Origin of Romanians
Encyclopedia
Ethnogenesis
Ethnogenesis is the process by which a group of human beings comes to be understood or to understand themselves as ethnically distinct from the wider social landscape from which their grouping emerges...
of the Romanian people
Romanians
The Romanians are an ethnic group native to Romania, who speak Romanian; they are the majority inhabitants of Romania....
(speakers of a Romance language
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
in Southeastern Europe) – can be traced back to the region’s Romanized
Romanization (cultural)
Romanization or latinization indicate different historical processes, such as acculturation, integration and assimilation of newly incorporated and peripheral populations by the Roman Republic and the later Roman Empire...
inhabitants living, within the Roman Empire
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
, in the lands north of the Jireček Line
Jirecek Line
The Jireček Line is an imaginary line through the ancient Balkans that divided the influences of the Latin and Greek languages until the 4th century...
(an imaginary line which had divided the influences of the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
and Greek
Koine Greek
Koine Greek is the universal dialect of the Greek language spoken throughout post-Classical antiquity , developing from the Attic dialect, with admixture of elements especially from Ionic....
languages in Southeastern Europe before the 4th century). Besides the Romans
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
and the Romanized autochthonous population
Indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as indigenous according to one of the various definitions of the term, there is no universally accepted definition but most of which carry connotations of being the "original inhabitants" of a territory....
(Dacians
Dacians
The Dacians were an Indo-European people, very close or part of the Thracians. Dacians were the ancient inhabitants of Dacia...
, Thracians
Thracians
The ancient Thracians were a group of Indo-European tribes inhabiting areas including Thrace in Southeastern Europe. They spoke the Thracian language – a scarcely attested branch of the Indo-European language family...
or Illyrians
Illyrians
The Illyrians were a group of tribes who inhabited part of the western Balkans in antiquity and the south-eastern coasts of the Italian peninsula...
), the Slavs also played a vital role in the formation of the Romanians.
The early Romanian language
Proto-Romanian language
Proto-Romanian is a Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and considered to have been spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians and related Balkan Latin peoples before ca...
, perhaps as early as the 10th century, began to split into four dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s which later tended to become language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s in their own right. The principal one, in terms of numbers, is Daco-Romanian
Daco-Romanian
Daco-Romanian is the term used to identify the Romanian language in contexts where distinction needs to be made between the various Eastern Romance languages...
, with approximately 25 million speakers. The second largest division is called Aromanian
Aromanian language
Aromanian , also known as Macedo-Romanian, Arumanian or Vlach is an Eastern Romance language spoken in Southeastern Europe...
. The other two divisions (Megleno-Romanian
Megleno-Romanian language
Megleno-Romanian is a Romance language, similar to Aromanian and Romanian, or a dialect of the Romanian language...
and Istro-Romanian
Istro-Romanian language
Istro-Romanian is an Eastern Romance language that is still spoken today in a few villages and hamlets in the peninsula of Istria, on the northern part of the Adriatic Sea, in what is now Croatia as well as in other countries around the world where the Istro-Romanian people settled after the two...
) are quite limited in extent. All these peoples share the Vlach
Vlachs
Vlach is a blanket term covering several modern Latin peoples descending from the Latinised population in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. English variations on the name include: Walla, Wlachs, Wallachs, Vlahs, Olahs or Ulahs...
exonym
Exonym and endonym
In ethnolinguistics, an endonym or autonym is a local name for a geographical feature, and an exonym or xenonym is a foreign language name for it...
(first recorded in the 11th century by Byzantine
Byzantine
Byzantine usually refers to the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages.Byzantine may also refer to:* A citizen of the Byzantine Empire, or native Greek during the Middle Ages...
authors) which indicates that they have been perceived as speakers of a Romance language.
The origin of the Romanians became subject to heated controversy, primarily for political reasons, as early as the 18th century. On the one hand the denial of Romanian continuity on the territory of present-day Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
corresponded to Austro-Hungarian
Habsburg Monarchy
The Habsburg Monarchy covered the territories ruled by the junior Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg , and then by the successor House of Habsburg-Lorraine , between 1526 and 1867/1918. The Imperial capital was Vienna, except from 1583 to 1611, when it was moved to Prague...
objectives; on the other, by claiming a “Daco-Roman” descent, the Romanians of Transylvania
Transylvania
Transylvania is a historical region in the central part of Romania. Bounded on the east and south by the Carpathian mountain range, historical Transylvania extended in the west to the Apuseni Mountains; however, the term sometimes encompasses not only Transylvania proper, but also the historical...
demanded political rights equal to those owned by the three “political nations
Unio Trium Nationum
Unio Trium Nationum Unio Trium Nationum Unio Trium Nationum (Latin for "Union of the Three Nations" was a pact of mutual aid formed in 1438 by three Estates of Transylvania: the (largely Hungarian) nobility, the Saxon (i.e. German) burghers, and the free Szeklers...
” of the province. The confrontation among scholars is based arguments of historical
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, archeological and linguistic
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
character.
Summary of theories
Four theories explain the fact that a language of Latin origin (the Romanian languageRomanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
) is spoken in modern Romania:
- The ‘theory of Daco-Romanian continuity’ holds that the Romanians are a synthesis of two ethnic elementsEthnic groupAn ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...
, namely the Roman conquerors of ancient Dacia and the autochthonous Dacians. Although, the venue of this ethnogenesis was situated on both sides of the Danube, but after the onrush of the Slavs, the center of Danubian Romanity was concentrated in today's Romania.
Scholars who suggest that the Romanians descended (primarily or partly) from the Romanized population of the Roman province
Roman province
In Ancient Rome, a province was the basic, and, until the Tetrarchy , largest territorial and administrative unit of the empire's territorial possessions outside of Italy...
of Dacia Traiana (now Transylvania, Banat
Banat
The Banat is a geographical and historical region in Central Europe currently divided between three countries: the eastern part lies in western Romania , the western part in northeastern Serbia , and a small...
and Oltenia
Oltenia
Oltenia is a historical province and geographical region of Romania, in western Wallachia. It is situated between the Danube, the Southern Carpathians and the Olt river ....
in modern Romania), base their theories on archaeological and linguistic researches; they also state that early written sources support their views. Among these scholars, the followers of the ‘theory of Daco-Romanian continuity’ emphasize the role the Dacians played in the formation of the Romanian people (the Encyclopedia Britannica’, Encyclopædia Universalis
Encyclopædia Universalis
The Encyclopædia Universalis is a French-language general encyclopedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company. The articles of the Encyclopædia Universalis are aimed at educated adult readers, and written by a staff of full-time editors and expert contributors...
's accounts expand upon this interpretation).
- The ‘immigrationist theory’ or the ‘theory of moving continuity’ (in Romanian scholarship, ‘Roesler’s theory’) suggests that the Romanian language can be traced back to the idiom spoken by the inhabitants of the intensively Romanized provinces of the Roman Empire to the south of the river Danube. After the collapse of the Roman limes on the Danube, they sought refugee in the mountainous regions of the Balkan Peninsula where their language was preserved. The Romanians’ ancestors commenced their migration to the territory of modern Romania not earlier than the 10th–12th centuries.
The followers of the ‘immigrationist theory’, based on linguistic researches and early written sources, emphasize that archaeological researches do not contradict their theory.
- An interim theory, the ‘admigration theory’, argues that two centers of the latinLatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
ophones crystallized in Southeastern Europe: one in Dacia Traiana and the other in the central regions of the Balkan Peninsula. But a close relationship existed between the two centers, and parts of the southern population joined (‘admigrated’ to) the northern latinophones. The Romanians thus appear at one and the same time as indigenousIndigenous peoplesIndigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as indigenous according to one of the various definitions of the term, there is no universally accepted definition but most of which carry connotations of being the "original inhabitants" of a territory....
(in Dacia Traiana), immigrants (from the south of the Danube), and conquerors (in the principalities of WallachiaWallachiaWallachia or Walachia is a historical and geographical region of Romania. It is situated north of the Danube and south of the Southern Carpathians...
and MoldaviaMoldaviaMoldavia is a geographic and historical region and former principality in Eastern Europe, corresponding to the territory between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river...
).
The theory suggests that the northward migration of the Romanized population from the regions lying south of the river Danube
Danube
The Danube is a river in the Central Europe and the Europe's second longest river after the Volga. It is classified as an international waterway....
also strengthened the presence of Romance speakers (the descendants of the Romanized population of Dacia Traiana province) in modern Romania. The followers of the ‘theory of the core regions of the Romanian language’ emphasize that the population of the Romanized regions of Southeastern Europe survived the storms of the Migration Period
Migration Period
The Migration Period, also called the Barbarian Invasions , was a period of intensified human migration in Europe that occurred from c. 400 to 800 CE. This period marked the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages...
in larger or smaller territories (e.g., in the Apuseni Mountains
Apuseni Mountains
The Apuseni Mountains is a mountain range in Transylvania, Romania, which belongs to the Western Carpathians, also called Occidentali in Romanian. Their name translates from Romanian as Mountains "of the sunset" i.e. "western". The highest peak is "Cucurbăta Mare" - 1849 metres, also called Bihor...
in Romania), and the Romanians descended from them.
- The ‘theory of the core regions of the Romanian language’ implies that the territory where the formation of the Romanians occurred cannot be determined exactly. Instead, a vast homelandHomelandA homeland is the concept of the place to which an ethnic group holds a long history and a deep cultural association with —the country in which a particular national identity began. As a common noun, it simply connotes the country of one's origin...
is supposed: a large block of latinophones existed in modern Romania, while in other territories solely language islands survived the storms of the Migration Period.
Adherents claim that the fact that a language of Latin origin is spoken in modern Romania works to the advantage of those who claim the continuous presence of a Latin-speaking population there. Supporters argue that the burden of proof
Burden of proof
The burden of proof is the obligation to shift the accepted conclusion away from an oppositional opinion to one's own position.The burden of proof is often associated with the Latin maxim semper necessitas probandi incumbit ei qui agit, the best translation of which seems to be: "the necessity of...
lies with the scholars who undertake to demonstrate that certain facts are incompatible with the continuity and further claims, without taking the possibility of migrations into account, that there are no facts that cannot be explained without assuming it:
Origin of theories
The Eastern Romans (Greeks) were the first to refer to the Romanians, specifically to the Balkan Vlachs. KekaumenosKekaumenos
Kekaumenos is the family name of the otherwise anonymous Byzantine author of the Strategikon, a manual on military and household affairs composed c. 1078. He was apparently of Graeco-Armenian origin and the grandson of the doux of Hellas...
(11th century) mentioned that the Vlachs “are the so-called Dacians and Bessi
Bessi
The Bessi were an independent Thracian tribe who lived in a territory ranging from Moesia to Mount Rhodope in southern Thrace, but are often mentioned as dwelling about Haemus, the mountain range that separates Moesia from Thrace and from Mount Rhodope to the northern part of Hebrus...
who used to live near the rivers Danube and Saos (which we call Sava), where now the Serbs
Serbs
The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group of the Balkans and southern Central Europe. Serbs are located mainly in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a sizable minority in Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia. Likewise, Serbs are an officially recognized minority in...
live”. Ioannes Kinnamos
John Kinnamos
Joannes Kinnamos or John Cinnamus was a Greek historian. He was imperial secretary to Emperor Manuel I , whom he accompanied on his campaigns in Europe and Asia Minor...
(12th century) wrote that they “are said to have descended from the one-time Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
settlers.”
Pope Innocent III
Pope Innocent III was Pope from 8 January 1198 until his death. His birth name was Lotario dei Conti di Segni, sometimes anglicised to Lothar of Segni....
wrote to Kaloyan of Bulgaria
Kaloyan of Bulgaria
Kaloyan the Romanslayer , Ivan II , ruled as emperor of Bulgaria 1197-1207. He is the third and youngest brother of Peter IV and Ivan Asen I who managed to restore the Bulgarian Empire...
(Ioannitsa), the brother of the leaders of the Vlach-Bulgarian liberation movement of 1185, saying that he had heard of Kaloyan's Roman descent. In the 15th century, French
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
and Italian travelers realized the Neo-Latin
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
features of the Romanian language. The Dominican
Dominican Order
The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France...
John of Sultanieh referred to the Romanians’ Latin origin already around 1400. The archaic-sounding name ‘Daco-Roman’ was given to them by Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini
Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini
Poggio Bracciolini was an Italian scholar, writer and humanist. He recovered a great number of classical Latin texts, mostly lying forgotten in German and French monastic libraries, and disseminated manuscript copies among the educated world.- Biography :Poggio di Duccio was...
(1380–1459). who writes that in the western part of eastern Europe live the descendants of Trajan's settlers
Giovanni Andrea Gromo (in 1564) and Pierrre Lescalopier (around 1574), remarked that the Romanians called themselves the descendants of the Roman colonists
In Romanian historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
it was Grigore Ureche
Grigore Ureche
Grigore Ureche was a Moldavian chronicler who wrote on Moldavian history in his Letopiseţul Ţării Moldovei , covering the period from 1359 to 1594....
(c. 1590-1647) who first noted that the origin of the Romanians was in “Râm” (Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
). In his Chronicle of Moldavia, he presents many strong arguments for the claim that the Romanians “descended from Rome.” With the exception of Constantin Cantacuzino (c. 1640-1714), who accepted a Daco-Roman mixing in his History of Wallachia, Romanian historians, from Dimitrie Cantemir
Dimitrie Cantemir
Dimitrie Cantemir was twice Prince of Moldavia . He was also a prolific man of letters – philosopher, historian, composer, musicologist, linguist, ethnographer, and geographer....
(1673–1723) to the Transylvanian School
Transylvanian School
The Transylvanian School was a cultural movement which was founded after part of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Habsburg-ruled Transylvania accepted the leadership of the Pope and became the Greek-Catholic Church . The links with Rome brought to the Romanian Tranylvanians the ideas of the Age of...
,Samuil Micu-Klein
Samuil Micu-Klein
Samuil Micu Klein was a Romanian theologist, historian, philologist and philosopher, a member of the Enlightenment-era movement of Transylvanian School .-Biography:...
(1745-1806), Gheorghe Şincai
Gheorghe Sincai
Gheorghe Șincai was an ethnic Romanian Transylvanian historian, philologist, translator, poet, and representative of the Enlightenment-influenced Transylvanian School....
(1754-1816), Petru Maior
Petru Maior
Petru Maior was a Romanian writer who is considered one of the most influential personalities of the Age of Enlightenment in Transylvania...
(1756-1812) would agree to nothing less than a pure Roman origin, with the Dacians exterminated or expelled to make way for the conquerors.
Mihai Cantacuzino’s History of Wallachia, written between 1774 and 1776, was the first book to speak of the symbiosis of the Dacians and the Romans. After this, the idea of the Romanization of the Dacians became a permanent feature of Romanian historiography.
The ‘immigrationist theory’ was set up by Franz Joseph Sulzer, an Austrian
Austrians
Austrians are a nation and ethnic group, consisting of the population of the Republic of Austria and its historical predecessor states who share a common Austrian culture and Austrian descent....
scholar of Swiss origin, who published his work (History of the Transcarpathian Dacians)Sulzer, Franz Joseph: Geschichte des Transalpinischen Daciens, das ist: der Walachey, Moldau und Bessarabiens; Rudolph Gräffer, 1781, Vienna http://books.google.com/books?id=BR0VAAAAQAAJ&dq=Franz+Joseph+Sulzer&hl=en&source=gbs_navlinks_s (retrieved: 2009-12-12) in 1784-1785. He argued that the lack of linguistic elements in Romanian from the Migration Period disproved the theory of continuity.
The idea that there is a correlation between the geographical position and the age of a linguistic phenomenon was raised by Sextil Pușcariu (1877–1948), based on lexical findings published in "the Linguistic Map of the Romanian Language" (finished in 1938). In his view, the Roman settlements were most dense in the region of the Apuseni Mountains, and certain peculiarities of speech of the Romanians living thereFor example, the usage of such words of Latin origin as ai ‘garlic
Garlic
Allium sativum, commonly known as garlic, is a species in the onion genus, Allium. Its close relatives include the onion, shallot, leek, chive, and rakkyo. Dating back over 6,000 years, garlic is native to central Asia, and has long been a staple in the Mediterranean region, as well as a frequent...
’, nea ‘snow
Snow
Snow is a form of precipitation within the Earth's atmosphere in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. Since snow is composed of small ice particles, it is a granular material. It has an open and therefore soft structure, unless packed by...
’, instead of Slavic loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
s. indicates that Romanian has been spoken there uninterruptedly since the Roman period. His theory was accepted by Ernst Gamillscheg (1887–1971) who commented "the Linguistic Map of the Romanian Language". Günter Reichenkron (1966) has similar conclusions.
Native people
Albania
Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...
, Macedonia
Republic of Macedonia
Macedonia , officially the Republic of Macedonia , is a country located in the central Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991...
, and Thrace
Thrace
Thrace is a historical and geographic area in southeast Europe. As a geographical concept, Thrace designates a region bounded by the Balkan Mountains on the north, Rhodope Mountains and the Aegean Sea on the south, and by the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara on the east...
on to Constantinople
Constantinople
Constantinople was the capital of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.-Names:...
: the Dacians, Thracians and Illyrians.
The Dacians lived north of the lower Danube. But there is a recurrent inconsistency in the literary sources regarding their ethnic names: the Greek sources use the name ‘Getae
Getae
The Getae was the name given by the Greeks to several Thracian tribes that occupied the regions south of the Lower Danube, in what is today northern Bulgaria, and north of the Lower Danube, in Romania...
’, while the Latin ones seem to prefer the name ‘Dacians’, but some of the Latin authorsPliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
(23 - 79 AD) and Lucan
Lucan
Lucan is the common English name of the Roman poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus.Lucan may also refer to:-People:*Arthur Lucan , English actor*Sir Lucan the Butler, Knight of the Round Table in Arthurian legend...
(39 - 65 AD); Oltean, Ioana A. (2007), p. 44. made a distinction between them. Since the very first detailed account by Herodotus
Herodotus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
(c. 484 - 430/420 BC), the Getae are acknowledged as belonging to the Thracian tribes.
The Thracians inhabited the eastern Balkans; Herodotus describes them as the greatest and most populous people on earth after the Indians
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends...
. Among the Thracian tribes, the Bessi lived in the mountains north-east of today's Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki , historically also known as Thessalonica, Salonika or Salonica, is the second-largest city in Greece and the capital of the region of Central Macedonia as well as the capital of the Decentralized Administration of Macedonia and Thrace...
