Rome’s ancient domination of the Illyrian coast and Wallachian plains led to highly interesting consequences. A genuine Romance language was once spoken by the mountain population of shepherds which extended across the entire Balkan peninsula from the Dalmatian coast, through the Bosnian and Serbian highlands, into the easternmost ranges of the Carpathians. The similarity observable in Balkan and Carpathian mountain dialects thus finds its source in the original easterly expansion of Rome. The Banat territory, in which the proportion of Rumanian inhabitants is high, is the bridge land which connects the Rumanian form of Latin used on the broad Transylvanian shelf to the Albanian prevailing in the broken-up highlands of Albania. Romance speech therefore found a ready soil in the Balkan uplifts. It may even be detected in the mountainous sections of Thrace, a province which also fell under Roman rule during the transition period from pagan to Christian days. The arrival of Slavs in the seventh century forced the Romans to take refuge behind city walls, so that although the vast non-urban part of the province became Slavic in population, the cities remained Latin and formed themselves into a number of independent republics. These city states passed under Venetian protection in the ninth and tenth centuries to safeguard themselves against the piratical raids of Slavs who had succumbed to the nefarious influence exerted by the dissected coast with its numerous fiords and deep-water harbors. The Venetian protectorate soon became converted into direct sovereignty. But the yoke of the Doges lay light on the land, the administration of cities being left entirely in the hands of the citizens. Venetian authority was most strongly felt in Dalmatia after the assumption of the title of Dux Histriae et Dalmatiae by Doge Pietro Orseolo II. All the efforts of Hungarians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and of Turks in the seventeenth, to insinuate themselves into Dalmatian affairs were futile. The imposing barrier of the Dinaric Alps forbade intercourse between Dalmatia and the east. Life and progress flowed into the province from the west over Adriatic waters.