect on his interlocutor: The Sultan encircles his ideas around two concepts: the stump and the staff. The rhyme with which he concludes his speech – ‘staff/old man’ – brings these two elements, which are in any case linked (see folk literature: ‘If the old man were to die / So I might steal his staff’ – where ‘staff’ symbolises the power of the family) to coexist in an organic, functional unity, much like the later rhyme ‘wall/Baiazid’. The ‘stump’ with which the sultan begins his speech is something with deep roots; dry on the surface, with no apparent strength, yet firmly embedded in the ground; it poses an imminent danger to anyone who ignores it, especially in a sown field where it particularly ‘attacks’ the heel. The relationship between the stump and the staff is clearly established in the first canto of the Iliad by Achilles, the hero who is vulnerable precisely at the heel:
‘I swear by this staff which bears no leaves or branches
, Nor shall it ever blossom again, for its root remains in the mountains
(the stump)
Severed from the tree, stripped of leaves and bark
by the axe. Behold, today the judges amongst the sons of the Achaeans carry it
in their hands, and through it divine justice from Zeus
is meted out to us.”
In Aeschylus’s theory of hubris, the heroes ‘stumble upon an unseen rock’: hidden by the waves, the overloaded ship cannot avoid it, but if you throw overboard, in moderation, some of the piled-up cargo, you can lighten the ship so that it may pass unscathed. This ‘rock’ is a warning and, at the same time, the individual’s only chance of self-salvation – otherwise, caught up in the spiral of grandeur and having amassed too many possessions, the ship sinks even without encountering it. In tragedy, the heroes forget or disregard certain binding ethical precepts and discover them by chance, thereby demonstrating through this chance occurrence the value of those norms; they are the ones who lend their names (‘eponyms’) to this or that type of mistake. The ‘stump’ has the significance of a ‘hidden rock’ for the ship that is ‘Aliotman in its entirety’. It is, on the other hand, a boundary placed on the return journey, the ultimate limit up to which the aggressor has the right to advance. It functions as a ‘marker’ marking the halfway point of the journey, as Clytemnestra says, hoping that Agamemnon has met his death at Troy or on the return journey: ‘Even if the gods have helped them to victory, let them not rejoice just yet: they are only halfway there and must travel back without those same gods punishing them. Only then will it be seen whether heaven has truly been on their side or not”.
In Mircea’s reply, the sultan’s ‘hatred’ (‘With an irreconcilable hatred I muttered to myself then’) becomes the ‘hostility’ of the place. The battle that follows is, strictly speaking, nothing more than an unleashing of the forces of nature invoked by the old prince. Through his ‘misfortune’, Bayezid ‘fulfils the saying’: his own attributes, his own coat of arms with which he sought to do harm, turn against him. Just as he shattered the West with a ‘hurricane’, he is, in turn, ‘swept away’ by a storm: ‘And like clouds of brass, and like the clatter of hailstones’; ‘Roaring like a gale and the lashing of rain, / The field howls...’; ‘And striking from the front and from behind, like the north wind and the frost’; ‘Mircea himself leads the dreadful storm into battle / Which comes, comes, comes, trampling everything underfoot / Like a devastating flood, like a churning sea / Within an hour, the paganism is like chaff blown about’.
The ‘diamond dust’ that accompanied the birth of the empire ultimately becomes ‘chaff scattered by the wind’ – just as in Aeschylus, Xerxes, ‘born of the golden rain’, becomes the ruler of a ‘myriad of peoples’—a motley crowd, leaderless and disorderly—following the battles of Salamis and Plataea. The ‘lightning’ which ‘in its stormy fury engulfed land and sea’ is defeated by the cosmic elements between heaven and earth, which rebel ‘like a troubled sea’, driving the Turkish hordes into their predestined path, beyond the Danube. The true meaning of the lightning is revealed in Mircea’s favour, being one of the signs the prince had sought from the local deity:
‘As the army takes up its position, behold, the sun sets
, Wishing to crown
the lofty peaks of the land With a halo of victory, a long, frozen
bolt of lightning Borders the black mountains in the setting sun’.