, and the Moesi
Moesi
The Moesi were a Daco-Thracian tribe who inhabited present day Serbia and Bulgaria, part of the then Roman province of Moesia, which was named after them in 87 AD by the Romans after the Romans under Crassus defeated them in the 29 BC.- History :...
lived in the plains bordering the Black Sea
Black Sea
The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...
and the Danube.
The Illyrians constituted a loose tribal confederation that occupied the territory of modern Albania, Dalmatia
Dalmatia
Dalmatia is a historical region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. It stretches from the island of Rab in the northwest to the Bay of Kotor in the southeast. The hinterland, the Dalmatian Zagora, ranges from fifty kilometers in width in the north to just a few kilometers in the south....
, Bosnia
Bosnia (region)
Bosnia is a eponomous region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It lies mainly in the Dinaric Alps, ranging to the southern borders of the Pannonian plain, with the rivers Sava and Drina marking its northern and eastern borders. The other eponomous region, the southern, other half of the country is...
and Croatia
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
.
The provinces of the Roman Empire
Illyricum (Roman province)
The Roman province of Illyricum or Illyris Romana or Illyris Barbara or Illyria Barbara replaced most of the region of Illyria. It stretched from the Drilon river in modern north Albania to Istria in the west and to the Sava river in the north. Salona functioned as its capital...
for their Adriatic
Adriatic Sea
The Adriatic Sea is a body of water separating the Italian Peninsula from the Balkan peninsula, and the system of the Apennine Mountains from that of the Dinaric Alps and adjacent ranges...
territories north of the river Drina
Drina
The Drina is a 346 kilometer long river, which forms most of the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. It is the longest tributary of the Sava River and the longest karst river in the Dinaric Alps which belongs to the Danube river watershed...
. Dalmatia
Dalmatia (Roman province)
Dalmatia was an ancient Roman province. Its name is probably derived from the name of an Illyrian tribe called the Dalmatae which lived in the area of the eastern Adriatic coast in Classical antiquity....
was organized into a province in 9 AD when the command of Illyricum was divided along the southern confines of the valley of the river Sava.
The province of Moesia
Moesia
Moesia was an ancient region and later Roman province situated in the Balkans, along the south bank of the Danube River. It included territories of modern-day Southern Serbia , Northern Republic of Macedonia, Northern Bulgaria, Romanian Dobrudja, Southern Moldova, and Budjak .-History:In ancient...
, named after the Moesi, was created around 15 AD. Dobruja
Dobruja
Dobruja is a historical region shared by Bulgaria and Romania, located between the lower Danube river and the Black Sea, including the Danube Delta, Romanian coast and the northernmost part of the Bulgarian coast...
also became part of the new province.
Roman sources first include Dacia Traiana among the imperial provinces in 106 AD. The province was confined to the core territory of the Dacian kingdom
Dacia
In ancient geography, especially in Roman sources, Dacia was the land inhabited by the Dacians or Getae as they were known by the Greeks—the branch of the Thracians north of the Haemus range...
(Transylvania, the Banat and western Oltenia); the greater part of modern Moldavia, together with Maramureş
Maramures
Maramureș may refer to the following:*Maramureș, a geographical, historical, and ethno-cultural region in present-day Romania and Ukraine, that occupies the Maramureș Depression and Maramureș Mountains, a mountain range in North East Carpathians...
and Crişana
Crisana
Crișana is a geographical and historical region divided today between Romania and Hungary, named after the Criș River and its three tributaries: the Crișul Alb, Crișul Negru and Crișul Repede....
was ruled by free Dacians
Free Dacians
The "Free Dacians" is the name given by some modern historians to Dacians who putatively remained outside the Roman empire after the emperor Trajan's Dacian wars...
even after the establishment of the province. The Roman Empire decided to abandon Dacia Traiana in 275.
Dacia Aureliana
Dacia Aureliana was a province of the Roman Empire found by Emperor Aurelian, after his retreat from Dacia Traiana in 271. Between 271/275 and 285, it occupied most of what is today Bulgaria. Its capital was in Serdica...
, formed by cuts from the territory of Moesia. In 297 Dobrudja became a separate province, Scythia Minor
Scythia Minor
Scythia Minor, "Lesser Scythia" was in ancient times the region surrounded by the Danube at the north and west and the Black Sea at the east, corresponding to today's Dobruja, with a part in Romania and a part in Bulgaria....
. At the end of the 3rd century, the new province of Dardani
Dardani
Dardania was the region of the Dardani .Located at the Thraco-Illyrian contact zone, their identification as either an Illyrian or Thracian tribe is uncertain. Their territory itself was not considered part of Illyria by Strabo. The term used for their territory was , while for other tribes had...
a was also formed out of Moesia, while the area around the Lake Shkodër was separated from Dalmatia and organized into the province of Praevalitana
Praevalitana
Praevalitana was an ancient Roman province. It included parts of present-day Albania, Montenegro and Serbia.-History:...
.
In 312 emperor Constantine I
Constantine I
Constantine the Great , also known as Constantine I or Saint Constantine, was Roman Emperor from 306 to 337. Well known for being the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, Constantine and co-Emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan in 313, which proclaimed religious tolerance of all...
(312-337) restored the confiscated property of Christians
Edict of Milan
The Edict of Milan was a letter signed by emperors Constantine I and Licinius that proclaimed religious toleration in the Roman Empire...
, and by the time of the First Nicean Council (325) he had clearly declared himself a partisan of Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
. He also restored direct Roman control of the southern half of Oltenia and Muntenia. But by 369, the river Danube had marked again the physical limit of Roman power.
When emperor Theodosius I
Theodosius I
Theodosius I , also known as Theodosius the Great, was Roman Emperor from 379 to 395. Theodosius was the last emperor to rule over both the eastern and the western halves of the Roman Empire. During his reign, the Goths secured control of Illyricum after the Gothic War, establishing their homeland...
(379-395) died, he left the empire divided in two parts to his two sons. The part of the eastern empire that most resembled the West was the Prefecture of Illyricum which encompassed, among other provinces, Dacia Aureliana, Dardania and Praevalitana; it came under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the pope
Pope
The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, a position that makes him the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church . In the Catholic Church, the Pope is regarded as the successor of Saint Peter, the Apostle...
.
Dalmatia was occupied by Odoacer
Odoacer
Flavius Odoacer , also known as Flavius Odovacer, was the first King of Italy. His reign is commonly seen as marking the end of the Western Roman Empire. Though the real power in Italy was in his hands, he represented himself as the client of Julius Nepos and, after Nepos' death in 480, of the...
’s barbarians in 479, and by Theoderic
Theodoric the Great
Theodoric the Great was king of the Ostrogoths , ruler of Italy , regent of the Visigoths , and a viceroy of the Eastern Roman Empire...
’s Ostrogoths in 488. The Ostrogoths abandoned the territory in 536 when the armies of emperor Justinian I
Justinian I
Justinian I ; , ; 483– 13 or 14 November 565), commonly known as Justinian the Great, was Byzantine Emperor from 527 to 565. During his reign, Justinian sought to revive the Empire's greatness and reconquer the lost western half of the classical Roman Empire.One of the most important figures of...
(518-565) invaded Dalmatia. The emperor established the archbishopric of Justiniana Prima in 535 which became a separate papal vicariate for the northern part of the Prefecture of Illyricum.
The communis opinio is that the Danubian limes
Limes
A limes was a border defense or delimiting system of Ancient Rome. It marked the boundaries of the Roman Empire.The Latin noun limes had a number of different meanings: a path or balk delimiting fields, a boundary line or marker, any road or path, any channel, such as a stream channel, or any...
crumbled in 602, but it was only in 620 when all Roman troops were definitely moved from Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
.
Around 733, Emperor Leo III
Leo III the Isaurian
Leo III the Isaurian or the Syrian , was Byzantine emperor from 717 until his death in 741...
revoked papal jurisdiction over the Byzantine Empire’s western territories and awarded it to the patriarchate of Constantinople
Patriarch of Constantinople
The Ecumenical Patriarch is the Archbishop of Constantinople – New Rome – ranking as primus inter pares in the Eastern Orthodox communion, which is seen by followers as the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church....
.
Germanic people and the Huns
Germanic peoples
The Germanic peoples are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group of Northern European origin, identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages which diversified out of Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age.Originating about 1800 BCE from the Corded Ware Culture on the North...
towards the Danube generated a new situation beyond the Black Sea. The old neighboring peoples (e.g., free Dacians, Costoboci
Costoboci
The Costoboci were an ancient people located, during the Roman imperial era, between the Carpathian Mountains and the river Dniester.The Costoboci invaded the Roman empire in AD 170 or 171, pillaging its Balkan provinces as far as central Greece, until they were driven out by Romans...
, and Carpi). wished to obtain the receptio into the Roman Empire by force, and this receptio was granted to a few groups.
Soon after the middle of the 3rd century, the Tervingi (the Goths
Goths
The Goths were an East Germanic tribe of Scandinavian origin whose two branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, played an important role in the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Medieval Europe....
living to the west of the river Dniester
Dniester
The Dniester is a river in Eastern Europe. It runs through Ukraine and Moldova and separates most of Moldova's territory from the breakaway de facto state of Transnistria.-Names:...
) consolidated their hold between the Dniester and the Danube. Among the Tervingi, a substantial community of captives taken by Goths lived: e.g., the family of Ulfilas
Ulfilas
Ulfilas, or Gothic Wulfila , bishop, missionary, and Bible translator, was a Goth or half-Goth and half-Greek from Cappadocia who had spent time inside the Roman Empire at the peak of the Arian controversy. Ulfilas was ordained a bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia and returned to his people to work...
, who would later translate the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
into Gothic, was taken from a small village in Cappadocia
Cappadocia
Cappadocia is a historical region in Central Anatolia, largely in Nevşehir Province.In the time of Herodotus, the Cappadocians were reported as occupying the whole region from Mount Taurus to the vicinity of the Euxine...
(Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
).
The German tribes (Goths, Carps, Taifali, Bastarns) devastated Dacia in 248-250, the Carps and Goths in 258 and 263, Goths and Heruli
Heruli
The Heruli were an East Germanic tribe who are famous for their naval exploits. Migrating from Northern Europe to the Black Sea in the third century They were part of the...
in 267 and 269.
After 376, the first phase of the intrusion of the Huns
Huns
The Huns were a group of nomadic people who, appearing from east of the Volga River, migrated into Europe c. AD 370 and established the vast Hunnic Empire there. Since de Guignes linked them with the Xiongnu, who had been northern neighbours of China 300 years prior to the emergence of the Huns,...
into Europe forced the Roman Empire to accept upon its soil the establishment of enclaves of unsubdued barbarians: e.g., a vast throng of Goths was admitted and settled in Thrace. Attila the Hun
Attila the Hun
Attila , more frequently referred to as Attila the Hun, was the ruler of the Huns from 434 until his death in 453. He was leader of the Hunnic Empire, which stretched from the Ural River to the Rhine River and from the Danube River to the Baltic Sea. During his reign he was one of the most feared...
(434-453) struck across the Danube with devastating force in 447, and thereafter the parts of the Diocese of Dacia
Diocese of Dacia
The Diocese of Dacia was a diocese of the later Roman Empire, in the area of modern Serbia and western Bulgaria. It was subordinate to the Praetorian prefecture of Illyricum...
up to 5-days’ march from the Danube were to remain desolate and open to the Huns. After Attila’s death, the Gepids led a revolt against his sons; their success on the river Nedao
Battle of Nedao
The Battle of Nedao, named after the Nedava, a tributary of the Sava, was a battle fought in Pannonia in 454. After the death of Attila the Hun, allied forces of the Germanic subject peoples under the leadership of Ardaric, king of the Gepids, defeated the Hunnic forces of Ellac, the son of Attila,...
gave them a homeland in the eastern Carpathian Basin.
Slavs, Avars and Bulgars
The first written evidence of the appearance of the SlavsEarly Slavs
The early Slavs were a diverse group of tribal societies in Migration period and early medieval Europe whose tribal organizations indirectly created the foundations for today’s Slavic nations .The first mention of the name Slavs dates to the 6th century, by which time the Slavic tribes inhabited a...
refers to raids against the Byzantine Empire
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
from about 518, but it is likely that the westward expansion of the victorious Huns was accompanied by arrival of the first Slav-speaking settlers in the Danube region. Contemporary sources attest the use of more than one language by individuals whom their authors viewed as Antes or Sclavenes; artifacts displaying emblematic styles, such as "Slavic" bow fibulae became popular only after c. 550.
The arrival of the Avar
Eurasian Avars
The Eurasian Avars or Ancient Avars were a highly organized nomadic confederacy of mixed origins. They were ruled by a khagan, who was surrounded by a tight-knit entourage of nomad warriors, an organization characteristic of Turko-Mongol groups...
nomad
Nomad
Nomadic people , commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. There are an estimated 30-40 million nomads in the world. Many cultures have traditionally been nomadic, but...
s in the lower Danube area in the 560s further disrupted the situation. They destroyed what was left of Gepid power, but some splinters of the Gepid people survived the shock of the Avar conquest.
The Avars established themselves in the Great Hungarian Plain
Great Hungarian Plain
The Great Hungarian Plain is a plain occupying the southern and eastern part of Hungary, some parts of the Eastern Slovak Lowland, southwestern Ukraine, the Transcarpathian Lowland , western Romania , northern Serbia , and eastern Croatia...
. They took Sirmium
Sirmium
Sirmium was a city in ancient Roman Pannonia. Firstly mentioned in the 4th century BC and originally inhabited by the Illyrians and Celts, it was conquered by the Romans in the 1st century BC and subsequently became the capital of the Roman province of Lower Pannonia. In 294 AD, Sirmium was...
(Sremska Mitrovica
Sremska Mitrovica
Sremska Mitrovica is a city and municipality located in the Vojvodina province of Serbia, on the left bank of the Sava river. As of 2002 the town had a total population of 39,041, while Sremska Mitrovica municipality had a population of 85,605...
, Serbia
Serbia
Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...
) in 582 which eliminated a major Byzantine border defense post. Although the local garrison army still held the main strongholds near the Danube frontier, but between and behind them the Slavs had conquered vast territories in the Balkans by the 610s. The Slavic settlement was on such a large scale that the Balkans were lost for several centuries to the empire. However, the earliest archaeological evidence of settlements suggests that there was no "Slavic tide" in the Balkans following the presumed collapse of the Danube frontier. The "Slavs" were isolated pockets of population in various areas of the Balkans, which seems to have experienced serious demographic decline in the 7th century. It is also possible that the emblematic use of Slavic language was a much later phenomenon and cannot be associated with the Sclavenes of the 6th and 7th centuries.
Balkan Mountains
The Balkan mountain range is a mountain range in the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula. The Balkan range runs 560 km from the Vrashka Chuka Peak on the border between Bulgaria and eastern Serbia eastward through central Bulgaria to Cape Emine on the Black Sea...
.
In the late 670s or early 680s Kuver, who had been made governor by the Avars over a mixed population in the region of Sirmium, revolted against his overlords. His followers were descendants of the 270,000 captives taken in Thrace in about 619. They managed to cross the Danube and occupy a plain near Thessaloniki.
The Avar Khaganate collapsed under the attacks of the Frankish
Franks
The Franks were a confederation of Germanic tribes first attested in the third century AD as living north and east of the Lower Rhine River. From the third to fifth centuries some Franks raided Roman territory while other Franks joined the Roman troops in Gaul. Only the Salian Franks formed a...
armies in the winter of 795-796. Between 802 and 804, the army of Krum (c. 802-814), the Bulgar khan advanced northward into the Tisa
Tisza
The Tisza or Tisa is one of the main rivers of Central Europe. It rises in Ukraine, and is formed near Rakhiv by the junction of headwaters White Tisa, whose source is in the Chornohora mountains and Black Tisa, which springs in the Gorgany range...
region.
New states and last waves of migrations
First Bulgarian Empire
The First Bulgarian Empire was a medieval Bulgarian state founded in the north-eastern Balkans in c. 680 by the Bulgars, uniting with seven South Slavic tribes...
had become a major European power. Tzar Simeon I of Bulgaria
Simeon I of Bulgaria
Simeon I the Great ruled over Bulgaria from 893 to 927, during the First Bulgarian Empire. Simeon's successful campaigns against the Byzantines, Magyars and Serbs led Bulgaria to its greatest territorial expansion ever, making it the most powerful state in contemporary Eastern Europe...
(893-927) decided to lead a policy of war, especially directed against Byzantium. The Byzantine diplomacy appealed to the Hungarians (who had been consistently moving to the west since their first temporary presence north of the lower Danube in 837), but the Bulgarians and the Pechenegs invaded and destroyed the Hungarian settlements in 896 which made the Hungarians look for settlements in the Great Hungarian Plain.
The first king of Hungary
King of Hungary
The King of Hungary was the head of state of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1000 to 1918.The style of title "Apostolic King" was confirmed by Pope Clement XIII in 1758 and used afterwards by all the Kings of Hungary, so after this date the kings are referred to as "Apostolic King of...
, Stephen I (1000/1001-1038) defeated his uncle ‘King Gyula
Gyula III
Gyula III, also Gyula the Younger, Geula or Gyla, was an early medieval ruler who apparently ruled in Transylvania . His actual name was probably Prokui, yet Prokui cannot possibly be the same as Gyula. Around 1003, he and his family were attacked, dispossessed and captured by King Stephen I of...
’ and occupied the latter’s “whole country” (probably Crişana and Transylvania) in 1003. Around 1028, the king’s troops also defeated and killed Achtum who had been ruling over the Banat.
Byzantine conquest of Bulgaria
The Byzantine conquest of Bulgaria lasted from 968 to 1018, and was a military conflict that marked the beginning of the second apogee of the Byzantine Empire, which managed to incorporate most of the Balkan Peninsula, controlled by the First Bulgarian Empire, ridding itself of one of its most...
put the Byzantine Empire in the position of a commanding power. But at the beginning of the second quarter of the 11th century the Pechenegs’ invasion in the Balkans assumed greater frequency. This was a consequence of the pressure exerted by the Uzes
Oghuz Turks
The Turkomen also known as Oghuz Turks were a historical Turkic tribal confederation in Central Asia during the early medieval Turkic expansion....
, who, in their turn, were pressed by the Cumans
Cumans
The Cumans were Turkic nomadic people comprising the western branch of the Cuman-Kipchak confederation. After Mongol invasion , they decided to seek asylum in Hungary, and subsequently to Bulgaria...
. After 1068, the Cumans controlled the entire territory between the Aral Lake
Aral Sea
The Aral Sea was a lake that lay between Kazakhstan in the north and Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan, in the south...
and the lower Danube.
