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. Pič's view that the population of the Roman provinces of Moesia and Illyria were Hellenized rather than Romanized, and that it is to Trajan's Dacia alone that we must look for the Roman source of the Vlach race, conflicts with what we know of the Latinizing of the Balkan lands from inscriptions, martyrologies, Procopius's list of Justinian's Illyrian fortresses and other sources. This Roman element south of the Danube had further received a great increase at the expense of Trajan's colonial foundation to the north when Aurelian established his New Dacia on the Moesian side of the river. On the other hand, the analogy supplied by the withdrawal of the Roman provincials from Riparian Noricum tells against the assumption that the official withdrawal of the Roman colonists of Trajan's Dacia by Aurelian entailed the entire evacuation of the Carpathian regions by their Latin-speaking inhabitants. As on the upper Danube the continuity of the Roman population is attested by the Vici Romanisci of early medieval diplomas and by other traces of a Romanic race still represented by the Ladines of the Tirol, so it is reasonable to suppose a Latin-speaking population continued to exist in the formerly thickly colonized area embracing the present Transylvania and Little Walachia, with adjoining Carpathian regions. Even as late as Justinian's time (483-565), the official connexion with the old Dacian province was not wholly lost, as is shown by the erection or restoration of certain fortified posts on the left bank of the lower Danube.
We may therefore assume that the Latin race of eastern Europe never wholly lost touch of its former trans-Danubian Early migrations. strongholds. It was, however, on any showing greatly diminished there. The open country, the broad plains of what is now the Rumanian kingdom, and the Banat of Hungary were in barbarian occupation. The centre of gravity of the Roman 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 connexion with eastern Rome The Roman element was uprooted from its fixed seats, and 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 in the train of their conquerors, 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. In the Acts of St Demetrius of Thessalonica (d. A.D. 306) we find an account of such a Roman colony, which, having been carried away from South-Illyrian cities by the Avar khagan (prince), and settled by him in the Sirmian district beyond the Save, revolted after seventy years of captivity, made their way once more across the Balkan passes, and finally settled as an independent community in the country inland from Salonica. Others, no doubt, thus transported northwards never returned. 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 1100, makes the same invaders fight against Slavs and Vlachs in the Carpathian Mountains. So far from the first mention of the Vlachs north of the Danube occurring only in 1222, as Roesler asserts, 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 the date of a passage in the Nibelungenlied, which mentions the Vlachs, under their leader Râmunc, in association with the Poles, cannot well be later than 1200.
Nevertheless, throughout the early middle ages the bulk of the Ruman population lay south of the Danube. It was in the Balkan lands that the Ruman race and language took their characteristic mould. It is here that this new Illyrian Romance first rises into historic prominence. Already in the 6th century, as we learn from the place-names, such as Sceptecasas, Burgualtu, Clisura, &c., given by Procopius, the Ruman language was assuming, so far as its Latin elements were concerned, its typical form. In the somewhat later campaigns of Commentiolus (587) and Priscus, against the Avars and Slavs, we find the Latin-speaking 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. The fact that these peculiarities are common to the Rumans north of the Danube, whose language differs dialectically from that of their southern brothers, shows that it was this southern branch that throughout the early periods of Ruman history was exercising a dominating influence. Migrations, violent transplantation, the intercourse which was kept up between the most outlying members of the race, in its very origin nomadic, at a later period actual colonization and the political influence of the Bulgaro-Vlachian empire, no doubt contributed to propagate these southern linguistic acquisitions throughout that northern area to which the Ruman race was destined almost imperceptibly to shift its centre of gravity.
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 Byzantine 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.
1. The Bulgaro-Vlach Empire.—After the overthrow of the older Bulgarian tsardom by Basil Bulgaroktonos (976-1025), the Vlach Political and territorial divisions. population of Thrace, Haemus and the Moesian lands passed once more under Byzantine dominion; and in 1185 a heavy tax, levied in kind on the cattle of these warlike mountain shepherds, stirred the Vlachs to revolt against the emperor Isaac Angelus, and under the leadership of two brothers, Peter and Asen, to found a new Bulgaro-Vlachian empire, which ended with Kaliman II in 1257. The dominions of these half-Slavonic half-Ruman emperors extended north of the Danube over a great deal of what is now Rumania, and it was during this period that the Vlach population north of the river seems to have been most largely reinforced. The 13th century French traveller Rubruquis speaks of all the country between Don and Danube as Asen's land or Blakia.
2. Great Walachia (Μεγάλη Βλαχία).—It is from Anna Comnena, in the second half of the 11th century, that we first hear of a Vlach settlement, the nucleus of which was the mountainous region of Thessaly Benjamin of Tudela, in the succeeding century, gives an interesting account of this Great Walachia, then completely independent. It embraced the southern and central ranges of Pindus, and extended over part of Macedonia, thus including the region in which the Roman settlers mentioned in the Acts of St Demetrius had fixed their abode. After the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, Great Walachia was included in the enlarged despotate of Epirus, but it soon reappears as an independent principality under its old name, which, after passing under the yoke