As an element of the cosmos – the most important attribute of divinity – it did not take part in the battle alongside the north wind, the frost or the deluge – appearing only after the battle to bestow a halo upon the liberated land. Of course, Mircea’s crown was one of green branches, a symbol of supplication, since the country itself, through its mountains, appears wearing the true crown as an authoritative, living figure. In earlier versions, the poet had transferred to Mircea the first element from Bayezid’s coat of arms, the tree, then assigned to the prince the empire’s guardian celestial body, the moon – and now, finally, the ‘lightning’ breaks free of its own accord from the invader’s power, joining the ‘country’1ly. The Romanian Flood is a response to the ‘hurricane’ (the discord of the elements). The true relationship between ‘Romanians and the (cosmic) elements’ lies in the tranquillity of sunset and night (‘The land and waters are their friends’, as Herodotus says; they live in harmony – ‘filia’ – with nature). Positive animism, mobilised against the devastating hurricane, represents a system of self-defence and self-regulation of this order. The fury of the elements of the Romanian soil is, in fact, harmony aimed at restoring universal order. Bayezid drags in his wake all the destructive forces of chaos to the very boundary between chaos and the cosmos: ‘Until the gates of history open with a great clamour / And Bayezid appears on the stage of our world’. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire to the ‘gates of history’ is a wild, uncontrollable phenomenon; his entry into ‘the hierarchy of our world’ (into the value system of civilisation) is initially linked to the mobilisation, through homeopathy and magnetism, of the elements of chaos existing in the cosmos: those who happen to stand in his way are precisely the ‘brave men’ moulded in the same mould as himself. We note that, as regards the knights of the West, Mircea and Bayezid are in complete agreement that they were arrogant. It is the only ethical value known to the sultan on ‘our world’s scale’; he fails to understand what a defensive war is, for example. By discovering, as if by chance, the very values of civilisation—Mircea’s conscience in his historical creed, his willingness to sacrifice for his estate—the sultan rewrites the text, re-filling with meaning forms established over time, reviving their memory and functionality.
Such chaos as that wrought by Bayezid essentially mirrors the campaigns of all the great invading armies, beginning with the great conquerors known to Eminescu: Cyrus, Darius-Xerxes, the Mongols, the Turks (it is interesting that the early Middle Ages – the Goths, Huns and Avars – are less frequently invoked by the poet in this context; indeed, they even acquire a sense of humanity and ennoblement; see his political articles). A new idea in the Romanian interpretation of Eminescu’s philosophy of history is the involvement of the Catholic West in the same hubris of Christian feudal excess. The poet thus aligns himself with the line of practical Romanian foreign policy, characterised by the assertion of independence and sacrifice at critical junctures (Dracula, Podul Înalt, Mihai Viteazu). It also stems from an understanding of national historiography and the political education ingrained for centuries in the Romanian consciousness. In fact, this clash between the two forms of power follows a long tradition, beginning with the struggle between the Uranids and the Titans, in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’s Prometheus and The Persians, the defeat of Lucifer in Christian morality, the Western chivalric poem on the ethical motivation of the Crusades, etc.
Mircea, together with the entire country, becomes the instrument of the restoration of universal order. Religiosity and reverence for ancestors stem from the principle of restoring this order, not from a specifically Romanian inclination. The battle, viewed from the Romanians’ camp, is like a cleansing of the borders infested with unclean spirits, who are driven out and drowned in the Danube in the manner of any Romanian incantation. From this perspective, Mircea emerges not necessarily as a Christian prince, nor as a figure endowed with material power – but as a mere instrument of the aforementioned order. He exudes tranquillity and even a good-naturedness drawn from the traditional figure of fairy tales.
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‘The Lightning’ could not even show his face in the place where his namesake, Bayezid the Lightning, a usurper, was to be found.