On July 16, 1054 the papal legate
Papal legate
A papal legate – from the Latin, authentic Roman title Legatus – is a personal representative of the pope to foreign nations, or to some part of the Catholic Church. He is empowered on matters of Catholic Faith and for the settlement of ecclesiastical matters....
s excommunicated
Excommunication
Excommunication is a religious censure used to deprive, suspend or limit membership in a religious community. The word means putting [someone] out of communion. In some religions, excommunication includes spiritual condemnation of the member or group...
Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople who also excommunicated the legates. After the Great Schism of 1054, the Romanians were amongst those people who profess the Orthodox religion.
In 1066-1067, the Vlachs living in the hinterland of Larissa
Larissa
Larissa is the capital and biggest city of the Thessaly region of Greece and capital of the Larissa regional unit. It is a principal agricultural centre and a national transportation hub, linked by road and rail with the port of Volos, the city of Thessaloniki and Athens...
(Greece) were at the center of a rebellion against the Byzantine government. In 1095, the Vlachs helped the Cumans in attacking the Byzantine Empire by showing them the mountain paths of the eastern Balkan Mountains.
During the reign of Géza II of Hungary
Géza II of Hungary
Géza II , , King of Hungary, King of Croatia, Dalmatia and Rama . He ascended the throne as a child and during his minority the kingdom was governed by his mother and uncle...
(1141–1162), groups of German
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
, Walloon
Walloons
Walloons are a French-speaking people who live in Belgium, principally in Wallonia. Walloons are a distinctive community within Belgium, important historical and anthropological criteria bind Walloons to the French people. More generally, the term also refers to the inhabitants of the Walloon...
and Flemish
Flemish people
The Flemings or Flemish are the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of Belgium, where they are mostly found in the northern region of Flanders. They are one of two principal cultural-linguistic groups in Belgium, the other being the French-speaking Walloons...
settlers (later known as the ‘Transylvanian Saxons
Transylvanian Saxons
The Transylvanian Saxons are a people of German ethnicity who settled in Transylvania from the 12th century onwards.The colonization of Transylvania by Germans was begun by King Géza II of Hungary . For decades, the main task of the German settlers was to defend the southeastern border of the...
’) arrived to Transylvania.
In the fall of 1185, two brothers named Theodore
Peter IV of Bulgaria
Peter IV ruled as emperor of Bulgaria 1185–1197. Together with his brother Asen he managed to restore the Bulgarian Empire after nearly 170 years of Byzantine domination.-Name:...
and Asen
Ivan Asen I of Bulgaria
Ivan Asen I ruled as emperor of Bulgaria 1189–1196. The year of his birth is unknown.-Life:...
, from the region of Tirnovo in Bulgaria called for a full rebellion of Vlachs and Bulgarians against the Byzantine Empire. They were also able to mobilize many Cumans. In 1188, a treaty between Asen and Emperor Isaac II Angelus (1185–1195) recognized the existence of an independent state, the Second Bulgarian Empire
Second Bulgarian Empire
The Second Bulgarian Empire was a medieval Bulgarian state which existed between 1185 and 1396 . A successor of the First Bulgarian Empire, it reached the peak of its power under Kaloyan and Ivan Asen II before gradually being conquered by the Ottomans in the late 14th-early 15th century...
.
The conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade
Fourth Crusade
The Fourth Crusade was originally intended to conquer Muslim-controlled Jerusalem by means of an invasion through Egypt. Instead, in April 1204, the Crusaders of Western Europe invaded and conquered the Christian city of Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire...
(April 13, 1204) drastically altered the balance of power in the entire Southeast European region. The papal legate crowned the ruler of Bulgaria, Ioannitsa
Kaloyan of Bulgaria
Kaloyan the Romanslayer , Ivan II , ruled as emperor of Bulgaria 1197-1207. He is the third and youngest brother of Peter IV and Ivan Asen I who managed to restore the Bulgarian Empire...
‘King of Bulgaria and Vlachia’.
In 1238, a direct Mongol
Mongols
Mongols ) are a Central-East Asian ethnic group that lives mainly in the countries of Mongolia, China, and Russia. In China, ethnic Mongols can be found mainly in the central north region of China such as Inner Mongolia...
attack on the ‘Cumans’ Steppe’ seems to have encountered serious resistance from various Cuman chieftains; at least one of them, Köten
Köten
Köten was a Cuman khan and member of the Terter clan. This Köten is the same Prince Kotjan Sutoevic of the Russian annals, who forged the Russian-Cuman alliance against the Tatars...
, fled to the west to find shelter within the borders of Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
. The main target of the 1241 Mongol invasion was Hungary, and the Mongol onslaught effectively stopped the Hungarian expansion across the Carpathian Mountains
Carpathian Mountains
The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians are a range of mountains forming an arc roughly long across Central and Eastern Europe, making them the second-longest mountain range in Europe...
for several decades.
By 1280, an ambitious general of the Golden Horde
Golden Horde
The Golden Horde was a Mongol and later Turkicized khanate that formed the north-western sector of the Mongol Empire...
, Nogai
Nogai Khan
Nogai , also called Isa Nogai, was a general and de facto ruler of the Golden Horde and a great-great-grandson of Genghis Khan. His grandfather was Baul/Teval Khan, the 7th son of Jochi...
had established himself on the lower Danube. When rumor had it that the Mongols wanted to invade Thrace and Macedonia, the Byzantines deported the Vlachs living in Thrace en masse to Anatolia
Anatolia
Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
in order to prevent their possible joining up with the Mongol invaders.
Foundation of principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia
In the future Wallachia, voivodates dependent on Hungary began to form toward the middle of the 13th century. The first recorded sovereign of the unified Wallachia was Basarab IBasarab I of Wallachia
Basarab I the Founder was voivode or prince of Wallachia . His rise seems to have taken place in the context of the war between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Orthodox states in the north of the Balkan Peninsula...
(c. 1310-1352) whose armies defeated the troops of King Charles I of Hungary
Charles I of Hungary
Charles I , also known as Charles Robert , was the first King of Hungary and Croatia of the House of Anjou. He was also descended from the old Hungarian Árpád dynasty. His claim to the throne of Hungary was contested by several pretenders...
(1308–1342) in 1330.
The process of political unification was slower in the area between the Carpathian Mountains and the river Dniester. After 1352-53, King Louis I of Hungary (1342–1382) organized a defensive border province in northern Moldavia to be ruled by Dragoş
Dragos
Dragonș, also Dragoş Vodă or Dragoş of Bedeu, was a Romanian voivode in Maramureş who has traditionally been considered as the first ruler or prince of Moldavia...
, a voivode from Maramureş. However, the Romanians living there were discontent with the Hungarian domination. Bogdan I
Bogdan I of Moldavia
Bogdan I the Founder was the third or fourth voivode of Moldavia . He and his successors established the independence of Moldavia, freeing the territory east of the Carpathian Mountains of Hungarian and Tatar domination....
(1359–1365), another Romanian from Maramureş took advantage of this situation, crossed the mountains to Moldavia and proclaimed its independence.
Historical events under debate
Fate of native Dacians in Dacia Traiana after the Roman conquest
- One theory holds that the Roman conquest of DaciaSecond Dacian WarThe Second Dacian War was fought in 105 to 106 because the Dacian king Decebalus had broken his peace terms with the Roman emperor Trajan from the First Dacian War...
was followed by a general pacification in an attempt to encourage the native population to cooperate. A country this large could not have been fully exploited by imported labor, and the natives were a precious labor force. (Many of the followers of the ‘imigrationist theory’For example, Gottfried Schramm and Endre Tóth. also point out that the native Dacians survived the Roman conquest; moreover, in the course of the 2nd and 3rd centuries free Dacians and other tribespeople were resettled into the province.)
- The opposing theory argues that under the Romans, Dacia Traiana appears to have been laid waste, ethnically cleansedEthnic cleansingEthnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
and re-settled by foreign colonists. In effect, the wars were traumatic to such an extent that the autochthonous population became so strongly debilitated and demoralized that it was swept away; the survivors in large part emigrated elsewhere.
Romanization of the natives in Dacia Traiana
- One theory argues that the massive and organized colonization of Dacia Traiana with Latin-speaking ethnic elements and the close life of the Romans and the natives together in common settlements contributed to the Romanization of the Dacians. The Latin language, as the only mode of communication among the diverse peoples of the province, influenced every level of society. Through the mix of the Roman and native Dacian populations a Daco-Roman people, speaking Latin, came into being.
- The opposing theory holds that the indigenous population did not play a significant role in the creation of the provincial society in Dacia. Considering the fact that the native languages spoken in the provinces, which had been under Roman rule for more than four centuries, (e.g., Britannia), survived the Roman occupation, very specific circumstances should be demonstrated in order to prove that the Dacians adopted the conquerors’ language in 165 years. Moreover, the Romans effectively ruled only half of Dacia and the un-annexed part of that logically had no way of being Romanized at all.
Ethnic situation in Dacia Traiana after the Roman withdrawal
- One view is that no power has ever succeeded in the course of history to relocate such a mass of population as the inhabitants of Dacia Traiana. The ‘Daco-Romans’ were not willing to move to foreign places where the lands had already been occupied; and thus the withdrawal under AurelianAurelianAurelian , was Roman Emperor from 270 to 275. During his reign, he defeated the Alamanni after a devastating war. He also defeated the Goths, Vandals, Juthungi, Sarmatians, and Carpi. Aurelian restored the Empire's eastern provinces after his conquest of the Palmyrene Empire in 273. The following...
(270-275) in the 270s was largely of administrators and landed proprietors. Normal contacts between the ‘Daco-Romans’ and the Roman world continued uninterrupted as long as the Byzantine Empire still controlled the Danube until 602. Scholars who accept the theory of Daco-Romanian continuity also suggest that the relations between the ‘Daco-Romans’ and the free Dacians developed after the Roman withdrawal, and thus Romanization continued and was further spread, even to areas which had not been directly conquered by the Romans. Although, waves of migratory peoples rode across Dacia; but, as a rule, they did not settle amongst the ‘Daco-Romans’, but those who did were quickly assimilated by them.
- The opposite view is that the evacuation and resettlement of Roman citizens was well within the capacities of the empire’s efficient administration; many civilians had already fled since the 250s, and the evacuation did not have to be accomplished overnight. Even the barbarians of the territory on the periphery had regarded the empire as a prosperous and well-guarded haven for centuries, and the province’s Latin-speaking Roman citizens had no interest in remaining in an undefended territory. Dacia Traiana was evacuated partially because Illyria and Moesia had been devastated; thus the relocation of its reduced population coincided with the need to repopulate the Balkans. The Roman withdrawal did not result in the total depopulation of the province, but the vernacularVernacularA vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...
spoken by those who stayed behind was not the Latin language.
Migrations of the proto-Romanians
- One theory argues that the ‘Daco-Romans’ had to give up their Roman-type city life and search for safety in the woods when the raids of the migratory peoples became more and more frequent after 350. When the Roman border on the Danube fell, two branches of the Proto-Romanians developed, and the southern branch, driven by the Slavs, become eventually the Balkan Vlachs. But in the north, the remaining Slavic population was in the end assimilated by the Proto-Romanians.
- The opposite theory holds that after the collapse of the Roman limes on the Danube, the latinophones who had been living for centuries in the territories to the south of the Danube fled southward. Some of their number settled in the towns of Macedonia; but their majority took refuge in the mountainous regions where they became involved in transhumanceTranshumanceTranshumance is the seasonal movement of people with their livestock between fixed summer and winter pastures. In montane regions it implies movement between higher pastures in summer and to lower valleys in winter. Herders have a permanent home, typically in valleys. Only the herds travel, with...
. This mobile pastoralist population, occupying a specific ecological nicheEcological nicheIn ecology, a niche is a term describing the relational position of a species or population in its ecosystem to each other; e.g. a dolphin could potentially be in another ecological niche from one that travels in a different pod if the members of these pods utilize significantly different food...
, could easily expand its territory by migrating towards the regions of modern Greece, Serbia, and Bosnia in the First Bulgarian Empire and the Byzantine Empire in the 9th-11th centuries. Some smaller groups may have crossed the Danube already in the 10th century, but their masses began their migration to modern Romania in the 13th century.
Volochs and Blachs
There are two written sources on the basis of which the presence of Romanians in Transylvania before the 13th century can be assumed: the Russian Primary Chronicle was elaborated in the 1120s, and the Gesta HungarorumGesta Hungarorum
Gesta Hungarorum is a record of early Hungarian history by an unknown author who describes himself as Anonymi Bele Regis Notarii , but is generally cited as Anonymus...
(The Deeds of the Hungarians) was written around the year 1200. The latter, being one of the very few written documents from that era, is often referred either by Hungarian and Romanian historians in disputes about the origin of different Transylvanian peoples. However, some statements of Gesta are rejected even by the Hungarian Academy of Science MTA): e.g. Hungarians being descendants of Huns.
Both sources refer to the events of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin around 896.
The Russian Primary Chronicle narrates that the Slavs had lived on the territories west of the Carpathians before the “Volochs” subdued their land; later the Hungarians “drove out the Volochs, and settled in their country”.
- One view is that the Volochs are identical to the ancestors of the Romanians. They cannot be identical to the Eastern Franks since the latter are mentioned separately under their own name in the chronicle. Not only are the Volochs and Franks listed in the same chronicle, but also in the same sentence, using different names: Nestor lists “the Varangians, the Svear, the Norwegians, the Götar, the Rus, the Anglians, the Galicians, the Vlachs (Вольхва), the Romans, the Germans, the Carolingians, the Venicians, the Franks (фряги)” among the peoples living “in areas from the west to the east”. Furthermore, Voloch was a term used for a variety of Latin people.
- The opposing view is that the Volochs cannot be regarded Romanized Dacians living in that territory since the 1st century, because the text shows explicitly that Slavs had already inhabited the region before them. Consequently, the Volochs are probably identical to the Franks who occupied parts of the Carpathian Basin at the end of the 8th century, and the Hungarian conquest put an end to their rule. This view, according the scholars who accept it, is also reinforced by the analysis of the Voloch name in the chronicle, for example Nestor speaks of “the Varangians” whose area in the west “reaches to the Anglians’ and Vlachs’ land”.
The Gesta Hungarorum writes that the Hungarians found “Slavs, Bulgarians and Vlachs [Blachii], and the shepherds of the Romans” on the plains of the rivers Tisa and Danube when they settled there. According to the Gesta, Transylvania was inhabited by “Vlachs [Blasii] and Slavs” at that time, and Gelou, “a certain Vlach [Blachus]” had the supreme authority over them.
- One view is that most of the reports in the Gesta are not inventions, but they have a real support. The Gesta is the oldest surviving Hungarian chronicleChronicleGenerally a chronicle is a historical account of facts and events ranged in chronological order, as in a time line. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and local events, the purpose being the recording of events that occurred, seen from the perspective of the...
, and the anonymous notary of the Hungarian king wrote his work based on ancient chronicles and oral tradition. Although the version given by the author of this chronicle is in sharp contrast with that of Simon of KézaSimon of KézaSimon of Kéza was the most famous Hungarian chronicler in the 13th century. He was a priest in the royal court of king Ladislaus IV of Hungary....
and of the 14th-century chronicles, but there was no reason for its author to “make up” Romanians (Vlachs) and insert them into his narrative. - Other view is that very few of the episodes of the Gesta can be substantiated from other sources. Of the Hungarians’ actual adversaries, the Gesta’s author knew only of the Bulgars; consequently his choices reflect the ethnic and political realities of the 12th century. The author neither knew any of the some two dozen historic personalitiesFor example, Emperor ArnulfArnulf of CarinthiaArnulf of Carinthia was the Carolingian King of East Francia from 887, the disputed King of Italy from 894 and the disputed Holy Roman Emperor from February 22, 896 until his death.-Birth and Illegitimacy:...
, Symeon of Bulgaria, Svatopluk of MoraviaSvatopluk ISvatopluk I or Zwentibald I was the greatest ruler of Moravia that attained its maximum territorial expansion in his reign . His career had already started in the 860s, when he governed a principality, the location of which is still a matter of debate among historians, within Moravia under the...
; Kristó, Gyula (2003), p. 32. of the regions neighboring the area of the Carpathian Basin who are mentioned in contemporary sources. In lack of trustworthy information, he could turn only to his own imagination when he outlined the history of the Hungarian conquest: this was exactly what the romantic gest genre expected from the writers.
Christianization of proto-Romanians
- One theory holds that after the Roman withdrawal Christianity was gaining more and more ground in the former province of Dacia Traiana. By the spreading of the Christian faith, Romanity was actually strengthened: the free Dacians did not merely turn to Christianity, but they also became latinophones. But the political troubles in the region brought a considerable delay to the organization of church structures in the lands north of the Danube. In the 9th century, Old Church SlavonicOld Church SlavonicOld Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic was the first literary Slavic language, first developed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius who were credited with standardizing the language and using it for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek...
was adopted as liturgical language by many powers in the Carpatho-Danubian area. That language remained in use among Romanians for centuries, a phenomenon still insufficiently studied and understood.
- The other theory argues that the Romanians' ancestors adopted Christianity within the Roman Empire after 312. At that time, they lived in the territories of the Balkan Peninsula where the Latin was the liturgical language of the Church. The Slavonic liturgy was adopted by them within the First Bulgarian Empire in the second half of the 9th century.
Natives in Dacia Traiana after the Roman conquest
The theory that the Dacians were completely exterminated is based on the claim of Eutropius (4th century) who wrote that “the land had been exhausted of inhabitants in the long war waged against DecebalusDecebalus
Decebalus or "The Brave" was a king of Dacia and is famous for fighting three wars and negotiating two interregnums of peace without being eliminated against the Roman Empire under two emperors...
.” However, not all existing manuscripts of his work are consistent: five codices (dating to the 9th to the 13th centuries) contain another variant which would imply that Dacia was depleted of resources (“res”).
Julian the Apostate
Julian the Apostate
Julian "the Apostate" , commonly known as Julian, or also Julian the Philosopher, was Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 and a noted philosopher and Greek writer....
(331/332 - 363) also refers to the annihilation of the Dacians, but his words may be considered as satirical fiction. Drawing on the work of Criton (1st-2nd centuries), who had participated in Trajan’s Dacian campaign, later chroniclers say that the Romans captured 500,000 Dacians, and the life of only 40 of them was spared; but these estimates may be excessive.
Other historians – Cassius Dio (c. 150 - 235), Eusebius of Cesarea (c. 263 - c. 339), and Ammianus Marcellinus
Ammianus Marcellinus
Ammianus Marcellinus was a fourth-century Roman historian. He wrote the penultimate major historical account surviving from Antiquity...
(c. 330 - 395) – relate the conquest of Dacia in less dramatic terms; e.g., Dio Casius writes that “Decebalus,(…), committed suicide; and his head was brought to Rome. In this way Dacia became subject to the Romans, and Trajan founded cities there.”
