Vlachs

On the whole it may be said that the truth lies between the two extremes. Roesler is no doubt so far right that after 272, and throughout the early middle ages, the bulk of the Ruman people lay south of the Danube. But it is reasonable to suppose a Latin speaking population continuing to exist in the formerly thickly colonized area embracing the present Transylvania and Little Walachia, with adjoining Carpathian regions.

Early Migrations.

We may therefore assume that the Latin race of eastern Europe never wholly lost touch with its former trans-Danubian strongholds. It was, however, greatly diminished there. The open country, the broad plains of what is now Rumania and the Banat were in barbarian occupation. The centre of gravity of the Rorhan or Romance element of Illyricum had now shifted south of the Danube. By the 6th century a large part of Thrace, Macedonia and even of Epirus had become Latin-speaking.

What had occurred in Trajan's Dacia in the 3rd century was consummated in the 6th and 7th throughout the greater part of the South-Illyrian provinces, and the Slavonic and Avar conquests severed the official connection with eastern Rome. The Roman element was swept hither and thither by the barbarian flood. Nomadism became an essential of independent existence, while large masses of homeless provincials were dragged as captives to be distributed in servile colonies. They were thus in many cases transported by barbarian chiefs—Slav, Avar and Bulgarian—to trans-Danubian and Pannonian regions. The earliest Hungarian historians who describe the Magyar invasion of the 9th century speak of the old inhabitants of the country as Romans, and of the country they occupied as Pascua Romanorum; and the Russian Nestor, writing about iioo, makes the same invaders fight against Slays and Vlachs in the Carpathians. So far from the first mention of the Vlachs north of the Danube occurring only in 1222, it appears from a passage of Nicetas of Chonae that they were to be found already in 1164 as far afield as the borders of Galicia ; and a passage in the Nibelungenlied, which mentions the Vlachs, under their leader Ramunc, in association with the Poles, cannot well be later than 1200.

Nevertheless, through the early middle ages the bulk of the Ru man population lay south of the Danube. It is here that this new

Illyrian Romance race first rises to historic prominence. Already in the 6th century, as we learn from the place-names, such as Sceptecasas, Burgualtu, etc., given by Procopius, the Ruman lan guage was assuming, so far as its Latin elements were concerned, its typical form. In the later campaigns of Commentiolus (587) and Priscus, against the Avars and Slays, we find the Latin-speak ing soldiery of the Eastern emperor making use of such Romance expressions as torna frate! (turn, brother !), or sculca (out of bed) applied to a watch (cf. Ruman a se culca=Italian coricarsi+ ex-[s-] privative). Next we find this warlike Ruman population largely incorporated in the Bulgarian kingdom, and, if we are to judge from the names Paganus and Sabinus, already supplying it with rulers in the 8th century. The blending and close contact during this period of the surviving Latin population with the Slavonic settlers of the peninsula impregnated the language with its large Slavonic ingredient. The presence of an important Latin element in Albanian, the frequent occurrence of Albanian words in Rumanian, and the remarkable retention by both languages of a suffix article, may perhaps imply that both alike took their characteristic shapes in the same region.

Byzantium, which had ceased to be Roman, and had become Romanic, renewed its acquaintance with the descendants of the Latin provincials of Illyricum through a Slavonic medium, and applied to them the name of Vlach, which the Slav himself had borrowed from the Goth. The first mention of Vlachs in a Byzan tine source is about the year 976, when Cedrenus (ii. 439) relates the murder of the Bulgarian tsar Samuel's brother "by certain Vlach wayfarers," at a spot called the Fair Oaks, between Castoria and Prespa. From this period onwards the Ruman inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula are constantly mentioned by this name, and we find a series of political organizations and territorial divisions connected with the name of Vlachia. A short synopsis may be given of the most important of these, outside the limits of Rumania itself.