appeared to lend colour to this view, for the name Beesd might have been slavized into Besdin and this might be the record of a payment made, between 1332 and 1337, to the Pope. It is only fair to say that the learned Magyar Jesuit who presides over the episcopal library at Gjula Fehérvár (Alba Julia in Roumanian) did no more than say that these surmises were possible. He was, as a matter of fact, much more interested in the political situation and in another book, the oldest printed Bible in Roumanian (of 1582 and in Slav characters) which, as he pointed out with half a sigh, was published by one Magyar through the liberality of another. The charming Bishop of Caransebes, as he sat with me one Sunday morning in his rose garden, did not receive Professor Iorga's idea with approbation. The Professor, he thought, was too fond of originality and he himself preferred to claim some of the monasteries on equitable instead of on historical grounds. They were founded after all, he said, for the people of the Banat and of those a majority were now Roumanian. (But in Caras-Severin, the chief stronghold of his countrymen, there are no ancient monasteries with the exception of some ruins. The Roumanians are not ostentatiously religious; they do not take kindly to the building of churches and in their portion of the Banat one usually finds churches of wood, some of these being 150 years old.) But another librarian, this time a German at Veršac, poured cold water on Professor Iorga. Only one Roman Catholic religious house, he said, was founded by that French dynasty in the Banat and this was at Egres, near the Maroš, where the wife of Louis of Anjou built a church which remained Catholic and is now in ruins. The monastery of Besdin was founded in 1539 and a Serb-Slav psaltery which is kept there has, on p. 270, the following words: "In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. So that all people shall know when a beginning was made to build the monastery of Besdin. It was begun in the year 7058 from the creation of the world, that is 1539 from the Birth of Christ ... Joseph Milutinović, archimandrate, built it, and his monks and the Christians helped him. Written by me: Leontic Bogojević, administrator and monk." Beesd and Besdin, said the librarian, are from the same root, signifying that which has no bottom, an abyss, and the marshes in the Banat are numerous. The Beesd of the above citation is, said the librarian, a place between the rivers Temes and Berzava; Catholics were there in the fourteenth century, but the founders were Slavs. The burly archimandrate of Besdin, whose constitution had withstood twenty-seven years of marshes and mosquitoes, was extremely scornful of his adversaries' pretensions. "They wanted to prove that they built it! Not one stone, not a single stone! Then they argued that something was due to them as they had paid a part of the church taxes. We had invited them!" ...