Romanization of the natives in Dacia Traiana
So far the Dacian elite have not been identified epigraphicallyEpigraphy
Epigraphy Epigraphy Epigraphy (from the , literally "on-writing", is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; that is, the science of identifying the graphemes and of classifying their use as to cultural context and date, elucidating their meaning and assessing what conclusions can be...
after the Roman conquest; only one piece of solid epigraphic evidence has been discovered: “Decebalus Luci”, found on a small golden plate in a pool in Germisara (Geoagiu-Băi). As individuals, the Dacians are better represented in the inscriptions found in other provinces, even in Italy and Rome.
There is no evidence of civitates peregrinae, which were native communities organized by the Romans, in Dacia Traiana. But before the Roman conquest, the Dacians had gone beyond the tribal organization, reaching state level which neither the Celts, nor the Germanic peoples had achieved.
Roman withdrawal from Dacia Traiana
According to Eutropius, Aurelius VictorAurelius Victor
Sextus Aurelius Victor was a historian and politician of the Roman Empire.Aurelius Victor was the author of a History of Rome from Augustus to Julian , published ca. 361. Julian honoured him and appointed him prefect of Pannonia Secunda...
(c. 320-c. 390) and Festus (4th century)
Festus (historian)
Festus was a Late Roman historian whose breviary was commissioned by the emperor Valens in preparation for war against Persia....
, Dacia Traiana was lost under the reign of emperor Gallienus
Gallienus
Gallienus was Roman Emperor with his father Valerian from 253 to 260, and alone from 260 to 268. He took control of the Empire at a time when it was undergoing great crisis...
(260-268). Eutropius, the Augustan History
Augustan History
The Augustan History is a late Roman collection of biographies, in Latin, of the Roman Emperors, their junior colleagues and usurpers of the period 117 to 284...
, and Festus also give a uniform account of the resettlement of the province’s population under Aurelian (270-275). They describe that the emperor “had moved the Romans” or “led away both soldiers and provincials” from Dacia Traiana.
In opposition with the authors cited above, Jordanes
Jordanes
Jordanes, also written Jordanis or Jornandes, was a 6th century Roman bureaucrat, who turned his hand to history later in life....
(6th century), who knew very well his contemporary ethnical realities in Dacia Traiana, mentions that Aurelian “calling his legions from” Dacia, “settled them in Moesia”.
Latinophones, Blakumen, and Vlachs north of the Danube
Contemporary sources of the expansion of the Latin language in the Barbarian world to the north of the Danube are not plentiful in the 4th-7th centuries. The following sources confirm the importance of the circulation of the Latin language in the territory of modern Romania:- During his embassy to the court of Attila the Hun, PriscusPriscusPriscus of Panium was a late Roman diplomat, sophist and historian from Rumelifeneri living in the Roman Empire during the 5th century. He accompanied Maximinus, the ambassador of Theodosius II, to the court of Attila in 448...
(5th century) ascertained that the ‘language of the Ausoni’ (the Latin language) was spoken at the king’s residence. He wrote that “the subjects of the Huns, swept together from various lands, speak, besides their own barbarous tongues, either Hunnic or Gothic, or – as many as have commercial dealings with the western Romans – Latin.” - According to an episode recorded by ProcopiusProcopiusProcopius of Caesarea was a prominent Byzantine scholar from Palestine. Accompanying the general Belisarius in the wars of the Emperor Justinian I, he became the principal historian of the 6th century, writing the Wars of Justinian, the Buildings of Justinian and the celebrated Secret History...
(c. 500-c. 565) in his History of the Wars, the ‘phoney ChilbudiusChilbudiusChilbudius or Chilbuldius was a Byzantine general, holding the rank of magister militum per Thracias in the early 530s. He was apparently killed in battle c. 533, but an impostor claimed his identity c. 545-546. The only source for both men is Procopius.- Origin :According to some scholars...
’, an AntAntes (people)The Antes or Antae were an ancient Slavic-Iranian tribal union in Eastern Europe who lived north of the lower Danube and the Black Sea in the 6th and 7th century AD and who are associated with the archaeological Penkovka culture.- Historiography :Procopius and Jordanes mention the Antes as one of...
slaveSlaverySlavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
strikingly resembled with the Roman general Chilbudius (also a Slav by his origin), was able to pretend that he was the Roman general, because he “spoke Latin”. - When mentioning “some Romans” who “forget their own people, and prefer the good will of the enemy”, ‘Pseudo-Maurice’ (6th century) may have referred either to Roman prisoners who returned to the East Roman Empire or to Romans who definitely settled in the territories north of the Danube.
The oldest source in which the Romanians outside the Carpathian range are mentioned is the writing on a memorial rune stone set at Sjonhem (Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
). The stone with runes datable to the mid-11th century was set by a couple for their son Rodfos, killed by Blakumen during his trip abroad.
The oldest extant documents from Transylvania, dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, make passing reference to both Hungarians and Vlachs. The first mention of Vlachs in the royal charters of Hungary is in the grant of King Andrew II of Hungary
Andrew II of Hungary
Andrew II the Jerosolimitan was King of Hungary and Croatia . He was the younger son of King Béla III of Hungary, who invested him with the government of the Principality of Halych...
(1205–1235) to the Cistercian Cârţa Monastery
Cârta Monastery
Cârţa Monastery is a former Cistercian monastery in the Ţara Făgăraşului region in southern Transylvania in Romania, currently a Lutheran Evangelical church belonging to the local Saxon community...
. The charter mentions that the monastic estates were carved out of “the land of the Vlachs”. Starting from around 1210, information we have on Romanians living in Transylvania increase more and more: e.g.,, the Diploma Andreanum
Diploma Andreanum
The Diploma Andreanum, or Goldener Freibrief der Sachsen Siebenbürger , was issued by Andrew II of Hungary in 1224, granting provisional autonomy to colonial Germans residing in the Siebenbürgen region of the Kingdom of Hungary ....
granted Transylvanian Saxons free use of “a forest belonging to the Romanians and the Pechenegs”, and a royal charter granted the Teutonic Knights
Teutonic Knights
The Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem , commonly the Teutonic Order , is a German medieval military order, in modern times a purely religious Catholic order...
exemption from duty when travelled “through the lands of the Székely people and the Romanians”. The actual number of persons belonging to each nationality is at best guesswork. Jean W.Sedlar estimates that Vlachs constituted about two-thirds of Transylvania's population in 1241 on the eve of the Mongol invasion. On the other hand, King Andrew III of Hungary (1290–1301) decreed that all Romanians in Transylvania who had settled on private land be relocated on crown lands along the river Secaş
Secas River (Târnava)
The Secaş River is a tributary of the Târnava River in Romania.-References:* Administraţia Naţională Apelor Române - Cadastrul Apelor - Bucureşti* Institutul de Meteorologie şi Hidrologie - Rîurile României - Bucureşti 1971...
. Personal names recorded in 1138 and 1219 suggests that the ratio of names of Slav origin decreased in the 80 years (in 1138 Slav, while in 1219 Christian names were more), but even in 1219 every fifth person had a name of Slav origin, although the ratio of Hungarian common names increased from 10 to 17%.
Latinophones and Vlachs south of the Danube
An episode of the war of the Byzantine Empire against the Avars in 587-588, recorded by Theophylact SimocattaTheophylact Simocatta
Theophylact Simocatta was an early seventh-century Byzantine historiographer, arguably ranking as the last historian of Late Antiquity, writing in the time of Heraclius about the late Emperor Maurice .-Life:His history of the reign of emperor Maurice is in eight books...
(7th century) and Theophanes Confessor (c. 758-817/818), contains the first reference to a proto-Romanian population at the southern end of the Balkan Mountains. The episode indicates that the loss of order among the marching troops was caused by a soldier who called the one marching ahead of him in his “native tongue” to turn around (“torna, torna” or “torna, torna frater”). This expression shows the evolution of vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin is any of the nonstandard forms of Latin from which the Romance languages developed. Because of its nonstandard nature, it had no official orthography. All written works used Classical Latin, with very few exceptions...
into Proto-Romanian
Proto-Romanian language
Proto-Romanian is a Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and considered to have been spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians and related Balkan Latin peoples before ca...
.
The first reference to Balkan Vlachs is connected to the murder of David
David of Bulgaria
David was a Bulgarian noble, brother of Emperor Samuil and eldest son of Comita Nikola. After the disastrous invasion of Rus' armies and the fall of North-eastern Bulgaria under Byzantine occupation in 971, he and his three younger brothers took the lead of the defence of the country. They...
, brother of Samuel (who later became the tsar of the Bulgarians) in 976. John Skylitzes
John Skylitzes
John Skylitzes, latinized as Ioannes Scylitzes was a Greek historian of the late 11th century. He was born in the beginning of 1040's and died after 1101.- Life :Very little is known about his life...
(c. 1040-1101) writes that he was killed by “voyaging Vlachs” between Prespa
Prespa
Prespa is a region in Republic of Macedonia. It shares the same name with the two Prespa lakes which are situated in the middle of the region. The largest town is Resen with 9,000 inhabitants....
and Castoria
Castoria (titular see)
Castoria is a Catholic titular see. The original diocese was in Macedonia.Livy mentions a town near a lake in Orestis, called Celetrum, whose inhabitants surrendered to Sulpitius during the Roman war against Philip V of Macedon . Procopius relates that Justinian, finding the town of...
(Republic of Macedonia).
A statement of Anna Komnene
Anna Komnene
Anna Komnene, Latinized as Comnena was a Greek princess and scholar and the daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos of Byzantium and Irene Doukaina...
(1083–1153) in her Alexiad
Alexiad
The Alexiad is a medieval biographical text written around the year 1148 by the Byzantine historian Anna Comnena, daughter of Emperor Alexius I....
clearly shows that at the end of the 11th century the primary connotation of ‘Vlach’ was ‘nomadic shepherd of the Balkans’; she relates that in 1091 emperor Alexios I Komnenos ordered Nikephoros Melissenos
Nikephoros Melissenos
Nikephoros Melissenos , latinized as Nicephorus Melissenus, was a Byzantine general and aristocrat. Of distinguished lineage, he served as a governor and general in the Balkans and Asia Minor in the 1060s. In the turbulent period after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, several generals tried to...
“to enroll new men for a term of duty from (…) the nomads (commonly called Vlachs)”.
In accordance with the important role the Vlachs played in the liberation movement that had led to the foundation of the Second Bulgarian Empire, the new country separating from Byzantinum was called Vlachia/Blacia in the Latin sources.
Numerous Serbian documents, dating from the end of the 12th century, mention Romanian shepherds in the mountainous region between the Drina and Morava rivers: e.g., the law code issued by Stephen Uroš IV Dušan of Serbia stipulates that the Vlachs, who tended flocks instead of farming land, owed work dues in transport as well as a donation of a certain number of animals a year. References to Romanians in Serbian royal charters became progressively rarer in the 14th-15th centuries.
Migrations of the Vlachs/Romanians
According to the Byzantine Kekaumenos (11th century), who knew of clashes between Vlachs in Serbia and the Byzantine authorities, the Vlachs withdrew southwards, to EpirusEpirus
The name Epirus, from the Greek "Ήπειρος" meaning continent may refer to:-Geographical:* Epirus - a historical and geographical region of the southwestern Balkans, straddling modern Greece and Albania...
, Macedonia, and Hellas, and not to the region north of the Danube. An anonymous author at the beginning of the 14th century, supposed to be a French Dominican
Dominican Order
The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France...
, was also informed about an emigration of Romanian shepherds from Pannonia
Pannonia
Pannonia was an ancient province of the Roman Empire bounded north and east by the Danube, coterminous westward with Noricum and upper Italy, and southward with Dalmatia and upper Moesia....
towards the Balkans, again from north towards the south.
In the Kingdom of Hungary
Kingdom of Hungary
The Kingdom of Hungary comprised present-day Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia , Transylvania , Carpatho Ruthenia , Vojvodina , Burgenland , and other smaller territories surrounding present-day Hungary's borders...
, royal chartersE.g., a charter issued by King Charles in 1335; Spinei, Victor (1986) p. 204. indicate that at least some of the Romanian settlers came from beyond the borders of the kingdom: when a certain Voivode Bogdan, son of Micola, moved to Hungary in 1334 from his own lands. In 1359, six members of a distinguished Romanian family from Wallachia settled in the Banat, where the king had given them 13 villages to accommodate their retinue.
According to a Romanian tradition, which was recorded in a Russian chronicleThe so called Moldo-Russian Chronicle which records the legend-like stories of Roman and Vlahata, the eponymous heroes of the Romanians; Spinei, Victor (1986) p. 197. written around 1504, the Romanians asked a certain 'king Ladislaus of Hungary' “to give them a place to stay”, and the king “gave them land in Maramureş, between the rivers Tisa and Mureş
Mures River
The Mureș is an approximately 761 km long river in Eastern Europe. It originates in the Hășmașu Mare Range in the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, Romania, and joins the Tisza river at Szeged in southeastern Hungary....
at the place called Criş”. According to The Moldo-Polish Chronicle, written in the third quarter of the 16th century, Dragoş (one of the Romanians who had been granted land in Maramureş) crossed into Moldavia from Maramureş while hunting an aurochs
Aurochs
The aurochs , the ancestor of domestic cattle, were a type of large wild cattle which inhabited Europe, Asia and North Africa, but is now extinct; it survived in Europe until 1627....
; in Moldavia, Dragoş “feasted with his nobles, and liking the country he remained there, bringing Hungarian Romanians as colonists.” Later, as the chronicler of King Louis I of Hungary, John of Küküllő states “Bogdan, the voivode of the Romanians of Maramureş, gathering the Romanians from this district, secretly passed into Moldavia, which was subject to the Hungarian Crown, but had been abandoned by its inhabitants because of the vicinity of the Tatars.”
No medieval chronicle mentions a migration of Romanian-speaking peoples from the Balkans northward But a 17th century Muntenian chronicle, attributed to Stoica Ludescu writes of Romanians “who separated from the Romans and went to the north” and after crossing the Danube, “some settled at Turnu Severin; others, along the waters of the Olt, the Mureş, and the Tisa; and still others in Hungary, reaching as far as Maramureş”. The chronicle's author also refers to “a voievod in Hungary called voievod Radu Negru
Radu Negru
Radu Negru also known as Radu Vodă , Radu Negru, or Negru Vodă, was a legendary ruler of Wallachia....
” who “set forth from there with his whole household and many peoples (Romanians, papist
Papist
Papist is a term or an anti-Catholic slur, referring to the Roman Catholic Church, its teachings, practices, or adherents. The term was coined during the English Reformation to denote a person whose loyalties were to the Pope, rather than to the Church of England...
s, Saxons, and all kind of men), descending towards the waters of Dâmboviţa
Dâmbovita River
Dâmbovița is a river in Romania. It has its sources in the Făgăraş Mountains, on the Curmătura Oticu. The upper reach of the rivers, upstream of the confluence with the Boarcăşu River is also known as Izvorul Oticului River or Oticu River....
”.
Romanian polities before the establishment of Wallachia and Moldavia
An interpolationInterpolation (manuscripts)
An interpolation, in relation to literature and especially ancient manuscripts, is an entry or passage in a text that was not written by the original author...
(probably from the 1st centuries of the second millennium) in the book written by Ananias of Shirak is among the oldest attestations of the countries of the Vlachs on the northern side of the Danube. The passage refers to an “unknown country called Balak”.
The diploma granted the Knights Hospitalers by Béla IV of Hungary
Béla IV of Hungary
Béla IV , King of Hungary and of Croatia , duke of Styria 1254–58. One of the most famous kings of Hungary, he distinguished himself through his policy of strengthening of the royal power following the example of his grandfather Bela III, and by the rebuilding Hungary after the catastrophe of the...
(1235–1270) in 1247 lists in Oltenia and western Wallachia, the principalities of two voivodes named Litovoi
Litovoi
Litovoi, also Litvoy, was a Vlach voivode in the 13th century whose territory comprised northern Oltenia .He is mentioned for the first time in a diploma issued by king Béla IV of Hungary on 2 July 1247...
and Seneslau
Seneslau
Seneslau, also Seneslav or Stănislau, was a Vlach voivode mentioned in a diploma issued by king Béla IV of Hungary on 2 July 1247; the diploma granted territories to the Knights Hospitaller in the Banate of Severin and Cumania...
who are said to be Vlakhs (Olati) in the document.
William of Rubruck
William of Rubruck
William of Rubruck was a Flemish Franciscan missionary and explorer. His account is one of the masterpieces of medieval geographical literature comparable to that of Marco Polo....
(c. 1220-c. 1293) reports that at the court of Sartaq Khan
Sartaq Khan
Sartaq Khan was the son of Batu Khan and Regent Dowager Khatun Boraqcin of Alchi Tatar. Sartaq succeeded Batu as khan of the Ulus of Jochi ....
he encountered messengers of the Blacs and other peoples. Rashid-al-Din Hamadani (1247–1318) mentions that in 1241 a Mongol army crossed the mountains of the "Black Vlachs" (Kara Ulagh) and defeated them and one of their leaders named Mišlav
Bezerenbam and Miselav
Bezerenbam and Mişelav were the Wallachian leaders mentioned in 1241, in the Persian chronicle of Rashid-al-Din Hamadani . They appear in the context of the Mongol invasion of Europe...
.
In 1276-77, the Romanians were, according to Thomas Tuscus' chronicle, at war with the Ruthenians.
Scythia Minor (Dobruja) in Late Antiquity
Tetrarchy
The term Tetrarchy describes any system of government where power is divided among four individuals, but usually refers to the tetrarchy instituted by Roman Emperor Diocletian in 293, marking the end of the Crisis of the Third Century and the recovery of the Roman Empire...
, Christianity made important progress in the province. Most of the large numbers of Christians who became martyr
Martyr
A martyr is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce, or accept, a belief or cause, usually religious.-Meaning:...
s, in about 300, during Diocletian's persecution remained anonymous, but some names exist in the so-called 'martyrdom acts'.
Some high clericsFor example, Mark at Nicaea (325), Gerontius at Constantinople (381); Pacurariu, Mircea (2007), p. 188. were involved in the theological controversies debated at the first Ecumenical Council
Ecumenical council
An ecumenical council is a conference of ecclesiastical dignitaries and theological experts convened to discuss and settle matters of Church doctrine and practice....
s. In the early 5th century, Theotimos, Bishop of Tomis, was also well known to the Huns living north of the Danube, who called him “the god of the Romans”. The names of some reputed monk
Monk
A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...
s in the Christian world of the time are linked to monastic settlements in Scythia Minor (e.g., John Cassian, Dionysius Exiguus
Dionysius Exiguus
Dionysius Exiguus was a 6th-century monk born in Scythia Minor, modern Dobruja shared by Romania and Bulgaria. He was a member of the Scythian monks community concentrated in Tomis, the major city of Scythia Minor...
