In the four centuries between the founding of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia and the first substantial limitation of Ottoman suzerainty over them by a European power, Romanian elites strove to find a secure place for their countries in a neighborhood of competing and never friendly great powers. Princes and nobles, churchmen and intellectuals learned to appreciate early on the advantages of balance and accommodation in international relations. Through often dangerous times they continued to build institutions and fashion a culture that would ensure their identity and survival. At the same time they debated among themselves who they were and where they belonged in Europe. From the beginning they asked themselves whether they should look to the East or to the West for a model. In time, religion and culture inherited from Byzantium and political and economic ties imposed by the Ottoman Empire turned them to the East. Orthodoxy in the broad cultural sense of the term was paramount in establishing their identity and may explain why Roman Catholicism and, later, Protestantism made little headway among them. Yet, the Romanians of the principalities and of Transylvania were never isolated from the West. The educated were always aware of their Roman origins. A shift in their consciousness and aspirations toward the West became palpable in the seventeenth century and gathered momentum in the eighteenth, and thereby they prepared the way for the emergence of the modern Romanian sense of being. Their writings – church books, chronicles, and histories – and their experiments with poetry and artistic prose trace the path they followed from East to West.