Post by greenemperor on Nov 28, 2012 18:03:32 GMT -5
The Romanian Colonisation of Dacia
Romanians are descended from the fusion of the indigenous Dacian inhabitants of Romania with the incoming Roman colonists.
Gugliemo Ferraro writes:
“Trajan colonised the conquered territory on a large scale. Colonists were brought in from all directions. Contractors were engaged to work in the mines. Wheat-growing and water transport on the Danube made great progress. In a short time, the old kingdom of Decebalus was transformed into an important Roman province. The old language gave way completely to the speech of Rome, which has been preserved here down to our day.”
(Nouvelle Histoire Roumaine, Paris, p. 234)
The French historian, Victor Chapot, also writes:
“To fill the gaps left by the war and to spread the Latin spirit in the country as quickly as possible, the Romans, contrary to their usual procedure, threw in at once a multitude of colonists recruited over a wide area, notably in the Greek countries, in the Thraco-Illyrian peninsula. Miners were brought in from Dalmatia, soldiers from the Celtic provinces. Trajan also transplanted to the new province 12,000 Dacian families from the unsubdued regions surrounding the Carpathians. Finally, many Italians were attracted by the gold mines; and mixed marriages brought the various elements together. The colonisation took place almost exclusively along the rivers: the Olt (Alutus), the Mureş (Marissus), the Someş, and their tributaries. In the end, the native stock was outnumbered; we dare not use the term fusion; the same inscriptions name side by side a muncipium and a colonia at Apulum, the most populous city. The Latin language spread, thanks to the army and to the growth of associations and the unions of the watermen (utricularii) who transported the riches of the country – salt, iron and marble.
(Le Monde Roumain, Paris, 1927, pp. 431 and 432)
The German writer, Dr. Julius Jung says:
“... Transylvania, the Banat, Oltenia and a part of Muntenia, though inhabited by a large Dacian population, were very rapidly Latinised. The Daco-Roman population at this period spoke a peasant dialect of Latin (romanisches Bauerndialekt).
(Die Anfänge der Romänen)
Father van den Gheyn says:
“There is no doubt that colonisation was rapid in Dacia. This is not the place to dwell on the causes which favoured this Roman influence ... The example of Britain proves nothing: the Celtic element remained dominant there after the conquest; whereas in Dacia the native element had been reduced to impotence.
(“Les populations danubiennes”, in Bulletin de la Société Royale de Géographie d’Anvers, vol. XI, no. 3, 1887.”)
Continuity of Daco-Romanian Settled After the Barbarian Invasions
The Roman withdrawal across the Danube by Aurelian due to incursions of barbarian hordes was never complete. Some Roman colonists still lived on in the lands north of Danube.
Victor Chapot:
“Fortunately, Dacia, which was a sort of enclave in hostile territory, provided him with an excellent base from which to take the Germanic hordes in the rear. The advantages of this position seem to have suggested to him the plan of returning to the views of his remote predecessor and of pushing the limits of the Empire to the Elbe, or at least of incorporating in it the quadrilateral of Bohemia and all the territory enclosed by the Carpathians; the Roman territory would then have presented a mountain front to barbarians on this side.”
(Op. Cit., p. 75)
Vasile Pârvan, the Rumanian historian, writes:
“We may thus accept as probable the existence of a genuine Romanian province north of the Danube from the 4th to the 6th century. It included a large part of the Banat to the west and of Oltenia to the east. This province, like Pannonia, lost in 380, was sometimes completely separated from the Empire; sometimes placed indirectly under its authority by the presence of barbarians ruling it as allies (foederati) of the new Rome; and sometimes really Roman, as in the time of Justinian.”
