Iorga had a complex personal perspective on the little-documented Dark Age history, between the Roman departure (271 AD) and the 14th century emergence of two Danubian Principalities: Moldavia and Wallachia. Despite the separate histories and conflicting allegiances these regions had during the High Middle Ages, he tended to group the two Principalities and medieval Transylvania together, into a vague non-stately entity he named "the Romanian Land". Iorga cautioned about the emergence of states from a stateless society such as the proto-Romanian one: "The state is a late, very elevated, very delicate form that, under certain conditions, may be reached by a people. ... There was therefore no state, but a Romanian mass living in the midst of forests, in those villages harbored by protective forests, where it is just as true that a certain way of life could emerge, sometimes on a rather elevated level."