enabled to bring about the foundation of their free state as a democratic « domnie ».
But in the hinterland of the Adriatic sea-shore the military force in the rural districts was that of the Serbs and Bosnians. No Roumanian voevode or duke, except the modest of the scattered Vlach cete (sing.: ceatd), existed in the surrounding lands, while among the Roumanians of the Danube the chiefs became crowned dukes against the kings leaders by the wish of the Pope or the Emperor, but foreign kings. The political catastrophe of the Romance world in the Balkans and the Pindus was thus complete. Only the Roumanians of Thessaly, who were both numerous and brave, persisted, a phantom remnant of the ancient glories of the race. Sustained by their Macedonian brothers, they were enabled to aid foreign states: first in the region of Ochrida about the year 1000, then, at the end of the 12th century, in Thessaly itself.
It should be added that a principality on the Lower Danube, near Silistra, existed under the Comnenes. Furthermore, the small state of the Zenta at the end of the 14th century, and the Dobrudja, a hundred years later, bore witness to their Roumanian initiative. Everywhere, however, they found the traditions of the first Bulgarian state, an « empire », opposed to that of Byzantium: they found the Bulgarian church, employing the old Slavonic language of the province of Salonika, with a new, Cyrillic alphabet; the cities were Slavonic and every state formed in the cultural atmosphere of an older political organisation must enter into all its customs and adopt all its forms. Thus the boyard-sons of Ochrida, the Asenides of Trnovo, the Shishmanide princes of the 13th century, the Balshides in Adriatic Zenta, a Balica, a Dobrotitch in the maritime provinces of the Euxine became Slavs in the second generation, like the greatest, richest and most higly-cultured of their subjects,