).
The episcopal see
Episcopal See
An episcopal see is, in the original sense, the official seat of a bishop. This seat, which is also referred to as the bishop's cathedra, is placed in the bishop's principal church, which is therefore called the bishop's cathedral...
s in Scythia Minor disappeared after 602. But from the 10th or 11th centuries there are again evidence of a superior hierarchy in former Scythia Minor.
The earliest examples of the use of Slavic Cyrillic
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
writing in the territory of modern Romania are the graphite writings on the walls of the cave churches in the Basarabi Cave Complex
Basarabi Cave Complex
Basarabi Cave Complex or Murfatlar Cave Complex is a medieval Christian monastery located near the town of Murfatlar , Constanţa County, Dobruja, Romania....
, and the inscription from Mircea-Vodă
Mircea Voda, Constanta
Mircea Vodă is a commune in Constanţa County, Dobrogea, Romania.-History:Settlement in the area dates back at least to the time of the Roman Empire. In a place that the local Turks called "Acşandemir Tabiasi", a 10th century castrum was found, which has a stone vallum...
from the 10th century.
Territories north of the Danube in the Late Antiquity
The first bishop mentioned in the lands north of the Danube was Teophil, the bishop of the Goths who participated in the First Nicean Synod in 325. The modern research is under controversy with regards to the location of his see, oscillating between the mouths of the DanubeDanube Delta
The Danube Delta is the second largest river delta in Europe, after the Volga Delta, and is the best preserved on the continent. The greater part of the Danube Delta lies in Romania , while its northern part, on the left bank of the Chilia arm, is situated in Ukraine . The approximate surface is...
and the Pontic steppes.
A letter written by Auxentius of Durostorum around 400 illuminates the extraordinary achievements of Ulfilas who in 341 “was ordained – for the salvation of many – bishop among the people of the Goths” and “preached in the Greek, Latin, and Gothic tongues”.
A passage of the The Passion of St Saba (who was a ‘proper’ Tervingi, not the descendant of Roman prisoners) demonstrates that some harmony existed between Gothic Christians and their Gothic non-Christian neighbors who “intended while offering sacrifice
Sacrifice
Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals or people to God or the gods as an act of propitiation or worship.While sacrifice often implies ritual killing, the term offering can be used for bloodless sacrifices of cereal food or artifacts...
s to the gods to swear to the persecutor that there was not a single Christian in their village.”
When Emperor Justinian I established the archbishopric of Justiniana Prima in 535, he declared that “both banks of the Danube are occupied by towns subject to Our Empire”.
Theophylact Simocatta refers to a Gepid “who had once long before been of the Christian religion” when he writes of the campaign which the Roman general Priscus launched against the Slavs north of the Danube around 596.
Orthodox proselytism and church organization in the early Middle Ages
Saints Cyril and Methodius
Saints Cyril and Methodius were two Byzantine Greek brothers born in Thessaloniki in the 9th century. They became missionaries of Christianity among the Slavic peoples of Bulgaria, Great Moravia and Pannonia. Through their work they influenced the cultural development of all Slavs, for which they...
(Clement
Clement of Ohrid
Saint Clement of Ohrid was a medieval Bulgarian saint, scholar, writer and enlightener of the Slavs. He was the most prominent disciple of Saints Cyril and Methodius and is often associated with the creation of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, especially their popularisation among...
, Naum, and Angelarius) managed to come across the Danube to the First Bulgarian Empire after their expulsion from Moravia
Great Moravia
Great Moravia was a Slavic state that existed in Central Europe and lasted for nearly seventy years in the 9th century whose creators were the ancestors of the Czechs and Slovaks. It was a vassal state of the Germanic Frankish kingdom and paid an annual tribute to it. There is some controversy as...
in 885. If a later Russian chronicle is accurate, Old Church Slavonic was proclaimed the official language of the Bulgarian church in 893.
One of the Hungarians’ military commanders, the gyula
Gyula II
Gyula II was a Hungarian tribal leader in the middle of the 10th century. He visited Constantinople where he was baptized. His baptismal name was Stephen .- Life :...
was baptized in Constantinople a few years after 948. John Skylitzes records that he “returned with a monk called Hierotheus (…) who (…) led many to Christianity from their barbarian erring.” Constantinus Porphyrogenitus
Constantine VII
Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos or Porphyrogenitus, "the Purple-born" was the fourth Emperor of the Macedonian dynasty of the Byzantine Empire, reigning from 913 to 959...
describes Turkia as a region bordered by the rivers Timiş
Timis River
The Timiş or Tamiš is a 359 km long river originating from Țarcu Mountains , southern Carpathian Mountains, Caraş-Severin County, Romania. It flows through the Banat region and flows into the Danube near Pančevo, in northern Serbia....
, Mureş, Criş
Körös River
Körös is the name of a 195 km long river in eastern Hungary. It is formed at the confluence of the rivers Fehér-Körös and Fekete-Körös near Gyula. The Sebes-Körös flows into the Körös near Gyomaendrőd...
, Tisa, and “Toutis”.
The Long Life of Saint Gerald
Gerard Sagredo
Saint Gerard Sagredo , also called Gerhard or Gellert, was an Italian bishop from Venice who operated in the Kingdom of Hungary , and educated Saint Emeric of Hungary, the son of Saint Stephen of Hungary). He played a major role in converting Hungary to Christianity...
(an early 14th century compilation of different sources) contains a much earlier account of a chieftain, named Achtum, ruling over the Banat who had been baptized in the Orthodox faith in Vidin
Vidin
Vidin is a port town on the southern bank of the Danube in northwestern Bulgaria. It is close to the borders with Serbia and Romania, and is also the administrative centre of Vidin Province, as well as of the Metropolitan of Vidin...
(Bulgaria).
Native Dacians in Dacia Traiana after the Roman conquest
After the Roman conquest, Dacia faced the disappearance of the high-status settlementsof the previous period (hillforts and tower-houses), especially
from the Orăştie Mountains
Dacian Fortresses of the Orastie Mountains
Built in murus dacicus style, the six Dacian Fortresses of the Orăștie Mountains, in Romania, were created in the 1st centuries BC and AD as protection against Roman conquest....
.
According to other scholars, however, all settlements ceased to exist due to violent destruction and no Roman settlement was built on the location of a previous Dacian one.
Archaeological research indicates that around 60 rural settlements in Dacia Traiana are indigenous or mixed (locals and colonists). Rural indigenous communities on their old location from pre-Roman Age were archaeologically identified in the south of Transylvania (e.g., at Slimnic
Slimnic
Slimnic is a commune located in Sibiu County, Romania. It is composed of five villages: Albi, Pădureni, Ruşi, Slimnic and Veseud. Slimnic and Ruşi villages have fortified churches. Slimnic village also has a medieval citadel....
and Şura Mică
Sura Mica
Şura Mică is a commune in the northern part of Sibiu County, Romania. It is composed of two villages, Rusciori and Şura Mică.-History:Documented in 1323 as "Parvum Horreum" = Kleine Scheuer.It has a fortified church...
). Aspects of continuity have been detected in architecture, such as the persistence of traditional forms of sunken houses and storage pits in several locations where continuity of site occupation was not necessarily applicable (e.g., at Obreja
Obreja
Obreja is a commune in Caraş-Severin County, western Romania with a population of 3249. It is composed of four villages: Ciuta, Iaz, Obreja and Var.-References:...
, which is a post-conquest foundation).
In a study area covering middle-Mureş valley and the plain of Haţeg, some 46 sites have been documented on the same location in both ‘La Tène
La Tène culture
The La Tène culture was a European Iron Age culture named after the archaeological site of La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where a rich cache of artifacts was discovered by Hansli Kopp in 1857....
’ and Roman periods, and future research could prove their continuous occupation more explicitly. Late pre-Roman native occupation of villa
Roman villa
A Roman villa is a villa that was built or lived in during the Roman republic and the Roman Empire. A villa was originally a Roman country house built for the upper class...
sites has been documented by excavation at Răhău
Sebes
Sebeș is a city in Alba County, central Romania, southern Transylvania.-Geography:The city lies on the Mureș River valley and it straddles the Sebeș river...
, Şeuşa
Ciugud
Ciugud is a commune located in Alba County, Romania. It has a population of 2,664. It is composed of six villages: Ciugud, Drâmbar , Hăpria , Şeuşa , Teleac and Limba .- External links :...
and Chinteni
Chinteni
Chinteni is a commune in Cluj County, Romania. It is composed of nine villages: Chinteni, Deuşu, Feiurdeni, Măcicaşu, Pădureni, Săliştea Veche, Sânmărtin, Satu Lung and Vechea.-Demographics:...
; another example of a relationship between a villa site and a late pre-Roman and Daco-Roman settlement is at Vinţu de Jos
Vintu de Jos
Vinţu de Jos, also known as Vinţ is a commune located in the centre of Alba County, Romania. It is composed of eighteen villages: Câmpu Goblii , Ciocaşu , Crişeni , Dealu Ferului , Gura Cuţului , Haţegana , Inuri , Laz , Mătăcina , Mereteu...
. Archaeological evidence included sporadic finds of handmade Dacian ceramic fragments in the pars rustica of several villas, which represent mainly storage vessels.
Romanization in Dacia Traiana (2nd–3rd centuries AD)
The nature of change under Roman rule in Dacia as reflected in material culture is very similar to that experienced by other Roman provinces. The wider landscape experienced substantive changes: the emergence of Roman-type urbanism, a large increase in settlement numbers and settlement density.The rural indigenous communities, with sunken houses and storage pits, look similar architecturally to the pre-conquest lowland villages (e.g., at Vinţu de Jos, Lancrăm
Sebes
Sebeș is a city in Alba County, central Romania, southern Transylvania.-Geography:The city lies on the Mureș River valley and it straddles the Sebeș river...
). Roman influences were scarce, though, with very few discoveries consisting of stone buildings, hypocausts, and Latin inscriptions; Roman currency was little used. There is persistence of certain elements of native material culture, particularly pottery, in varied archaeological context (e.g., ‘jar’-shaped cooking pot, ‘Dacian mug
Mug
A mug is a sturdily built type of cup often used for drinking hot beverages, such as coffee, tea, or hot chocolate. Mugs, by definition, have handles and often hold a larger amount of fluid than other types of cup. Usually a mug holds approximately 12 fluid ounces of liquid; double a tea cup...
’ were present even in Roman forts).
“Daco-Romans” in the former province of Dacia Traiana (3rd–5th centuries AD)
Society in the former province achieved a certain state of breaking down of the social and cultural patterns at the end of the 3rd century and the beginning of the 4th century. This society must have been rural, composed of small, poor, remote communities, but the rural environment in the former province is still insufficiently known from archaeological point of view. Most notable are the effects of Roman de-colonization in modern ClujCluj County
Cluj ; is a county of Romania, in Transylvania, with the capital city at Cluj-Napoca.-Demographics:In 2007, it had a population of 692,316 and a population density of 104/km².*Romanians – 80%*Hungarians – 17.5%*Roma – 2.5%-Geography:...
and Alba
Alba County
Alba is a county of Romania, in Transylvania, its capital city being Alba-Iulia with a population of 66,406.- Demographics :In 2002, it had a population of 382,747 and the population density was 61/km².* Romanians - 90.4%* Hungarians - 5.4%...
counties – a reduction in number of sites, but not the purported terra deserta. But the data from Mureş county
Mures County
Mureș is a county of Romania, in the historical region of Transylvania, with the administrative centre in Târgu Mureș.-Geography:The county has a total area of 6,714 km²....
warn us against generalizing about population history across a wider territory, and in fact show more consistent settlement in the post-Roman period.
Archaeology has identified many settlements which continued to exist within their own precincts, other rural settlements were probably founded in the 4th century. But it is extremely difficult to formally identify what of the provincial Roman material culture belongs to the pre- or post-withdrawal age.
| Established in Pre-Roman Dacia | Established in the Roman period | Established in the 3rd-4th centuries | Established in the 5th century | Established in the 6th century | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abandoned in the Roman period | Cernatul de Jos Cernat Cernat is a commune in Covasna County, Romania composed of three villages:*Albiş / Kézdialbis*Cernat*Icafalău / IkafalvaIt formed part of Háromszék district of the Székely Land region in the historical Transylvania province.-Demographics:... , Copşa Mică Copsa Mica Copşa Mică is a town in Sibiu County, Transylvania, Romania, located north of Sibiu, 33 km east of Blaj, and 12 km southwest of Mediaş. According to the town's website, its population in 2000 was 5189, down 23% from its population in 1989, the year communism collapsed in Romania.The town... , Cristeşti, Curciu, Guşteriţa, Micoşlaca, Roşia Rosia, Sibiu Roşia is a commune located in Sibiu County, Romania. It is composed of six villages: Caşolţ, Cornăţel, Daia, Nou, Nucet and Roşia.-References:... , Ruşi, Şimoneşti Simonesti Şimoneşti is a commune in Harghita County, Romania. It lies in the Székely Land, an ethno-cultural region in eastern Transylvania.-Component villages:The commune is composed of fourteen villages:- History :... , Slimnic, Vulcan |
||||
| Abandoned in the 4th century | Sebeş Sebes Sebeș is a city in Alba County, central Romania, southern Transylvania.-Geography:The city lies on the Mureș River valley and it straddles the Sebeș river... , Şura Mică |
Aiton Aiton, Cluj Aiton is a commune in Cluj County, Romania. It is composed of two villages, Aiton and Rediu.-Population:The population modified during time, as follows:- History :... , Archiud (‘Fundătura’), Bistriţa Bistrita Bistrița is the capital city of Bistriţa-Năsăud County, Transylvania, Romania. It is situated on the Bistriţa River. The city has a population of approximately 80,000 inhabitants, and it administers six villages: Ghinda, Sărata, Sigmir, Slătiniţa, Unirea and Viişoara.-History:The earliest sign of... (‘Han’), Boarta Seica Mare Şeica Mare is a commune located in Sibiu County, Romania. It is composed of six villages: Boarta, Buia, Mighindoala, Petiş, Şeica Mare and Ştenea... , Braşov Brasov Brașov is a city in Romania and the capital of Brașov County.According to the last Romanian census, from 2002, there were 284,596 people living within the city of Brașov, making it the 8th most populated city in Romania.... -Stupini (‘Pe Dos’), Cicău, Feldioara Feldioara Feldioara is a Romanian commune located in Transylvania, very close to Braşov . It is composed of three villages: Colonia Reconstrucţia , Feldioara and Rotbav .... , Felmer Soars Şoarş is a commune in Braşov County, Romania. It is composed of five villages: Bărcuţ, Felmer, Rodbav, Seliştat and Şoarş. Every one of these has a fortified church.... , Mediaş Medias Mediaș is the second largest city in Sibiu County, Transylvania, Romania.-Geographic location:Mediaș is located in the middle basin of Târnava Mare River, at 39 km from Sighișoara and 41 km from Blaj. The health resort Bazna, officially recognized for the first time in 1302, is... , Mugeni Mugeni Mugeni is a commune in Harghita County, Romania. It lies in the Székely Land, an ethno-cultural region in eastern Transylvania.- Component villages :The commune is composed of eight villages:... , Nocrich Nocrich Nocrich is a commune in Sibiu County, Romania, in the region of Transylvania. The commune is situated between Agnita and Sibiu. It is composed of five villages: Fofeldea, Ghijasa de Jos, Hosman, Nocrich and Ţichindeal. Nocrich and Hosman have fortified churches.It is the site of the St... -Ţichindeal, Obreja, Ocniţa Teaca Teaca is a commune in Bistriţa-Năsăud County, Romania. It is composed of six villages: Archiud, Budurleni, Ocniţa, Pinticu, Teaca and Viile Tecii.... , Porumbenii Mici, Rădeşti, Şintereag Sintereag Şintereag is a commune in Bistriţa-Năsăud County, Romania. It is composed of seven villages: Blăjenii de Jos, Blăjenii de Sus, Caila, Cociu, Şieu-Sfântu, Şintereag and Şintereag-Gară.... , Sic Sic, Cluj Sic is a commune in Cluj County, Romania. It is composed of a single village, Sic.-Demography:The commune has 2,754 inhabitants, of which 95.75% identify as ethnic Hungarians, 3.99% as ethnic Romanians, and 0.25% as Roma. By religion, 74.98% are Hungarian Reformed, 10% Seventh Day Adventists, 6.6%... |
Braşov, Ciceu Ciceu Ciceu , or colloquially Csicsó, Hungarian pronunciation:) is a commune in Romania, located in Harghita County. It lies in the Székely Land, an ethno-cultural region in eastern Transylvania... -Corabia, Cristian Cristian, Brasov Cristian is a commune in Braşov County, Romania. It is composed of a single village, Cristian.At the 2002 census, 95.3% of inhabitants were Romanians, 2.9% Transylvanian Saxons and 1.8% Hungarians. 93.1% were Romanian Orthodox, 2.6% Lutheran, 1.7% Christian Evangelical, 0.8% Reformed and 0.5%... , Cristuru Secuiesc Cristuru Secuiesc Cristuru Secuiesc is a town in Harghita County, Romania. It lies in the Székely Land, an ethno-cultural region in eastern Transylvania.The town administers two villages:*Beteşti / Betfalva, part of Mugeni until 2004*Filiaş / Fiatfalva- History :... , Cuci Cuci, Mures Cuci is a commune in Mureş County, Transylvania, Romania. It is composed of five villages: Cuci, Dătăşeni, După Deal, Orosia and Petrilaca.-Demographics:... , Hărman Harman - Places :* Harman, Australian Capital Territory* Hărman, Romania* Harman, West Virginia* Harmans, Maryland* Harman, Virginia- Other uses :* Harman , 1-methyl-9H-b-carboline, one of the harmala alkaloids, a reversible inhibitor of MAO-A... -1, Hărman-2, Iernut Iernut Iernut is a town in Mureş County, central Transylvania, Romania. It administers eight villages: Cipău, Deag, Lechinţa, Oarba de Mureş, Porumbac, Racameţ, Sălcud and Sfântu Gheorghe.-Demographics:The 2002 census revealed the following demographic data :... , Prejmer Prejmer Prejmer is a commune in Braşov County, Romania. It is composed of three villages: Lunca Câlnicului, Prejmer and Stupinii Prejmerului. Located 18 km northeast of Braşov, the Olt River passes through the commune.-History:... , Şercaia Șercaia Șercaia is a commune in Brașov County, Romania. It is composed of three villages: Hălmeag , Șercaia and Vad .- Natives :* Augustin Bunea , priest and historian... , Sfântu Gheorghe Sfântu Gheorghe Sfântu Gheorghe is the capital city of Covasna County, Romania. Located in the central part of the country and in the historical region of Transylvania, it lies on the Olt River in a valley between the Baraolt Mountains and Bodoc Mountains... , Sfântu Gheorghe-Chilieni, Râşnov Râsnov Râşnov is a town in Braşov County, Romania with a population of under 16,000.It is located at about 15 km from the city of Braşov and about the same distance from Bran, on the road that links Wallachia and Transylvania.... |
||
| Abandoned in the 5th century | Aiud Aiud Aiud is a city located in Alba county, Transylvania, Romania. The city has a population of 28,934 people. It has the status of municipality and is the second-largest city in the county, after county seat Alba Iulia. The Aiud administrative region is 142.2 square kilometres in area.- Administration... , Batoş Batos Batoş is a commune in Mureş County, Romania. It is composed of four villages: Batoş, Dedrad, Goreni and Uila.- See also :* List of Hungarian exonyms... , Ghirbom, Moreşti Ungheni, Mures Ungheni is a town in Mureş County, in central Romania. Its Romanian name until the 1960s was Niraşteu.Six villages are administered by the town:* Cerghid* Cerghizel* Moreşti* Recea* Şăuşa* Vidrasău... , Târnăvioara |
Archita Vânatori, Mures Vânători is a commune in Mureş County, Romania composed of five villages: Archita, Feleag, Mureni, Şoard and Vânători. It has a population of 3,760: 47% Romanians, 26% Hungarians, 26% Roma and 1% others.- See also :... , Bistriţa (‘Şos.Năsăud’), Noşlac Noslac Noşlac is a commune located in Alba County, Romania. It is composed of six villages: Căptălan , Copand , Găbud , Noşlac, Stâna de Mureş and Valea Ciuciului .-References:... |
Dipşa Galaţii Bistriţei Galaţii Bistriţei is a commune in Bistriţa-Năsăud County, Romania. It is composed of five villages: Albeştii Bistriţei, Dipşa, Galaţii Bistriţei, Herina and Tonciu.... |
||
| Abandoned in the 6th century | Suceagu Baciu, Cluj Baciu is a commune in Cluj County, located in the region of Transylvania, in the northwestern part of Romania. Baciu lies a short distance from the county seat of Cluj-Napoca... |
Soporu de Câmpie Frata Frata is a commune in Cluj County, Romania. It is composed of eight villages: Berchieşu, Frata, Oaş, Olariu, Pădurea Iacobeni, Poiana Frăţii, Răzoare and Soporu de Câmpie.- Demographics :... , Ţaga Taga Taga may refer to:* Taga, Shiga Prefecture, Japan* Taga District, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan* Ţaga, a commune in Cluj County, Romania* Taga, Samoa* Taga, Burkina Faso* Taga, Mali* Taga, Indian Surname* 3997 Taga, a Main-belt asteroid... |
Braşov-Stupini (‘La Curte’), Cernat Cernat Cernat is a commune in Covasna County, Romania composed of three villages:*Albiş / Kézdialbis*Cernat*Icafalău / IkafalvaIt formed part of Háromszék district of the Székely Land region in the historical Transylvania province.-Demographics:... , Ghirbom (‘Faţa Crasnei’) |
||
| Abandoned in the 7th century | Brateiu Brateiu Brateiu is a commune located in Sibiu County, Romania. It is composed of two villages, Brateiu and Buzd , each of which has a fortified church.... (‘La Zăvoi’), Brateiu (‘Nisipuri’), Sighişoara Sighisoara Sighişoara is a city and municipality on the Târnava Mare River in Mureş County, Romania. Located in the historic region Transylvania, Sighişoara has a population of 27,706 .... (‘Dealul Viilor’), Voivodeni Voivodeni Voivodeni is a commune in Mureş County, Romania that is composed of two villages:*Toldal / Toldalag*Voivodeni- History :It formed part of the Székely Land region of the historical Transylvania province. Until 1918, the village belonged to the Maros-Torda County of the Kingdom of Hungary... |
Hărman-3 |
The inhabited urban areas shrank in size; the remaining ones were near the former residential areas or moved near the former city. In the former Roman towns, where archaeological evidence attested to their habitation from the 4th century to the beginning of the 5th century, life eventually disappeared, and the towns fell into ruin and oblivion.
