The past and its solutions against fear: the Romanian-Russian relations in
history and actuality (III): the dilemma of affiliation and the Byzantine
succession
The political and spiritual competition that transformed Central Eastern
Europe into the predominant territory of the crusade and the internal
developments that generated the emergence of some regional power centers
sufficiently stable to make new states arise, placed the Romanians now
identifyed as a stable presence in the chronicles of those times, and the
residents of the knezates that were successors of Kievan Russia, at the origins
of a number of initiatives likely to ensure their survival in relation to the
neighboring apostolic kingdoms, with the descendants of the Golden Horde, and
the revival of Islamic expansion, with the Ottoman Turks descending in the
southeast. The new regional experiences generated by the translation of Western
dynasties to the rule of the Hungarian and Bohemian Kingdoms, and the
restoration of the unity of Poland, made the Romanians from Transylvania and
the Ruthenians from the West and South-West Russian knezates subjects of
sovereigns who professed a different faith, generating loyalty crises among
their elites. The consolidation of the Romanian states and of the Grand Knezat
of Moscow has preceded an identity and political experiment that historians
have not fully deciphered, oscillating between the well-known Byzantium after
Byzantium and an evolution comparable to that of the nation-states in Europe.
FLORIAN DUMITRU SOPORAN
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