(Contributions épigraphiques à l’histoire du christianisme daco-romain, p. 192)
L. Homo:
“All that part of the populations which lived in the neighbourhood of the camps – legionaries, soldiers’ families, retired veterans, merchants, etc. – followed the army to the right bank of the Danube. But there must have remained in the province a large number of the old inhabitants, who lived on in good terms with the Goths and who had no interest in abandoning the province. A complete evacuation, moreover, could probably not have been carried out without another war: the Goths would not have acquiesced in the departure of the whole civilian population. If that population accepted the new regime, Aurelian had no reason to adopt a more intransigent attitude”
(Essai sur le règne de l’empereur Aurélien.)
V. Pârvan:
“The monuments discovered at Drubeta (Turnu Severin) supplemented by the statements of Procopius and Justinian, proved unquestionably that were are at home in Trajan’s Dacia, both as Latins and as Christians; that we are not a people late come from other regions.
The ancient monuments of Drubeta prove definitely, I believe, that our Romanian and our Christianity were born and grew naturally by a slow and sure evolution in Trajan’s Dacia, and were not merely imported at a late date from other countries. They were able to develop thus because, until the 12th century, we lived in material and spiritual contact with our Italo-Illyrian mother country. When we were abandoned, in the tempest of the Slavo-Turanian barbarian invasions, we were no longer children, but a vigorous people, young, no doubt, but fully developed. That is why, far perishing, the colonists of Trajan subsisted and multiplied, colonising the region from the Tisza (Theiss) to the sea and to the sources of the Dniester. The Danube was never a hateful enemy separating brothers, but, on the contrary, a true friend uniting them.”
(Op. Cit., p. 201)
J. Thumann:
“Under Roman rule, they (the Rumanians) adopted the Roman language and customs; and when Caracalla had granted them citizenship, they took the name of Rumanians.
It is impossible to accept the view that the Emperor Aurelian transferred all the inhabitants of Dacia across the Danube; a large number naturally still remained in a country so extensive and so mountainous.
The Hungarian invasion of 896 found them in Transylvania and in that part of Hungary situated on this side of the Danube.
But the Wallachians (Rumanians) had long occupied Wallachia and Moldavia as well”
(Untersuchungen über die Geschichte der oestlichen europäischen Völker, Leipzig, 1774.)
Migrations of Rumanians from Transylvania into Moldavia and Wallachia
In the 12th century thousands of Rumanians were forced to leave their homeland in Transylvania and migrate to the nearby principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia due to persecution and the proselytizing zeal of the Catholic Hungarians and Saxons.
“... thousands of Rumanians are passing to the other side of the Carpathians into the Rumanian Principalities and into Moldavia ... the inhabitants of these countries, stupefied by this invasion, exclaim, ‘All Transylvania is coming among us!’...”
Stupefactia vociferari auditi sunt: Tota Transylvania ad nos venit!.
“Many families from Transylvania abandoned their country and their farms and settled here in Romania ... 8,000 Transylvanian Rumanian refugees have settled here in my time, under the name of “Ungureni”.
(Geschichte des Transalpinischen Daciens, III, 1787, p. 363.)
Ignazio Raicevich:
“The taxes paid by the Rumanian immigrants from Transylvania – 13,000 families – are inferior to those paid by the population of the country, 140,000 piastres”
(Osservazioni storiche naturali e politiche interno la Valachia e Moldovia, Naples, 1888, p. 182.)
Rumanians- Remains of the Roman Legions
Johann Troester, a German historian, a native of Transylvania:
“Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania are nothing other than the remains of the Roman legions, which Aurelian later withdrew ... For Trajan, as Eutropius informs us, had given orders to gather people from the whole Roman Empire, and with these elements he filled Dacia, which had recently been conquered.
But when Aurelian was no longer able to check the Goths in Dacia and was oblige to withdraw his legions, these Roman colonies remained under rule of the Goths; and, as they mingled with various peoples, their number increased so that they occupied all Moldavia and Wallachia. They extirpated from these regions all the Germans and they spread out as far as the Maramureş and in Transylvania so that they almost exceeded in number the two other peoples, the Magyars and the Germans, together.
