Echoing his political conservatism, Iorga's theory proposed that the Romanized Dacians, or all their Vlach-Romanian successors, had created peasant republics to defend themselves against the invading nomads. It spoke of the rapid ruralization of Latin urban dwellers—suggested to him by etymologies such as the derivation of "pământ" ("soil") from "pavimentum", and the creation of "genealogical villages" around common ancestors ("moși") or the ancient communal sharing of village lands, in the manner imagined by writer Nicolae Bălcescu. Iorga also supposed that, during the 12th century, there was an additional symbiosis between settled Vlachs and their conquerors, the nomadic Cumans.