In Potaissa (Turda), coins and pottery show that the town lived on after Aurelian’s withdrawal from Dacia; its population went on burying people in the proximity of the old cemeteries. In Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa
Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa
Colonia Ulpia Traiana Augusta Dacica Sarmizegetusa was the capital and the largest city of Roman Dacia, later named Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa after the former Dacian capital, located some 40 km away. Built on the ground of a camp of the Fifth Macedonian Legion, the city was populated with...
the latest coins bear the effigy of Gallienus (260-268); later (in the 360s-370s) the amphitheatre
Amphitheatre
An amphitheatre is an open-air venue used for entertainment and performances.There are two similar, but distinct, types of structure for which the word "amphitheatre" is used: Ancient Roman amphitheatres were large central performance spaces surrounded by ascending seating, and were commonly used...
's gates were blocked, and defense ditches were set up. The very last document of Porolissum
Porolissum
Porolissum was an ancient Roman city in Dacia. Established as a military camp in 106 during Trajan's Dacian Wars, the city quickly grew through trade with the native Dacians and became the capital of the province Dacia Porolissensis in 124. The site is one of the largest and best-preserved...
as part of the Roman province are coins from the reign of Gallienus, afterwards its inhabitants performed burials in formerly forbidden places; but coinage began to circulate again under Valentinian I
Valentinian I
Valentinian I , also known as Valentinian the Great, was Roman emperor from 364 to 375. Upon becoming emperor he made his brother Valens his co-emperor, giving him rule of the eastern provinces while Valentinian retained the west....
(364-375) and Valens
Valens
Valens was the Eastern Roman Emperor from 364 to 378. He was given the eastern half of the empire by his brother Valentinian I after the latter's accession to the throne...
(364-378).
The most visible changes in the archaeological record of the post-Roman period are the method of burial (from cremation
Cremation
Cremation is the process of reducing bodies to basic chemical compounds such as gasses and bone fragments. This is accomplished through high-temperature burning, vaporization and oxidation....
to inhumation) and the augmentation of burial inventories.
Bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
and silver
Silver
Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...
coins dating from the Aurelian age to the beginning of the 5th century are known in over 160 settlements of Transylvania and the Banat. The monetary index of the region near the Danube has a larger value than that of Transylvanian settlements which suggests that the former province of Dacia Traiana became a buffer region with a monetary economy limited to the southern regions (in Transylvania, the coin became an object of value, not a currency).
Archaeological cultures in the Migration Period (2nd–13th centuries)
Scythia Minor (Dobrogea)
The continuing of Roman presence makes the archaeological evidence much richer in Dobrogea. Under DiocletianDiocletian
Diocletian |latinized]] upon his accession to Diocletian . c. 22 December 244 – 3 December 311), was a Roman Emperor from 284 to 305....
(284-305) new legions
Roman legion
A Roman legion normally indicates the basic ancient Roman army unit recruited specifically from Roman citizens. The organization of legions varied greatly over time but they were typically composed of perhaps 5,000 soldiers, divided into maniples and later into "cohorts"...
did guard duty in the camps, which he rebuilt or strengthened, e.g., at Dinogetia
Dinogetia
Dinogetia was an ancient Getae-Dacian settlement and later Roman fortress located on the left bank of the Danube near the place where it joins the Siret. The Dinogetia site is situated in Dobrudja at 8 kilometres east of Galați, Romania....
(Bisericuţa). Constantine I also did a great deal of rebuilding in Dobrogea: e.g., in Tropaeum Traiani
Civitas Tropaensium
Civitas Tropaensium was a Roman castrum situated in Scythia Minor in modern Constanţa County, Romania. Its site is now the modern settlement of Adamclisi...
(Adamclisi) and at Tomis. The reign of Justinian I saw much building activity in the province: e.g. at Troesmis
Troesmis
Troesmis was an ancient town in Scythia Minor. It was situated in what is now Romania near Igliţa-Turcoaia.Between 107 and 161, it was the home of the Roman Legio V Macedonica. Notitia Dignitatum shows that during 337-361, it was the headquarters of Legio II Herculia.-Destruction of the site:The...
(Igliţa) and Histria
Histria (Sinoe)
Ancient Histria or Istros , was a Greek colony or polis on the Black Sea coast, established by Milesian settlers to trade with the native Getae. It became the first Greek town on the present day Romanian territory. Scymnus of Chios , the Greek geographer and poet, dated it to 630 BC...
the walls were reinforced.
Tropaeum Traiani was destroyed after 586, Dinogetia fell in 596/597, and Tomis in 704.
Trans-Carpathian regions
| century | Botoşani (1976) |
Vaslui (1980) |
Iaşi (1984-5) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5th BC – 1st AD | 51 (?+11) | 205 (?+8) | 229 |
| 2nd – 3rd AD | 23 (?+4) | 89 (?+3) | 172 |
| 3rd – 4th | 204 (?+8) | ||
| 4th | 348 | 535 | |
| 4th – 5th | 8 (?+2) | 27 | |
| 5th | 3 | 22 | |
| 5th – 6th | 1 | 35 | |
| end 4th – beg. 6th | 111 (?+5) | ||
| 6th – 7th | 10 | 68 (?+3) | |
| 7th – 8th | 48 | ||
| 8th – 11th | 35 (?+3) | 344 (?+8) | 133 |
After the Marcomannic Wars
Marcomannic Wars
The Marcomannic Wars were a series of wars lasting over a dozen years from about AD 166 until 180. These wars pitted the Roman Empire against the Marcomanni, Quadi and other Germanic peoples, along both sides of the upper and middle Danube...
(162-72, 177-80), the region located beyond the limes become more populated, this contributed to the creation of contact zones. At the beginning of the 4th century, there was a spectacular demographic boom in the plain areas outside the Carpathians. Agricultural sedentary
Sedentism
In evolutionary anthropology and archaeology, sedentism , is a term applied to the transition from nomadic to permanent, year-round settlement.- Requirements for permanent settlements :...
communities were organized where handicraft
Handicraft
Handicraft, more precisely expressed as artisanic handicraft, sometimes also called artisanry, is a type of work where useful and decorative devices are made completely by hand or by using only simple tools. It is a traditional main sector of craft. Usually the term is applied to traditional means...
s were also practiced. A large cultural leveling, named the ‘Sântana de Mureş - Cernjachov culture
Chernyakhov culture
The Sântana de Mureș–Chernyakhiv culture is the name given to an archaeological culture which flourished between the 2nd and 5th centuries in a wide area of Eastern Europe, specifically in what today constitutes Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, and parts of Belarus...
’, had spread over an area between the Danube and the Don
Don River (Russia)
The Don River is one of the major rivers of Russia. It rises in the town of Novomoskovsk 60 kilometres southeast from Tula, southeast of Moscow, and flows for a distance of about 1,950 kilometres to the Sea of Azov....
by the middle of the 4th century. In present-day Romania, 158 settlements and 206 cemeteries, burial groups and isolated burials belonging to this culture have been excavated. But around 400 this culture was undergoing a deep crisis.
There are about 100 6th- to 7th-century settlement sites excavated so far at the foot of the eastern Carpathians and alongside the lower Danube. Their material culture indicates a mixture of different elements: e.g., there are square sunken-floored buildings
Pit-house
A pit-house is a dwelling dug into the ground which may also be layered with stone.These structures may be used as places to tell stories, dance, sing, celebrate, and store food. In archaeology, pit-houses are also termed sunken featured buildings and are found in numerous cultures around the world...
both with corner ovens (typical buildings of a type previously known from Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
) and with free-standing fireplaces; the pottery includes vessels reminiscent of Korchak
Korchak culture
Korchak culture is an archaeological culture of the sixth and seventh century East Slavs who settled along the southern tributaries of the Pripyat River and from the Dnieper River to the Southern Bug and Dniester rivers, throughout modern day northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus...
type. In Wallachia, the buildings are typically equipped not with stone ovens (as in Ukraine and Moldavia) but with a specific form of clay
Clay
Clay is a general term including many combinations of one or more clay minerals with traces of metal oxides and organic matter. Geologic clay deposits are mostly composed of phyllosilicate minerals containing variable amounts of water trapped in the mineral structure.- Formation :Clay minerals...
ovens. The first is exclusive for the low plain, where there is any stone in substratum or rolling stones along rivers; both types are encountered in upper plain, the second being dominant. There is also a third type of house oven, made by brick
Brick
A brick is a block of ceramic material used in masonry construction, usually laid using various kinds of mortar. It has been regarded as one of the longest lasting and strongest building materials used throughout history.-History:...
s (recovered from Roman sites); the type has a long history in the area, including within Roman camps, and is frequent in Illyricum too.
An interesting feature of the 6th century pottery assemblages in Wallachia is the frequent occurrence alongside handmade wares of wheel-made vessels; local potters fired both type of pottery in the same kiln
Kiln
A kiln is a thermally insulated chamber, or oven, in which a controlled temperature regime is produced. Uses include the hardening, burning or drying of materials...
. In a large perspective above all Ipoteşti-Cândeşti sites, exactly half of its pottery is handmade. The missing homogeneity is operating also at the design level: the morphologies with arguably Roman analogies are rising to 90% in Oltenia, 66% for western Muntenia, but only to 25% in some of the Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
sites. From the second half of the 6th century, there is a significant cluster of vessels with finger impressions or notches on the lip east of the Carpathians, while stamped decoration is especially abundant within the Carpathian Basin.
In the mid-6th century, the earlier regional pottery groups are replaced by material of the ‘Suceava-Şipot’ type. These assemblages consist of handmade pottery (with extremely close affinities with the ‘Penkovka’ material of the Ukraine) found together with metalwork of ultimate ‘Cernjachov’ type. A large cemetery discovered at Sărata-Monteoru consists of 1536 graves holding cremated remains; the cremation burials are either in urn
Urn
An urn is a vase, ordinarily covered, that usually has a narrowed neck above a footed pedestal. "Knife urns" placed on pedestals flanking a dining-room sideboard were an English innovation for high-style dining rooms of the late 1760s...
s (of the ‘Prague-Korchak’ type but with wheel-made pottery) or pit-graves without urns.
In Moldavia the earlier cultures are replaced in the 7th century by the ‘Hlinca culture’ which seems to be a local variant of the ‘Luka Raikovetska’ culture of the Ukraine. On the Danubian plain, the ‘Suceava-Şipot’ material seems to disappear, though the date at which this occurs is uncertain (it is usually accepted that it ends at the time of the Bulgarian invasion of c. 680).
During the 7th century, the settlements belonging to the ‘Ipoteşti-Ciurelu-Cândeşti culture’ ceased to exist south of the Carpathians, no direct connection can be established between these cultures and the ‘Dridu culture’ (a new cultural synthesis born in the Lower Danube Plain at the beginning of the 8th century). This cultural horizon, extending from the Romanian plains to the Stara Plannina range, is often connected to the establishment of the First Bulgarian Empire. According to a recent study,Postică, Gh: “Evoluţia aşezărilor din spaţiul pruto-nistrean în epoca migraţiirol (sec. V-XIII)”, Thraco-Dacica 20 (1999), nos. 1-3, p. 333. there are 107 10th- to 11th-century sites in southern, and 87 in central Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
(47 of those 87 sites also produced evidence of an 8th- to 9th century occupation, an indication of continuity); in Moldavia, to the west from the river Prut, field surveys identified 129 9th- to 10th-century sites attributed to the ‘Dridu culture’.
By 1050, the sites that had flourished during the 10th century in the Moldavian and Bessarabian Uplands had already been abandoned; it is perhaps during this period of time that most, albeit not all, sites south and east of the Carpathian Basin were deserted.
Judging from the published archaeological evidence, there are about 100 sites of the ‘Răducăneni culture’ dated to the 11th and 12th centuries known from the area to the east of the Carpathian Mountains. By contrast, only 35 sites are known, which have been dated to the 12th and 13th centuries.The Romanian historian Victor Spinei suggests that the small number of 13th-century sites is certainly a problem of the current research, and must therefore be treated with caution; Spinei, Victor (2009), p. 193.
Intra-Carpathian regions
| century | Cluj (1992) |
Alba (1995) |
Mureş (1995) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5th BC – 1st AD | 59 | 111 | 252 |
| Roman | 144 | 155 | 332 |
| 3rd – 4th | 40 | 67 | 79 |
| 5th | 49 | ||
| 6th | 48 | ||
| 7th | 40 | ||
| 8th | 39 | ||
| 9th | 19 | ||
| 10th | 16 | ||
| 11th – 13th | 47 |
The expansion of the Sântana de Mureş - Cernjachov culture in Transylvania probably began around 330. The graves of the culture were made in its last period of existence in 376-425.
Population shifts occurred, the former settlements were abandoned, and the settlements and necropolises became mixed, heterogeneous. This archaeological horizon begins to take shape in northwestern Romania in the Barcǎu
Barcau River (Cris)
The Barcău River or Bereteu River is a river which has its origin in Sălaj County, Romania. It has a length of 134 kilometers and a watershed area of 2,025 km²...
valley between 380-440.
Between 420 and 455, Transylvanian settlement stood at its nadir, for there are no traces of human presence on the most hospitable land, the river valleys. The only exceptions are the valleys of the Someş
Someş River
The river Someş flows through Romania and Hungary.It rises from two headstreams, the Someşul Mare, in the Rodna Mountains in Bistriţa-Năsăud County and the Someşul Mic in the Apuseni Mountains of Cluj County...
and the Mureş, and the road along the Olt. Settlements and graves which yielded grey jugs with smoothed decoration, vessels and a glass have been unearthed in Târgu Mureş.
According to the archaeological evidence, it seems that around 471 the population of modern northeastern Hungary withdraw to the south, a movement that could have reached the plains in the present-day western regions of Romania (e.g., few graves found in Dindeşti
Andrid
Andrid is a commune of 2,692 inhabitants situated in Satu Mare County, Romania. It is composed of three villages: Andrid, Dindeşti and Irina....
and Ghenci
Cauas
Căuaş is a commune of 2,559 inhabitants situated in Satu Mare County, Romania. It is composed of six villages:*Ady Endre / Érmindszent or Adyfalva*Căuaş*Ghenci / Gencs*Ghileşti / Illéd*Hotoan / Érhatvan*Răduleşti- Demographics :...
