But, apart from the Bogomiles, the number of those who of their own
free will went over to the Turks was scanty. Far more numerous were
those who abandoned their country and crossed the Danube to Hungary,
to Transylvania, to Wallachia, to Bessarabia, thus returning with
weary hearts to some of the places which, a thousand years before, had
seen their shaggy ancestors come trooping westward. What they heard in
the Banat, the part of southern Hungary they came to first, must have
induced a large proportion of them to remain, for they were told by
those who had migrated after Kossovo, in the days of old George
Brankovi['c] and of Stephen the son of Du[vs]an, that this was a good
land and that the masters of it, the Hungarians, were much more easy
to live under than the Turks. Not that it was necessary to live under
them, because one could settle in the lands or in the towns which had
been given by some arrangement to Stephen and to George Brankovi['c].
These were lands so wide that all the Slav wanderers could make a home
on them; they extended to the river Maro[vs] and even beyond it. If
they settled in one of those districts it would be under one of their
own leaders and judges, not those of the Hungarians. There did not
seem to be many Hungarians, and perhaps that was why they wanted other
people in the country, especially now that the Turk was not far off.
If anyone decided to live under the Hungarians, that also was much
better than under the Turks; in this country of fine horses you were
not prevented from going on horseback. Then it was much easier to
speak to the Hungarians, because a great many words in their language,
particularly the words which had to do with agriculture, seemed to be
Slav. So alluring, in fact, was the state of things in the Banat, as
these people painted it, that many of the immigrants, in their relief
and happiness, wanted to hear no more. They scarcely listened while
they were being told about the Slav settlers, in pretty large numbers,
who had been there longer still, people who said that they had lived
there always, even before the building of the Slav monasteries, and
some of these were three or four hundred years old, as could be proved
by rescripts of the Popes. Likewise those who had always lived there
reported that some of their own race had been great men--one had been
the Palatine of Hungary in the days when King Stephen II. was a child,
another was the Palatine Belouch, brother to Queen Helen; and were not
the monasteries there to remind one of the leaders, the voivodas, who
liked to raise such temples so that prayers could be said for the
repose of their souls?
It was known that a people which professed the same religion as
themselves--"a people of shepherds," as King Andrew II. called them in
a decree dated 1222, the time of their first appearance in Hungary--it
was known that these Roumanians from Wallachia were just advancing
from Caras-Severin, the most easterly of the three counties of the
Banat, into Temes, which is the central one. But even if they came
farther west it did not seem to matter; one had a kindly feeling for
them, since there was a good deal of Slav in their language, and if
they were averse from building monasteries, that was their own affair.
They had, it was interesting to learn, invited a Serb, the same man
who had erected Krushedol monastery in Syrmia, to build one at least
as imposing for them at a place called Argesu, to the north of
Bucharest.
Thus one cannot be surprised that hundreds and thousands of Serbs and
Bulgars quitted their native lands--they were not known to the Turks
as Serbs and Bulgars, but merely as raia of the province of
Rumili--and crossed the Danube, the Serbs going chiefly to their own
countryfolk in Banat and the lands to the west of it, while the
Bulgars went partly to the Banat, where their descendants have won
fame as market-gardeners, but chiefly to Roumania, settling in
villages round Bucharest.