Origin of The Romanians - Historiography: Origin of The Theories

Historiography: Origin of The Theories

Byzantine authors were the first to write of the Romanians, thus the earliest records were made of the Vlachs of the Balkans. The 11th-century scholar, Kekaumenos writes of a Vlach homeland situated "near the Danube and (...) the Sava, where the Serbians lived more recently", He also associates them with the Dacians and the Bessi and with the Dacian king Decebal. Accordingly, historians have located this homeland to several places, including Lower Pannonia (Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu) and "Dacia Aureliana" (Gottfried Schramm). The 12th-century John Kinnamos mentiones that the Vlachs "are said to be formerly colonists from the people of Italy".

The Russian Primary Chronicle from 1113 also contains possible references to the Vlachs. It relates how the Volokhi seized "the territory of the Slavs" and were later expelled by the Hungarians. Since the presence of the Slavs clearly antedates the arrival of the Volokhi in the chronicle's narration, the Volokhi have been identified not only with the Vlachs, but also with Romans occupying Transdanubia or with Franks annexing the same territory (for instance, by Lubor Niederle, and by Gyula Kristó, respectively).

Among the Western European authors, William of Rubruck who met Vlachs taking their tribute to the Great Khan in 1245 suggests that the Vlachs of the Second Bulgarian Empire descended from the Ulac people, who lived beyond Bashkiria. The late 13th-century Hungarian chronicler, Simon of Kéza states that the Vlachs used to be the Romans' "shepherds and husbandmen" who "elected to remain behind in Pannonia" when their masters left the province at the arrival of the Huns. An unknown author's Description of Eastern Europe from 1308 likewise states that the Balkan Vlachs "were once the shepherds of the Romans" who "had over them ten powerful kings in the entire Messia and Pannonia".

Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian scholar argued around 1450 that the Romanians' ancestors had been Roman colonists settled by Emperor Trajan. This view was repeated by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini who added that the Vlachs were named after one Pomponius Flaccus, a commander sent against the Dacians. In contrast with these views, the 17th-century Johannes Lucius expressed his concerns about the survival of Romans in a territory exposed to invasions for a millennium.

A Romanian legend on their origin was preserved in the Moldo-Russian Chronicle written around 1505. It narrates that one "King Vladislav of Hungary" invited the Romanians' ancestors to his kingdom to fight against the Mongols and settled them "in Maramureş between the Moreş and Tisa at a place called Crij". Grigore Ureche's Chronicle of Moldavia of 1647 is the first Romanian historical work stating that the Romanians "all come from Rîm" (Rome). Miron Costin explicitly connects the Romanians' ethnogenesis to the conquest of "Dacia Trajana" in his three chronicles published between 1675 and 1684.

Constantin Cantacuzino proposed in 1716 that the native Dacians also had a role in the formation of the Romanian people. However, Petru Maior and other historians of the "Transylvanian School" flatly denied any mixture between the natives and the conquerors. The Romanians' Daco-Romanian origin only became widely accepted after the publication of Dionisie Fotino's History of Dacia in 1818. In contrast, the Austrian Franz Joseph Sulzer had already in the 1780s rejected any form of continuity north of the Danube. Instead he proposed a 13th-century migration from the Balkans.