[4] The structure of the Universitas Valachorum placed the leadership of common Romanians upon their own nobility (voivodes, knezes),[vague] enjoying a jurisdiction based on their own laws (ius valachicum).
[citation needed] In 1288, in the face of external danger such as Tatars, Cumans, Saracens and other pagans (omnino Tartarorum vel Cumanum Saracenum vel Meugarium) the universitas of the Romanians was called together with the other Estates (universisque nobilibus Ungarorum, Saxonibus, Syculis et Volachis) and Church representatives of two counties, Brașov and Sibiu, to defend Christian faith, according to the letter of Lodomer, Archbishop of Esztergom.
[4] This fact is interpreted by Ioan-Aurel Pop to show that other surviving documents referring to other assemblies, which only mention the nobles as being present, do not exclude the possibility that the other Estates, including the Romanians, were actually participating.
[5] The charter established a set of exclusive legal rights over the united territory of the eight highland districts, thus creating an essential condition for an Universitas Valachorum in that region.
[5] When a few educated nobles did finally try to introduce the idea of a community through language rather than social origin in the mid-seventeenth century, it was already too late, as the entire Banat became incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1658.
[5] As a result of history and self-imposed restrictions, the Romanian universitas never came to be, in spite of the favourable conditions created by the fifteenth-century diploma, a situation which contrasts with that of the Saxons, who had established their own university in the 1480s.