However humiliating the conditions under which the Rumanian people are obliged to live in Transylvania, they are a striking prototype of the ancient Romans; by careful observations, any man who respects the past and makes a thorough study of the facts may convince himself of this.
Everything tends to prove that the Rumanians cannot but be the descendents of those whom Horace describes in his third book of odes:
<< Sed rusticorum mascula militum
Proles, Sabellis docta ligonibus
Versare glebas et severae
Matris ad arbitrium recisos
Portare fustes ...>>
A. De Gerando:
“The Rumanians are the oldest inhabitants of Transylvania. They occupied the country and had founded a principality, when the Hungarians extended their domination over the mountains of ancient Dacia.
The newcomers (the Hungarians) did not settle in a certain part of the country, as they had done in Hungary. They scattered and spread throughout the whole region, but without mingling with the native inhabitants (the Rumanians) ...”
(La Transylvanie et ses habitants, Paris, 1845.)
Thibault Lefebre:
“The present-day Rumanians have kept enough of the manners, the language, the customs and the character of the ancient Italian or Gallic colonists to make it easily possible, in spite of the large admixture of the manners, languages, customs and character of the barbarians, to note in Wallachia and Moldavia the predominance of the Latin element. This people is thus sharply differentiated from the Mongolian, Greek or Slavic types of the surrounding nation.”
(La Valachie au point du vue économique et dipomatique, Paris, 1857.)
Leopold von Ranke, the great German historian:
“Dacia was organised as a Roman province. The native (the Rumanians) today still call the road which leads from Rumania into Transylvania Calea lui Traian (Trajan’s Way), and the pass of Turnu Roşu Poarta Romanilor (the Roman’s Gate). They are the successors of the colonists whom Trajan brought to Dacia from all the provinces of the Roman Empire ... These (Dacian) provinces were now Romanised, as is proved by the present language of the country (the Rumanian language), which has persisted from ancient times down to our own day.”
(Weltgeschichte, Leipzig, 1883, p. 272).
Traugott Tamm:
“The Rumanians still live today where their ancestors lived 17 centuries ago. A succession of peoples came and ruled over the provinces of the lower Danube, but none of them was able to end the natural existence of the Rumanians. ‘The water runs off, the stone remain’ (Apa trece, pietrele rămân), says a Rumanian proverb. The hordes of the peoples who had left their own lands as emigrants disappeared like clouds before the sun, but the Rumanians, bowing their heads, let the storm pass in Dacia and kept the land which they had inherited from their ancestors until the fine weather returned; then they rose and stretched their limbs.”
(Ueber den Ursprung der Rumänen; ein Beitrag zur Ethnographie Süd-Osteuropas, Bonn, 1891, pp. 84, 85.)
Father van den Gheyn:
“When the Emperor Trajan returned in triumph from the campaign on the shores of the Danube, where, after two great wars which lasted five years, he had crushed the great nation of the Dacians, the people and Senate of Rome raised, in memory of this victory, the superb monument known as Trajan’s Column. On the shaft of this column were carved in a series of bas-reliefs the chief phases of the struggle which the Empire had just carried on against the peoples of the Danube. The Roman colonies in Dacia were founded by Trajan in 105 A.D., and it was in 274 that the Emperor Aurelian abandoned to the barbarians the left bank of the Danube.
It is impossible to doubt that it was the interval from 105 to 274 that the Rumanian language branched off from the Latin. The Rumanians must be regarded as the racial product of a mixture of the ancient Getae or Dacians with the Roman colonists who came into Dacia following upon the conquest of Trajan.”
(Loc. Cit.)