). If the large graves on the valley of the Someşul Mic River
Somesul Mic River
The Someșul Mic River is a river in north-western Romania . It is formed at the confluence of two rivers, Someșul Cald and Someșul Rece, that come from the Apuseni Mountains...
(Apahida
Apahida
Apahida is a commune in Cluj County, Romania. It is composed of eight villages: Apahida, Bodrog, Câmpeneşti, Corpadea, Dezmir, Pata, Sânnicoară and Sub Coastă....
, Someşeni), dating back to the last third of the 5th century relate to the same population, then these discoveries can indicate the advance of this population in Transylvania, maybe from the period immediately following the fall of the Hunnish kingdom.
In Transylvania, the first sunken floored huts with stone ovens appear in the very end of the 6th century in the valley of the rivers Râul Negru, Covasna
Covasna River (Râul Negru)
The Covasna River is a tributary of the Râul Negru in Romania.-References:* Administraţia Naţională Apelor Române - Cadastrul Apelor - Bucureşti* Institutul de Meteorologie şi Hidrologie - Rîurile României - Bucureşti 1971...
and Caşin
Casin River (Râul Negru)
The Caşin River is a tributary of the Râul Negru in Romania.-References:* Administraţia Naţională Apelor Române - Cadastrul Apelor - Bucureşti* Institutul de Meteorologie şi Hidrologie - Rîurile României - Bucureşti 1971...
. Some time after the middle of the 7th century, an enclave of sites in the region of Cluj forms a zone of settlements in the upper reaches of the Mureş and its tributaries. These are mainly settlement sites and flat cremation cemeteries, some containing also inhumation burials.
The ‘Band-Noşlac’ types of graveyards (e.g., Bratei 3, Târgu Mureş) saw a peak of activity in the 7th century. The villages linked to the cemeteries underwent a peculiar transformation after the turn of the 7th century: the traditional fashions of the earlier population (e.g., the smoothed or stamped decoration of pottery, comb
Comb
A comb is a toothed device used in hair care for straightening and cleaning hair or other fibres. Combs are among the oldest tools found by archaeologists...
-makers’ products) became mixed with a new culture (interment with horse
Horse
The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...
s, horse harness
Horse harness
A horse harness is a type of horse tack that allows a horse or other equine to pull various horse-drawn vehicles such as a carriage, wagon or sleigh. Harnesses may also be used to hitch animals to other loads such as a plow or canal boat....
es, pike-heads
Pike (weapon)
A pike is a pole weapon, a very long thrusting spear used extensively by infantry both for attacks on enemy foot soldiers and as a counter-measure against cavalry assaults. Unlike many similar weapons, the pike is not intended to be thrown. Pikes were used regularly in European warfare from the...
).
‘Early Avar’ graves were found in the Western Plain, mostly from the first half of the 7th century (e.g., at Felnac and Sânpetru German). The area of the Gâmbaş group included the Middle Mureş valley at the confluence between the rivers Arieş
Arieș River (Mureș)
The Arieș is a tributary of Mureș River in Transylvania, Romania.Most probably "Arieș" means "Gold River" in Dalmatian which is thought to be very similar to the Dacian language. It is concluded that the Romanian name most probably derives from the Dacian name of the river...
and Târnava
Târnava River
The Târnava is a river in Romania. It is formed by the confluence of the Târnava Mare and Târnava Mică in the town of Blaj. The Târnava flows into the Mureş River after 28 km, near the town of Teiuş.- Etymology :...
; its beginning cannot predate the first half of the 7th century, and the maximum expansion was achieved in the second half of the 7th century and in the early 8th century.
An important group of 7th- to 9th-century cemeteries known as the ‘Mediaş group’ cluster near the salt
Salt
In chemistry, salts are ionic compounds that result from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. They are composed of cations and anions so that the product is electrically neutral...
mines (e.g., the cemetery of Ocna Sibiului
Ocna Sibiului
Ocna Sibiului is a town in the centre of Sibiu County, in southern Transylvania, central Romania, 10 km to the north-west of the county capital Sibiu. The town administers a single village, Topârcea....
, with 120 cremation and 15 inhumation burials). Adjacent to the zone are the Someşeni and Nuşfalău
Nusfalau
Nuşfalău is a commune located in Sălaj County, Romania. It is composed of two villages, Bilghez and Nuşfalău; Boghiş and Bozieş split off in 2005 to form Boghiş commune....
barrow cemeteries which seems to reflect tradition of construction similar to the barrow cemeteries in the Ukraine.
Elements of the ‘Dridu culture have been identified only in the southeast of this province and near Alba Iulia
Alba Iulia
Alba Iulia is a city in Alba County, Transylvania, Romania with a population of 66,747, located on the Mureş River. Since the High Middle Ages, the city has been the seat of Transylvania's Roman Catholic diocese. Between 1541 and 1690 it was the capital of the Principality of Transylvania...
, all dated to the second half of the 9th century.
In addition to burials found near the church, three cemeteries have been excavated in Alba Iulia, which produced artifacts very similar to those from burial assemblages in Slavonia
Slavonia
Slavonia is a geographical and historical region in eastern Croatia...
and the Hungarian Plain that had attributed to the ‘Bjelo Brdo culture’. One of the earliest Bjelo Brdo cemeteries in Transylvania is that of Deva
Deva, Romania
Deva is a city in Romania, in the historical region of Transylvania, on the left bank of the Mureș River. It is the capital of Hunedoara County.-Name:...
; another was established shortly after 1000 in Hunedoara
Hunedoara
Hunedoara is a city in Hunedoara County, Transylvania, Romania. It is located in southeastern Transylvania near the Poiana Ruscă Mountains, and administers five villages: Boş, Groş, Hăşdat, Peştişu Mare and Răcăştia....
and continued through the 11th century. Burial in most pre-Christian cemeteries ceased by 1100.
At some point in the early 12th century, strongholds erected in the 11th century in the northwest (Biharea, Dăbâca
Dabâca, Cluj
Dăbâca is a commune in Cluj County, Romania. It is composed of three villages: Dăbâca, Luna de Jos and Pâglişa.- Demographics :According to the census from 2002 there was a total population of 1,804 people living in this town. Of this population, 87.91% are ethnic Romanians, 7.53% are ethnic...
, Cluj-Mănăştur
Manastur
Mănăştur is a district of the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca, built during Nicolae Ceauşescu's systematisation programme on the site of an older settlement. Its population as of 2007 is approximately 126,600...
, Moldoveneşti
Moldovenesti
Moldoveneşti is a commune in Cluj County, Romania, 12 km South-West of Turda, in the valley of the Arieş.-History:...
) had their ramparts repaired and heightened. Churches were built inside each one of them, and around those churches grew the 12th-century cemeteries that Romanian archaeologists group together in what they call the ‘Citfalău’ phase following the disappearance of the ‘Bjelo Brdo culture’.
Other Latin provinces in Southeastern Europe (3rd century AD–7th century AD)
The Balkans' prime function was to provide a bridge between the two halves of Empire; and many resources were devoted to maintaining the roads, and the towns and way-stations along them. Around 296 Emperor Diocletian secured the Danube frontier by building new fortresses. In the 4th century, the Danubian Plain north of the Haemus MountainsHaemus Mons
In earlier times the Balkan mountains were known as the Haemus Mons. It is believed that the name is derived from a Thracian word *saimon, 'mountain ridge', which is unattested but conjectured as the original Thracian form of Greek Haimos....
was still dotted with Roman towns and villas.
However, the late 4th and early 5th century layers of the recently excavated Nicopolis ad Istrum
Nicopolis ad Istrum
Nicopolis ad Istrum was a Roman and Early Byzantine town founded by Emperor Trajan around 101–106, at the junction of the Iatrus and the Rositsa rivers, in memory of his victory over the Dacians. Its ruins are located at the village of Nikyup, 20 km north of Veliko Tarnovo in northern Bulgaria...
are striking for the number of rich houses that suddenly appeared inside the city walls; it looks as though, since their country villas were now too vulnerable, the rich were running their estates from safe inside the city walls. After the middle of the 5th century, medium-sized estates completely disappeared (with just a few exceptions, mainly in the coastal areas).
By 500, most, if not all, major cities in the Balkans had contracted and regrouped around a fortified precinct, almost always dominated by a church building. A relatively large number of small houses was built in the 6th century in every city of the region, often within the ruins of previously large buildings.
When Justinian I sought to re-establish Roman Illyricum in the 6th century, the essential foundation of strategically placed cities in the valleys created in the 1st and 2nd centuries, linked by policed roads and bridges, no longer existed. During his reign, relatively small forts were built along the Danube and in the immediate hinterland. Many forts on the mountain passes across the Stara Planina were comparatively larger. Inside the walls, houses were built; and no other buildings exist besides churches.
After 620, occupation ceased on most urban or military sites in the central Balkans, whose existence may have continued in one form or another into the early 7th century. In several cases, there are clear signs of destruction by fire at some point after 600 AD.
The key evidence for the population of the period between the 7th and 8th centuries is the Komani-Kruja group of cemeteries whose distribution is centered on Dyrrhachium (Durrës, Albania), and the general character of the remains suggests communities that were town-based and Christians.
Scythia Minor (Dobrogea)
The strength of Christianity in Scythia Minor after 313 is proven by an impressive number of early Christian objects (rush-lights, crosses) and by over a hundred funeral inscriptions. There is a remarkable martyrs' crypt discovered in NiculiţelNiculitel
Niculiţel is a commune in Tulcea County, Romania. It is composed of a single village, Niculiţel....
, with the names of martyrs Zotikos, Attalos, Kamasis and Philippos written in Greek on the inner wall.
Moreover, 35 basilica
Basilica
The Latin word basilica , was originally used to describe a Roman public building, usually located in the forum of a Roman town. Public basilicas began to appear in Hellenistic cities in the 2nd century BC.The term was also applied to buildings used for religious purposes...
s (of the 4th to 6th centuries) were discovered in the main fortress towns of the province. At Callatis (Mangalia), the basilica-with-atrium is unique in the Balkans, for it is a type common in Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
.
Territories north of the Danube
There is no evidence of Christianity in Dacia Traiana until after the Roman withdrawal. A piece of evidence for Christianity in the former province is a pierced bronze inscription of the 4th centuryBiertan Donarium
The Biertan Donarium is a fourth century Christian votive object found near the town of Biertan, in Transylvania, Romania.Made out of bronze in the shape of a Labarum, it has the Latin text EGO ZENOVIUS VOTUM POSVI, which can be approximatively translated as "I, Zenovius, offered this gift".It was...
from Biertan
Biertan
Biertan is a commune in central Romania, in the north of the Sibiu County, 80 km north of Sibiu and 15 km east of Mediaş. Biertan is one of the most important Saxon villages with fortified churches in Transylvania, having been on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites since 1993...
which records that one Zenovius made the offering; its inscription is in Latin. Clay lamps are numerous from the end of the 4th century and especially in the 5th and 6th centuries (Apulum, Potaissa, Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa, Gherla); bronze lamps were discovered near Dej
Dej
Dej is a city in northwestern Romania, 60 km north of Cluj-Napoca, in Cluj County. It lies where the Someşul Mic River meets the river Someşul Mare River...
and Gherla
Gherla
Gherla is a city in Cluj County, Romania . It is located 45 km from Cluj-Napoca on the Someşul Mic River, and has a population of 24,083....
. A treasury belonging to a Christian woman (dating from the 5th century) was found in Someşeni; two rich tombs were discovered at Apahida.
Maltese cross
The Maltese cross, also known as the Amalfi cross, is identified as the symbol of an order of Christian warriors known as the Knights Hospitaller or Knights of Malta and through them came to be identified with the Mediterranean island of Malta and is one of the National symbols of Malta...
es worn (especially by women) either as pectorals or attached to dress pins and earrings were found e.g., at Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
and Ruginoasa. Moulds found north of the Danube demonstrate that such crosses were produced locally. The distribution of Maltese crosses overlaps that of ceramic artifacts (pots, and spindle whorls) with incised crosses, images of fish, and Christian inscriptions; handmade pots with such decoration are indisputably of local production. Humbler signs of Christian devotion, such as mold-made clay lamps with cross-shaped handles, are rare on 6th- to 7th-century sites in Romania and Moldavia.
A small rotunda
Rotunda (architecture)
A rotunda is any building with a circular ground plan, sometimes covered by a dome. It can also refer to a round room within a building . The Pantheon in Rome is a famous rotunda. A Band Rotunda is a circular bandstand, usually with a dome...
, which may have been built in the 9th century, was unearthed in Alba Iulia. Byzantine crosses dated to the 10th century were found in the region between the rivers Mureş, Criş and Tisa; no such finds are known from Transylvania.
Some ‘Citfalău’ cemeteries have burials clustering around an empty space in the middle, which has been interpreted as the mark of wooden church. The distribution of churches of either stone or wood overlaps that of the increasing number of finds of coins struck for the 12th-century kings of Hungary.
Latin provinces of the Roman Empire
Starting with Justinian’s reign, there was an increasing number of baptisteries (baptismal fonts) in the Balkans. The evidence of monastic sites is remarkably small.Though the dating of early Balkan churches is most controversial subject, archaeologists agree that there was a gap without churches that included the 7th and 8th centuries.
Bosnia and Hercegovina are famous for their enormous medieval gravestones, particularly those from the 14th to 16th century. The most elaborate and interesting motifs are found on the stones erected by Vlachs, especially in the area of Stolac
Stolac
Stolac is a town and municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina, located in the southern part of Herzegovina. Administratively, it is part of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina....
.
Linguistic aspects of the Romanians’ origin
The substratum of the Romanian language
For approximately 90-160 words in Romanian that lack Latin or Slavic ancestors, a Dacian, “Geto-Dacian”, “Thraco-Dacian”, “Thraco-Illyrian” or “Daco-Thracian-Illyrian” origin has been supposed, but the Indo-EuropeanIndo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
nature of these words is controversial. Examples include buză ‘lip’, băiat ‘boy’, and vatră ‘hearth’. Approximately one third of these words are specific shepherd expressions (e.g., caţă ‘sheep hook’; cârlan ‘one-year-old lamb’) or denote things of special importance to a pastoral population (e.g., măldac ‘hay stacks’; viscol ‘snowstorm’).
The Dacian language
Dacian language
The extinct Dacian language may have developed from proto-Indo-European in the Carpathian region around 2,500 BC and probably died out by AD 600. In the 1st century AD, it was the predominant language of the ancient regions of Dacia and Moesia and, possibly, of some surrounding regions.It belonged...
is generally regarded as a variety of Indo-European closely related to Thracian
Thracian language
The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times in Southeastern Europe by the Thracians, the northern neighbors of the Ancient Greeks. The Thracian language exhibits satemization: it either belonged to the Satem group of Indo-European languages or it was strongly...
. However, all attempts to relate Thracian to Phrygian
Phrygian language
The Phrygian language was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, spoken in Asia Minor during Classical Antiquity .Phrygian is considered to have been closely related to Greek....
, Illyrian
Illyrian languages
The Illyrian languages are a group of Indo-European languages that were spoken in the western part of the Balkans in former times by groups identified as Illyrians: Ardiaei, Delmatae, Pannonii, Autariates, Taulanti...
, or Dacian are purely speculative – our knowledge of these languages is simply too limited for claims of this kind. Even the notion that what ancients called “Thracian” was a single entity is unproven.
The Latin heritage
Basic core vocabulary of the Romanian language is, and always has been Latin: 20% of the more than 48,000 entries of the The Dictionary of the Modern Romanian LanguageDicţionarul Limbii Române Moderne (Editura Academiei, 1958, Bucureşti) is of Latin origin; if one counts other Romance sources (e.g., FrenchFrench language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
), the overall Latin-based content comes to around 85%. Considering the usual 200 or so items of truly basic vocabulary, Latin achieves an even higher percentage in standard Romanian.
Many names of crop
Crop
Crop may refer to:* Crop, a plant grown and harvested for agricultural use* Crop , part of the alimentary tract of some animals* Crop , a modified whip used in horseback riding or disciplining humans...
s, tillage
Tillage
Tillage is the agricultural preparation of the soil by mechanical agitation of various types, such as digging, stirring, and overturning. Examples of human-powered tilling methods using hand tools include shovelling, picking, mattock work, hoeing, and raking...
and harvest
Harvest
Harvest is the process of gathering mature crops from the fields. Reaping is the cutting of grain or pulse for harvest, typically using a scythe, sickle, or reaper...
ing, as well as gardening practices and tools are of Latin origin: e.g., câmp ‘field’; a ara ‘to plough’; grâu ‘wheat
Wheat
Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...
’; furcă ‘pitchfork
Pitchfork
A pitchfork is an agricultural tool with a long handle and long, thin, widely separated pointed tines used to lift and pitch loose material, such as hay, leaves, grapes, dung or other agricultural materials. Pitchforks typically have two or three tines...
’. The names of "man's part of the farm" are Latin: e.g., casǎ 'house'; poartǎ 'gate'; fereastrǎ 'window'. Similarly Latin is the name of several domesticated and wild animals: e.g., cǎprioarǎ 'deer
Deer
Deer are the ruminant mammals forming the family Cervidae. Species in the Cervidae family include white-tailed deer, elk, moose, red deer, reindeer, fallow deer, roe deer and chital. Male deer of all species and female reindeer grow and shed new antlers each year...
', câine 'dog
Dog
The domestic dog is a domesticated form of the gray wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The dog may have been the first animal to be domesticated, and has been the most widely kept working, hunting, and companion animal in...
'; lup 'wolf'; urs 'bear
Bear
Bears are mammals of the family Ursidae. Bears are classified as caniforms, or doglike carnivorans, with the pinnipeds being their closest living relatives. Although there are only eight living species of bear, they are widespread, appearing in a wide variety of habitats throughout the Northern...
'. On the other hand, no traces were left in the Romanian language of the Latin vocabulary of city life.
Some (sub)dialects of Balkan Romance are more innovative, others more conservative, and this particularly applies to lexis. For example, among more conservative features of the Maramureş subdialect of the Rumanian are lexical items of Latin origin such as gint ‘people’ and arină ‘sand’, while Aromanian, unlike Daco-Romanian, retains the Latin for ‘twenty’ (/jingits/), and the specific word for ‘month’ (/mes/). It is the Wallachian subdialect of Daco-Rumanian which has been most subject to change.
The Balkan Sprachbund
Though often genetically only remotely related, the Balkan languages (AlbanianAlbanian language
Albanian is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and northwestern Greece...
, Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, Macedonian
Macedonian language
Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...
, Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian language
Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
, and the Eastern Romance languages
Eastern Romance languages
The Eastern Romance languages in their narrow conception, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin. Some classifications include the Italo-Dalmatian languages; when Italian is...
