Eighty years ago, Nicolae Iorga titled the third volume of The History of the Romanians The Founders and concluded his account of the ‘independent foundation’ of the 14th century with the idea of ‘Romanian political creation’, as embodied in the reign of Mircea the Elder. Of course, the illustrious scholar might just as easily have included the great-grandson of Basarab the Founder in the following volume, The Knights, dedicated to Stephen the Great, to Iancu of Hunedoara and to Vlad the Impaler, the grandson of the founder of Cozia – who was also the first crusader amongst the Romanian princes – but it is certain that the title ‘founder of the country’, with a founding reign in an era of cultural consolidation 1, is fitting for the man whom the national poet, looking upon his dominion stretching from Severin to Dobrogea, called ‘the greatest Prince of Wallachia, under whom the country stretched along both banks of the Danube as far as the sea’2
Indeed, the title borne by this son of Radu I was more extensive than those borne by his predecessors and successors, such as that in the document issued at Tismana on 23 November 1406 – “I, Io Mircea, great voivode and lord, sole ruler of the whole country of Ungrovlahia and the lands beyond the mountains, even as far as the Tatar territories, and Herceg of Amlaș and Făgăraș, and lord of the Banat of Severin and of both sides across the whole of Podunavia, as far as the Great Sea, and sole ruler of the fortress of Dîrstor’3 – is one that strictly reflects historical realities and not, as was the case in Europe at the time, monarchical pretensions.
‘Great Voivode’, like his grandfather, Nicolae Alexandru, co-founder of the metropolitan see, ‘herzeg’, that is to say ‘Herzog’ or ‘dux’ of the Transylvanian fiefdoms—a title which had already appeared in that of his paternal uncle Vladislav I, whom Western sources referred to as ‘Mircius’, whilst Eastern sources called him ‘Emirgi’, he had for a time, between 1388 and, probably, shortly after 1396, also been ‘despot of the lands of Dobruja’, following the conquest of Dobruja from the Turks, as indicated by two Latin documents concluded with King Vladislav II Jagiello of Poland, in January 1390 and July 1391, as well as the double-headed eagles carved and painted at Cozia, about which I once wrote 4, a Byzantine title arrogated and then voluntarily relinquished in the name of that very same political realism mentioned.
What is certain is that during Mircea I’s reign of over three decades, several features of the ancient Romanian civilisation were firmly established. The first is the cultural synthesis demonstrated here, particularly through the princely and noble elite. This took place in a world where the voivode, himself clad in a Western chivalric costume with ‘chausses’ adorned with Eastern heraldic symbols — maintained steady or occasional relations with Emperor-King Sigismund of Luxembourg or with the Count of Nevers, the future Duke of Burgundy, whilst a Wallachian boyar of the time accompanied the great lord, Baron Enguerrand de Coucy 5.
As I noted some time ago 6, just as in several other corners of the continent – from Spain to the Greek archipelago, from the Crimea to Sicily – where, at that crucial moment in European history – with the centuries-old Franco-English conflict – English conflict, the Balkan fragmentation and the Ottoman offensive – the Catholic West of ‘International Gothic’, the Orthodox Byzantium of the Palaiologos dynasty and Arab–Turkish Islam came together, the Romanian region became polarised, in its political dealings with the Basarab and Bogdănești dynasties, a ‘Europe in miniature’ whose heroes were the German and Byzantine emperors, the Burgundian crusaders and the Franciscan missionaries, the Genoese merchants and the Ottoman sheikhs, bringing in their wake a natural cosmopolitan atmosphere where the visual aspect became paramount – whether in courtly or liturgical ceremonies, or in feudal wars no less.
The Muslim decorative details on the clasp of Nicodim’s Tetraevangelion from 1404–1405 and those on the Cozian epitaph from 1396, neighbouring the Byzantine imperial loros of the angels, were contemporary with the obverse of certain coins from 1399–1400, on which the voivode wore a saccos and a diadem of Constantinopolitan origin, as well as with the distinctly Western-style anthropomorphic sarcophagus at Cozia belonging to Mircea, itself – preceded by the Western-inspired adornments and recumbent effigy at Curtea de Argeș belonging to Vladislav I and Radu I – and again contemporary with the Gothic churches at Severin, Câmpulung and Târgoviște, at a time when a ‘minstrel’, a ‘joculator’, a ‘Spilman us der Walechyen’7 was coming to Marienburg from Wallachia. He came from a region where, around 1400, a Danubian Slavic-Romanian poetic tradition was taking shape, drawing on the mountainous, Bulgarian and Serbian regions, recounting the battles with the Turks, events from the time of figures such as Vladislav Vlaicu and Radu I, and the conflicts between the descendants of Dan I and Mircea I – all of which led to the emergence of an ‘ancient song’, common to much of Romanian epic poetry and the South Slavic epic tradition. It was a country, I might add, where, much like in Western monarchies, dynastic branches were now emerging, for a time: the Dănești, descended from the brother of Mircea the Elder and extinguished with Neagoe Basarab, the Drăculești – who trace their origins to Bucharest – descendants directly from Mircea and his son Vlad Dracul, through two lines: that of Țepeș and the Mihnești, and that of Vlad Călugărul, Radu the Great, Pătrașcu the Good, Petru Cercel and Mihai Viteazul.