The French historian Victor Duruy:
“When Trajan had extended the frontier of the Empire to the Carpathians, he realised that a few garrisons scattered over this vast province would not suffice to hold the Dacians in check and that the barbarism which he had driven back would return as the victorious army retired. He therefore called in from the old provinces an entire people. In spite of fifteen hundred years of hardships, the Rumanians today number twelve million. We will not, as easily as the Emperor Aurelian, bid a final farewell to this valiant Rumanian population of Trajan’s Dacia. Worthy of their origin and of him who gave them their first cities, they have played in the Carpathians the same part as Pelagius and his companions in the Asturias, braving all invasions from the heights of that impregnable fortress, winning back foot by foot the lost ground and reconstituting, after sixteen centuries of combats, a new Italy, Ţara Românească, the appearance of which in the ranks of the free nations the people of Latin race salute.”
(Histoire des Romains depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à l’invasion des Barbares, Paris, 1879, vol. V, p. 185.)
Ancient Sources Mentioning the Presence of Rumanians north of the Danube
The Russian Chronicle of Nestor:
“Near this sea of the Varangians, live the Varangians, to the east, toward the land of Shem. They likewise live to the west, also near this sea, as far as the confines of the land of the Angles and of the Volochi. Among the descendants of Japhet are likewise numbered the Varangians, the Suevi, the Norwegians, the Goths, the Russians, the Angles, the Galicians, the Volochi, the Germans, the Carolingians, the Venetians, the Franks, and other tribes. They are settled from the west to the south and are neighbours of the peoples descended from Ham ...
And when the Volochi attacked the Slavs of the Danube and settled among them and oppressed them, the Slavs departed and settled on the Vistula, under the name of Leshi.
In 888-897 A.D. the Hungarians passed near Kiev, near the mountain which is still called today Ugors Koie, and when they had reached the banks of the Dnieper, they set up their tents there, for they were nomads, as the Polovitsi still are today. Coming from the east, they marched in haste over the high mountains which are called the mountains of the Ougri, and began to fight against the Volochi and the Slavs who inhabited those countries. The Slavs had been settled there before, and the Volochi had subdued the country of the Slavs. Later, however, the Hungarians drove out the Volochi, took possession of this country, and settled in the same places of the Slavs, whom they had subdued. Since then that region is called Hungary.”
Although certain historians have claimed that these Volochi of the Chronicle of Nestor were Franks or Bulgarians, Schlözer says:
“These Volochi are neither Rumanians nor Bulgarians nor ‘Walsche’ (Welsh) but ‘Vlachi’ (Rumanians), descendants of the great and very ancient family of the Thracians, Dacians and Getae, who still possess today their own language, and, in spite of all persecutions, lived by millions in Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania and Hungary. It is true that they are nowhere mentioned under this name before the 11th century. They nevertheless inhabited a district which for several centuries remained a terra incognita after Aurelian withdrew all the Roman colonists from Dacia and abandoned the region north of the Danube. It is a priori infinitely unlikely that these nations have completely vanished since then. They were probably long subject to the Goths, then to the Huns and to yet other peoples; but they always freed themselves. As to what happened next in their great native country between the 5th and the 9th centuries, history is informed only imperfectly or not at all. And what it tells us is at least not in contradiction with what Nestor states, namely that there was a time when the Vlachi (perhaps of Transylvania) attacked Pannonia and ended by subjugating the Slav inhabitants who people the region at that time.”
(Annales russes, III, p. 145.)
Chronicle of the Anonymous Notary of King Bela of Hungary (12th century)
“And having sojourned here for some time, Tuhutum, father of Horca, had learned from the inhabitants, thanks to his shrewdness, that the lands beyond the forests, where lived a certain Blac (Rumanian) Gelu, were rich; he began to caress the hope of obtaining, by favour of Duke Arpad, the territories beyond the forests for himself and his successors.
Tuhutum, mentioned above, a very prudent man, sent the artful Ocmand, father of Opaforcus, to inform himself secretly concerning the quality and the fertility of the lands of Ultrasylvania (Transylvania) and concerning the character of its inhabitants, as well as concerning the possibility of making war against them.”