) share sets of typological features. For instance, the postposed articles (e.g., fecior - 'boy', feciorul - the boy'), the periphrastic future
Future tense
In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...
(signaled by “want” auxiliaries
Auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
), the periphrastic perfect (with “have” auxiliaries), and the syncretism of dative
Dative case
The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
and genitive
Genitive case
In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
are singled out among the shared typological features of the Balkan languages by most scholars.
These “prominent” Balkan properties are present in most of the individual languages, although (e.g., the postposed articles are absent from Modern Greek and Serbo-Croatian, and the periphrastic perfect with “have” auxiliaries is present only in the Macedonian, Albanian and Eastern Romance languages).
Albanian connections
Albanian forms its own separate branch of Indo-European. The widespread assertion that it is the modern-day descendant of Illyrian makes geographic and historical sense but is linguistically untestable. Competing hypotheses, likewise untestable, would derive Albanian from Thracian, or from “Daco-Mysian” (a hypothetical mixture or ancestor of Thracian, Illyrian, and Dacian). The Romanian epigraphist I. I. Russu suggested that the Albanians were descendant of the Carps, who had been displaced by the Romans to the south of the lower Danube in the latter half of the 3rd century.The duration of the borrowing from the Latin language was so long that loanwords in Albanian reflect several distinct chronological stages.
Romanian has approximately 70-120 substratum words cognate with Albanian (e.g., Albanian vatër, Romanian vatră ‘fireplace’; Albanian brez, Romanian brâu ‘girdle, belt’). The largest group of these lexical isoglosses (about 1/3 of the words) relates to the terminology of goat and sheep breeding (e.g., Albanian dash, Romanian daş ‘ram’; Albanian gëlbëza, Romanian gălbeaza ‘fasciolosis’) .
Albanian has many loans cognate with Romanian (e.g., Albanian vjetër, Romanian bătrân 'old' < Latin veterānus 'veteran'; Albanian pyll 'forest', Romanian pădure 'forest' < Latin paludem 'swamp'). Some Romanian words of Latin origin can possibly be traced back to the Latin via the Albanian language (e.g., Romanian sat 'village' < Albanian fshat 'village' < Latin fossātum 'ditch'); but the Romanian linguist Sorin Paliga argues that Albanian borrowings in Romanian are impossible.
The Slavic adstratum
Much more substantial than the Germanic adstrate in the Western Romance languagesWestern Romance languages
The Western Romance languages are one of the primary subdivisions of the Romance languages. They include at least the following:* The Pyrenean–Mozarabic group consists of two languages in two separate branches:**Aragonese**Mozarabic...
is the Slavic adstrate in Balkan Romance. But only 15 words can be attributed to a Common Slavic influence on the basis of their phonetical treatment (e.g., şchiau 'Bulgarian'; daltă 'chisel'); no other words of a very long list of Slavic loans in Romanian can be dated earlier than the 9th century.
Romanian-Slavic linguistic contacts reached their apex between the 9th and the 11th centuries when the Romanian language assimilated a significant number of terms of Slavic origin. On the other hand, according to Romanian linguists (e.g., Gheorghe Mihăilă, Sorin Paliga), there is no argument which may support the idea that Slavic influence in Romanian may be dated earlier than the 11th century (more probable 12th century).
The oldest Slavic elements in Romanian are popular and have Bulgarian characteristics. About 70 words of Slavic origin can be found in all the Eastern Romance dialects (e.g., prag 'threshold'; lopată 'shovel
Shovel
A shovel is a tool for digging, lifting, and moving bulk materials, such as soil, coal, gravel, snow, sand, or ore. Shovels are extremely common tools that are used extensively in agriculture, construction, and gardening....
'). Many items of the agriculturalists' and artisans' vocabulary are of Slavic origin (e.g., a plivi 'to weed'; a răsădi 'to plant'; a prăşi 'to hoe'; coasă 'scythe
Scythe
A scythe is an agricultural hand tool for mowing grass, or reaping crops. It was largely replaced by horse-drawn and then tractor machinery, but is still used in some areas of Europe and Asia. The Grim Reaper is often depicted carrying or wielding a scythe...
'; pahar 'glass'; potcoavă 'horseshoe
Horseshoe
A horseshoe, is a fabricated product, normally made of metal, although sometimes made partially or wholly of modern synthetic materials, designed to protect a horse's hoof from wear and tear. Shoes are attached on the palmar surface of the hooves, usually nailed through the insensitive hoof wall...
'; bob 'bean
Bean
Bean is a common name for large plant seeds of several genera of the family Fabaceae used for human food or animal feed....
'; morcov 'carrot
Carrot
The carrot is a root vegetable, usually orange in colour, though purple, red, white, and yellow varieties exist. It has a crisp texture when fresh...
'; şuncă 'ham
Ham
Ham is a cut of meat from the thigh of the hind leg of certain animals, especiallypigs. Nearly all hams sold today are fully cooked or cured.-Etymology:...
'; ocol 'farmyard'; grajd 'stable'). The names of most of the freshwater fish species were also borrowed from a Slavic language (e.g., biban 'perch
Perch
Perch is a common name for fish of the genus Perca, freshwater gamefish belonging to the family Percidae. The perch, of which there are three species in different geographical areas, lend their name to a large order of vertebrates: the Perciformes, from the Greek perke meaning spotted, and the...
'; cegă 'starlet
Starlet
Starlet may refer to:*Toyota Starlet, car*Corby Starlet, airplane*The Starlet, reality TV show*Starlet sea anemone, a species of sea anemone native to the east coast of the United States...
'; mreană 'barbel'). Several old borrow words relate to general household management nad trade: gospodărie 'household
Household
The household is "the basic residential unit in which economic production, consumption, inheritance, child rearing, and shelter are organized and carried out"; [the household] "may or may not be synonymous with family"....
', plăti 'pay
Pay
Pay may refer to:*A wage or salary earned for work*The process of payment for goods and services, an aspect of trade*Waterproofing the seams of a wooden ship*Puffy AmiYumi, a Japanese pop/rock band...
'.
Linguistic traces of other languages
Several migrations of peoples crossed the territory of today’s Romania between the departure of the Roman legions and the appearance of the modern Romanian people, but little or no linguistic trace of the Goths, Huns, Gepids, Avars, et al. remain. The word jupân (‘lord’) may be of Avar origin; if this is the case, it may have been borrowed at the same time by the early Slavs and the Proto-Romanians. Distinguishing Pecheneg and Cuman loanwords of the Romanian language from much later Tatar or Ottoman Turkish loans is very difficult, but some words may be regarded as of Pecheneg or Cuman origin (e.g., buzdugan ‘mace’; coboc ‘goblet’; călăuză ‘guide’).Up to the 18th century, Greek influence was primarily through the medium of Old Church Slavonic; the influence of Ancient Greek on Balkan Romance is minimal. Even the Romance languages spoken in present-day Greece, Albania and Macedonia do not betray the influence of Ancient Greek elements that they should if they had originated where they are spoken.
The Christian vocabulary
The Latin character of the Christian vocabulary of the Romanian language attests the ancient tradition of the Christianity of the Romanians. But only the terms referring to the most important objects of cult have been preserved (e.g., Dumnezeu ‘God’; biserică ‘church’; cruce ‘cross’; creştin ‘Christian’; sân or sânt ‘saint’; înger ‘angel’; and a boteza ‘to baptize’).Following the adoption by Romanians of the Slavonic liturgy, numerous terms of South Slavic origin were adopted (e.g., a se căi 'to repent'; călugar 'monk', clopot 'bell', duh 'soul, spirit', iad 'hel', rai 'paradise'). Some of those words are undoubtedly of Greek origin, but they entered Romanian through South Slavic.
Pre-Roman place names in Dacia Traiana province
Most of the names of Roman towns are of Dacian origin, but Sarmizegetusa Regia (Grădiştea Muncelului) is the only pre-Roman locality mentioned in written sources which is identified after archaeological excavations. In the case of Napoca, Potaissa, Drobeta, Porolissum there are no known Dacian settlements in the vicinity, and consequently the indigenous names are most likely local toponyms.The names of Dacia’s main rivers – Maris, Samus, Crisia, Tibiscus, and Alutus – were taken from the locals by the Romans.
Place names in Romania
After the Roman withdrawal, without exception, the names of onetime Roman towns, settlements, and fortresses fell into oblivion. The ancient or archaic sounding name instead, before or after the name of some modern settlements was only added in the recent past: e.g., Cluj (from 1974 Cluj-Napoca) and Sătmar (from the 1950s Satu Mare).The modern Romanian names of the great rivers have been transmitted through Slavonic phonology: e.g., Romanian Mureş < Slavic *Moriš < pre-Slavic Maris(ia)/Marisus; Romanian Olt < Slavic *Olt < pre-Slavic Alutus/Aluta (the Romanian linguistic rules would have produced *Mareş and *Alut respectively, but the a > o vowel shift
Vowel shift
A vowel shift is a systematic sound change in the pronunciation of the vowel sounds of a language.The best-known example in the English language is the Great Vowel Shift, which began in the 15th century...
is typical for all Slavic languages). On the other hand Sorin Paliga assumes that the a > ô > u vowel shift occurred in the Dacian language (Romanian Mureş < Dacian *Môreş < Maris). The Romanian name of the Danube (Dunăre) may have originated from the “Daco-Moesian” *Donaris; Sorin Paliga also argues that the Slavic and Hungarian forms with root Dun- reflect their Romanian origin.
Most Romanian toponyms are of Slavic origin. In contrast to the earlier Slavic loanwords (e.g., Romanian dumbravă ‘oak forest’ < Slavic *dǫbrǫva), the geographical names of Slavic origin, never contain the reflex -un, -um for the Slavic nasal back vowel (ǫ), but exclusively the reflex -ân, -âm (e.g., Dâmboviţa, Glâmbocea). In Transylvania, Slavic geographical names were also adopted by the Hungarians and the Transylvanian Saxons: e.g., Hungarian Zalatna, German Kleinschlatten (Zlatna) ‘golden’; Hungarian Beszterce, German Bistritz (Bistriţa) ‘swift’.
In many cases, a geographical name of Hungarian origin was adopted by the Romanians: e.g., Almaş
Almas River (Somes)
The Almaș River or Valea Fildului River is a tributary of the Someș River in Romania.-References:* Administrația Națională Apelor Române - Cadastrul Apelor - București* Institutul de Meteorologie şi Hidrologie - Rîurile României - București 1971...
‘with apple(trees)’, Căpuş
Capus River
The Căpuş River is a tributary of the Someşul Mic River in Romania.-References:* Administraţia Naţională Apelor Române - Cadastrul Apelor - Bucureşti* Institutul de Meteorologie şi Hidrologie - Rîurile României - Bucureşti 1971* Capitolul 3 Apa...
‘with doors’, Mediaş ‘with sour cherry’. Of the 153 tributaries of the rivers Someş, Criş, Ampoi
Ampoi River
The Ampoi is a river in the Apuseni Mountains, Alba County, western Romania. It is a right tributary of the river Mureş. It flows through the town Zlatna, and joins the Mureş near Alba Iulia...
, Mureş, Olt, Timiş and Bârzava
Bârzava River (Mures)
The Bârzava River is a tributary of the Mureş in Romania.-References:* Administraţia Naţională Apelor Române - Cadastrul Apelor - Bucureşti* Institutul de Meteorologie şi Hidrologie - Rîurile României - Bucureşti 1971...
72 (47%) are of Hungarian origin. The adopted names covering mostly the territory of Banat, Partium and Transylvania, most of them are (or partly) phonetic transciptions of the Hungarian toponyms. More examples: Hunyadvár-Hunedoara (Hunyad Castle), Temesvár-Timişoara (Temes Castle) - vár=castle, Nagyvárad-Oradea (formerly Oradea Mare, mare=nagy=big, várad=castle+suffix), Karánsebes-Caranşebes (Kara=Turkic origin and old Hungarian person name, meaning black or Slavic origin and the Hungarian sebes=fast), Székelyudvarhely-Odorheiu Secuiesc (udvarhely=court place), Máramarossziget-Sighetu Marmaţiei (formerly Sighet, sziget=island), etc. Sorin Paliga argues that the Hungarian name of the Criş (Körös) is borrowed from Romanian.
The Romanian and Hungarian names of some tributaries of the Olt are of German origin: e.g., Romanian Ghimbav
Ghimbav
Ghimbav is a town in Braşov County, Transylvania, central Romania. It is located in the centre of Romania, 5 miles west of Braşov.-History:The town was first mentioned in a letter written in 1420 by King Sigismund of Luxembourg...
, Hungarian Vidombák from German Weidenbach.
Romanian place-names from north of the Danube appear only rarely in pre-1300 documents. In Transylvania, the earliest Romanian toponyms include Nucşoara (1359), Cuciulata (1372), Râuşor (1377). Alexandru Madgearu propounds that the name of Achtum's capital in the Latin text of the Long Life of Saint Gerald (urbs Morisena) derived from the Romanian form Morişana.
47 names of rivers ending in -ui and -lui (‘river’ or ‘valley’), identified in the Romanian plain, are of Turkic
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
origin (e.g., Bahlui, Vaslui). Besides these names, several philologists and historians have assigned an old Turkic origin to other place names in the Carpathian-Dniester region (e.g., Bârlad, Galaţi).
Place names of Latin and Romanian origin in other parts of Southeastern Europe
The persistence of Roman place-names in several areas of Illyricum suggests the survival of Latin-speaking communities, notably in that region near the Danube where Aurelian had settled the people moved out of Dacia Traiana. There is also a concentration of Latin place-names around the Lake of Shkodër, in the Drin and Fan valleys and along the road from Lissus (Lezhë, Albania) to UlpianaUlpiana
Ulpiana was an ancient Roman city located in what is today Kosovo. It was also named Justiniana Secunda. Ulpiana is situated in the municipality of Lipljan...
(Kosovo
Kosovo
Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...
), with some in the Black Drin and Mat valleys, a distribution limited on the south by throughout the Via Egnatia
Via Egnatia
The Via Egnatia was a road constructed by the Romans in the 2nd century BC. It crossed the Roman provinces of Illyricum, Macedonia, and Thrace, running through territory that is now part of modern Albania, the Republic of Macedonia, Greece, and European Turkey.Starting at Dyrrachium on the...
road.
The Romanian presence in the Balkan Peninsula is illustrated by the Romanian toponymy in Bulgaria, Greece, Albania and Serbia. For example, names of mountains like Vacarel "little cattle herder", Pasarel "small bird" (Bulgaria), Durmitor
Durmitor
Durmitor is a massif and the name of a national park in North Western Montenegro. It reaches a height of 2,522 m .The massif is bordered by Tara River Canyon on the North, Piva River Canyon on the West, and by Komarnica River Canyon on the South. To the East, Durmitor is open to a vast ...
"sleeping room", and Visitor (Montenegro
Montenegro
Montenegro Montenegrin: Crna Gora Црна Гора , meaning "Black Mountain") is a country located in Southeastern Europe. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the south-west and is bordered by Croatia to the west, Bosnia and Herzegovina to the northwest, Serbia to the northeast and Albania to the...
) are of Romanian origin.
Other aspects of the Romanians’ ethnogenesis
Ethnonym
The use by Byzantine authors of ‘Vlach’ indicates that these people were perceived as speakers of a Latin language, for this term, initially used by ancient Germans to refer to the Roman and Romanized population of GaulGaul
Gaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...
, was later extended to the population of the Italic peninsula. It passed from the Germans to the Slavs and Byzantines, who applied it to the Romanic, Proto-Romanian populations on both sides of the Danube.
One of the earliest mentions of the name, which Romanians used to refer to themselves appears in an Italian description of the world, probably drawn up in Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
between 1312 and 1342. Among the peoples living in the region of Hungary, the unknown author lists “i Rumeni e i Vallacchi” (‘the Romanians and the Vlachs’), obviously without knowing that the two names referred to one and the same people. The name 'Roman' itself received a pejorative sense from a social point of view: during the Middle Ages, the rumâni were dependent peasants attached to feudal estates in Wallachia.
Cultural aspects
Many Romanian scholars (e.g., Mircea Eliade) suggest that the ethnic continuity is also manifested in the national costume: Romanian peasants are still dressed the same way as the Dacians on Trajan's ColumnTrajan's Column
Trajan's Column is a Roman triumphal column in Rome, Italy, which commemorates Roman emperor Trajan's victory in the Dacian Wars. It was probably constructed under the supervision of the architect Apollodorus of Damascus at the order of the Roman Senate. It is located in Trajan's Forum, built near...
.
According to Mircea Eliade, the types of houses from prehistoric times and certain villages in Transylvania also conserve the structures of the pre-Roman period.
Archeogenetics
A recent study reflects eminent genetic similarity between the old Thracian individuals and modern populations from Southeastern Europe Computing the frequency of common point mutationPoint mutation
A point mutation, or single base substitution, is a type of mutation that causes the replacement of a single base nucleotide with another nucleotide of the genetic material, DNA or RNA. Often the term point mutation also includes insertions or deletions of a single base pair...
s of the present-day European population with the Thracian population has resulted that the Italian (7,9%), the Albanian (6,3%) and the Greek (5,8%) have shown a bias of closer genetic kinship with the Thracian individuals than the Romanian and Bulgarian individuals (only 4,2%).
So far it can only be supposed, that the old Thracian populations would have been able to contribute to the foundation of the Romanian modern genetic pool.
See also
- EthnogenesisEthnogenesisEthnogenesis is the process by which a group of human beings comes to be understood or to understand themselves as ethnically distinct from the wider social landscape from which their grouping emerges...
- Origin of AlbaniansOrigin of AlbaniansThe origin of the Albanians has been for some time a matter of dispute among historians. Most historians conclude that the Albanians are descendants of populations of the prehistoric Balkans, such as the Illyrians, Dacians or Thracians...
- Free DaciansFree DaciansThe "Free Dacians" is the name given by some modern historians to Dacians who putatively remained outside the Roman empire after the emperor Trajan's Dacian wars...
- Eastern Romance substratumEastern Romance substratumThe Eastern Romance languages developed from the Proto-Romanian language, which in turn developed from the Vulgar Latin spoken in a region of the Balkans which has not yet been exactly determined, but is generally agreed to have been a region north of the Jireček Line.That there was...
- ProtochronismProtochronismProtochronism is a Romanian term describing the tendency to ascribe, largely relying on questionable data and subjective interpretations, an idealised past to the country as a whole...
- Romania in the Early Middle AgesRomania in the Early Middle AgesThe Early Middle Ages in Romania spans the period from the withdrawal of the Roman administration from the province of Dacia in the 271–275 AD, thenceforward modern Romania's territories were to be crisscrossed by migrating populations for almost 1,000 years...
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