A second characteristic of the Wallachian civilisation of the time is spiritual tolerance. We can discern this from the correspondence exchanged between 1381 and 1393 between Patriarch Eftimie of Târnovo and Antim Critopoulos, Metropolitan of Ungrovlahia, from which we learn that on the left bank of the Danube8, enemies and opponents of the Bulgarian Church, had found refuge. And we recall that it was also at this time that Mircea Vodă was sheltering the reformist sheikh of Seljuk origin, Bedreddin of Samavna, who, in opposition to the sultan’s policies, preached religious tolerance and a syncretism with Anatolian and Central – Asian roots, calling on Muslim dervishes and Hesychast monks from the Balkans to stand together 9 (this at a time when, for political reasons, the pretender Musa—who became sultan in Edirne for a brief period two years later—had sought refuge with the Prince of Wallachia in 1409).
The third feature will be the clear emergence, from this point onwards, of a ‘Romanity’—that is, a Latin character—of the Romanian spirit during the age of the ‘founding of the country’. A century of Slavic–Romanian bilingualism 10 which preceded by three hundred years the moment when the chroniclers, as a scholarly elite, would become aware of the Latin origins of their people; but, at the same time, a century in which there are signs, both material and immaterial, that allow us to hypothesise a Romanian way of life distinct from that of the Slavic or Greek worlds with which the region north of the Danube was closely connected.
The fact that a church such as the foundation—the necropolis at Cozia—possessed all the stylistic features of contemporary Serbian churches in the Morava Valley, minus the complexity and the volumetric and decorative exuberance found at Kruševac, Veluče, Neupara or Kalenić 11 – whilst embracing the calm, balance and logic demonstrated three decades earlier by the Argeș necropolis of the Basarab forebears – speaks volumes. Similar to many Moravian churches – with which it also shared the distinctive feature of a windowless narthex, characteristic of a monastic and funerary atmosphere, as well as the well-known Hesychast prayer of Palamite origin 12 – Cozia possesses what Gabriel Millet once called ‘the imprint of Byzantine wisdom’13 and what I have come to regard as evidence of a medieval ‘aesthetic Latinity’, quite distinct from the Slavic aesthetic with its penchant for complexity, ornamentation and pyramidal tendencies in architecture.
Here, too, lay the deeply Latin substratum – unjustly neglected – of Byzantium, which, in the easternmost reaches of Oltenia, encountered the underlying harmony of another Latin spirit, the Romanian one, which, not long before, in the very same Wallachia, had soberly simplified, at Argeș, the very work of the Byzantine architects of the time14”.
In a way, the spirit of the monastic church, where Mircea I rests in peace, will have resonated with the spirit of the Wallachian monks who, during the reign of their uncle Vladislav, around 1370, refused the ‘Chinovitsa-style monastic order’ of the Athonite Cutlumuz, who favoured a communal, cenobitic way of life of Slavic-Greek essence 15, returning home and preferring the individualistic idiorhythm of cave dwellings such as those in Muscel and Buzău?
It is difficult to give a definitive answer, but what is certain is that the era to which we have referred is a foundational one: one of political realism, cultural synthesis, tolerance and spiritual Romanity, for which the reign of Mircea the Elder remains a starting point.
- 1
R. Theodorescu, ‘An Era of Cultural Consolidation: Wallachia in 1400’, in The Great Prince Mircea, Bucharest, 1987, pp. 457–468.
- 2
M. Eminescu, Works XIII. Journalistic Writings 1882–1883. 1888–1889, Bucharest, 1885, p. 188.
- 3
Documenta Romaniae Historica. B. Wallachia, I, Bucharest, 1966, p. 70; cf. History of the Romanians IV, 2001, p. 288.
- 4
Around ‘despoteia’
- 5
R. Theodorescu, An Era…, p. 467.
- 6
ibid., p. 465.
- 7
ibid., p. 467. For the international climate in the Lower Danube region around 1400, see idem, A Millennium of Art in the Lower Danube Region (400–1400), Bucharest, 1976, p. 233 ff.
- 8
idem, Byzantium, the Balkans and the West in the Early Stages of Medieval Romanian Culture (10th–14th centuries), Bucharest, 1974, p. 252.
- 9
M. Balivet, Mystical Islam and Armed Revolution in the Ottoman Balkans. The Life of Sheikh Bedreddin, the ‘Hallaj of the Turks’
- 10
R. Theodorescu, Visuality and Language in the Ancient Civilisation of the Romanians, Bucharest, 1998, p. 7.
- 11
ibid., A Millennium…, p. 206.
- 12
idem, ‘The Narthexes of Two Wallachian Monuments from the 14th–16th Centuries’, in Revue Roumaine d'Histoire de l'Art, Beaux Arts series, XLIX, 2012, p. 4.
- 13
‘Cozia and the Serbian Churches of the Morava’, in Mélanges offerts à M. Nicolas Iorga, Paris, 1933, p. 849.
- 14
R. Theodorescu, An Era…, p. 459.
- 15
ibid., Byzantium…, pp. 226–227.