Tuhutum, having learned that this country was rich, sent emissaries to Duke Arpad to obtain permission to undertake an expedition against Gelu, beyond the forests. Duke Arpad, after taking counsel, approved the proposal of Tuhutum and gave him permission to go and fight against Gelu. Having learned this from his emissaries, Tuhutum prepared his troops, and having taken leave of this companions, set out through the forests to the eastward against Gelu, Duke of the Blachs (Rumanians). Gelu, Duke of Ultrasylvania (Transylvania), however, learning of his arrival, assembled his troops and hastened on horseback to meet Tuhutum, intending to stop him at the gates of Mezes. But Tuhutum, crossing the forest in a single day, reached the river Almaş. The two armies thus faced each other, with only the river between them. Duke Gelu, with his archers wished to stop the enemy at this place ...”
The Magyar Chronicle of Simion of Geza (13th century)
“The populations of the cities of Pannonia, Pamphylia, Macedonia, Dalmatia and Phrygia, which had been devastated by the sieges and the plundering of the Huns, left their native lands and crossed over, with the consent of Attila, into Apulia, on the Adriatic; the Blachs (Rumanians), who had been their shepherds and their colonists, remained of their own accord in Pannonia.
... For these Zacula (Siculi) are the descendants of the Huns; when they learned that the Hungarians were returning to Pannonia, they went to meet them in Ruthenia. After having conquered Pannonia with them, they obtained a part of it, not in the plain, but in the neighbourhood of the Blachs (Rumanians), whose lot they shared in the mountains.
... But when the sons of Attila had almost perished in war, and with them the Scythian people ..., Pannonia remained for ten years without a king. There were in it only foreigners: Sclavins, Greeks, Teutons, Messians and Vlachs (Rumanians), who in Attila’s lifetime had served him as slaves.”
The Anonymous Chronicle of 1308
“The Rumanians of Pannonia (present-day Hungary): We note that formerly the Kingdom of Pannonia was not called Hungary, but Moesia and Pannonia; the Pannonians who peopled Pannonia at that time were all Rumanian shepherds having at their head ten mighty kings ruling over the whole country of Moesia and Pannonia.
The Hungarians came from the land of the Scythians and from the great kingdom which is situated on the other side of the marshes of Maeotis (the Sea of Azov). They fought in the plains between Sycambria and Alba with the ten kings mentioned above and vanquished them.
The Blazi: Between Macedonia, Achaia and Salonika there is a very numerous and widely distributed people called the Blazi (Rumanians) who also were formerly Rumanian shepherds. Because of the fertility of the soil and the great number of pastures, they formerly lived in Hungary, where were the pastures of the Rumanians. But later, having been driven out by the Hungarians from those parts, they took refuge in his region. They possess in abundance excellent cheeses, milk and meat, in great quantity than other nations.
The country of these Blachs, which is large and immensely rich, was almost completely occupied by the army of Prince Charles, which established itself in the region of Greece ...”
Possessions of the Rumanian Sovereigns of Wallachia and Moldavia in Transylvania
Even in the middle ages the Rumanian kingdoms of Wallachia and Moldavia extended into Transylvania.
Romulus Seişanu:
“It appears from the documents published by the Hungarian scholar Pesty relative to the Banat of Severin, that this region was a Rumanian province divided into eight districts. A special Rumanian legal system was in force there. There had existed here an old Rumanian nobility thanks to whom the Rumanian people had been able to develop.
The district of Haţeg had been ruled in the 13th century by the Rumanian Litovoi, Voivode of Oltenia.”
(Rumania, Romanian Historical Studies, 1987)
Mircea the Elder, sovereign of the Rumanian lands, described himself in 1393 as:
“Sovereign by the grace of God and sole master of all the land of Hungaria-Vlachia and beyond the Carpathian Mountains as far as the lands of the Tatars, of Haţeg and of Amlaş, sovereign of the Banat to the west, master of both banks of the Danube as far as the Black Sea, sovereign of the citadel of Dârstor (Silistra) and of all the districts and cities as far as the frontiers of Adrianopolis.”