Origin of the Romanians

[88][89] An unknown author's Description of Eastern Europe from 1308 likewise states that the Balkan Vlachs "were once the shepherds of the Romans" who fled Hungary and "had over them ten powerful kings in the entire Messia and Pannonia".

[96] Piccolomini's version of the Vlachs' origin from Roman settlers in Dacia Traiana was repeated by many scholars—including the Italian Flavio Biondo and Pietro Ranzano, the Transylvanian Saxon Johannes Lebelius and the Hungarian István Szántó — in the subsequent century.

[99] A legend on the origin of the Moldavians, preserved in the Moldo-Russian Chronicle from around 1505,[104][105] narrates that one "King Vladislav of Hungary" invited their Romanian ancestors to his kingdom and settled them "in Maramureș between the Moreș and Tisa at a place called Crij".

[112][113][114] According to Grecescu, Simonescu and Djuvara, the author of the Letopisețul Cantacuzinesc is describing the conquest of Dacia by Trajan, which started with the crossing of the Danube in the area of Turnu Severin, arriving up to Maramureș.

[118][119] The idea was accepted and taught in the Habsburg monarchy, including Hungary until the 1870s,[120] although the Austrian Franz Joseph Sulzer had by the 1780s rejected any form of continuity north of the Danube, and instead proposed a 13th-century migration from the Balkans.

[137] The historian Keith Hitchins notes that the controversy "has lasted down to the post-Communist era", but it "has assumed an attenuated form as membership in the European Union has softened territorial rivalries between Romania and Hungary".

[142][164][1] After the abandonment of Dacia by the Roman army and administration and the frequent invasions of barbarians, the Daco-Roman population moved from the plains and river valleys to mountainous and hilly areas with better natural defenses.

[165][166] Historian Ioan-Aurel Pop concludes that the relocation of hundreds of thousands of people across the Lower Danube in a short period was impossible, especially because the commoners were unwilling to "move to foreign places, where they had nothing of their own and where the lands were already occupied.

[169][173] Instead of archaeological evidence, Alexandru Madgearu highlights the importance of the linguistic traces of continuity, referring to the Romanian river names in the Apuseni Mountains and the preservation of archaic Latin lexical elements in the local dialect.

[200] Both literary sources and archaeological finds confirm this conjecture: the presence of Carpians, Vandals, Taifals, Goths, Gepids, Huns, Slavs, Avars, Bulgarians and Hungarians in the former Roman province in the early Middle Ages is well documented.

[214][215] Both the monarchs and individual landowners (including Roman Catholic prelates) promoted their immigration because the Romanian sheep-herders strengthened the defense of the borderlands, and settled areas which could not be brought into agricultural cultivation.

In this light, the passionate discussion for or against Roman-Romanian continuity has been misled by a conception of ethnicity that is far too inflexibleIn the 5th century BC, Herodotus was the first author to write a detailed account of the natives of south-eastern Europe.

[299][52][300] In his study on medieval Hungarian chronicles, Carlile Aylmer Macartney concluded that the Gesta Hungarorum did not prove the presence of Romanians in the territory, since its author's "manner is much rather that of a romantic novelist than a historian".

[395] Rural cemeteries characterized by burial rites with analogies in sites east of the Carpathians attest to the presence of immigrant "barbarian" communities, for instance, at Obreja and Soporu de Câmpie.

[441][442] In their view, archaeological finds at Brateiu (in Transylvania), Ipotești (in Wallachia) and Costișa (in Moldavia), part of the Ipotești-Ciurel-Cândești Culture, represent the Daco-Roman stage of the Romanians' ethnogenesis which ended in the 6th century.

[173] He proposes that "The wheel-made pottery produced on the fast wheel (as opposed to the tournette), which was found in several settlements of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, may indicate the continuation of Roman traditions" in Transylvania.

[477] They yielded grave goods with analogies in many other regions, including belt buckles widespread in the whole Mediterranean Basin, rings with Greek inscriptions, pectoral crosses, and weapons similar to "Late Avar" items.

[489] Linguist Gabriela Pană Dindelegan (who accepts the continuity theory) asserts that the Romanian shepherds' seasonal movements, and commercial contacts across the mountains secured the preservation of language unity.

[488] From another point of view, Paul Wexler proposes that the "relative recency of the Romance-speaking settlement" is a more plausible explanation, because the levelling effect of migrations is well-documented (for instance, in eastern Germany, and along the western coasts of the USA).

[503] Similarities between Romanian and Albanian are not limited to their common Balkan features and the assumed substrate words: the two languages share calques and proverbs, and display analogous phonetic changes.

[527] Vékony and Schramm also emphasize that the meaning of almost a dozen of inherited Latin terms changed in parallel in Romanian and Albanian, suggesting that contacts between the speakers of Proto-Romanian and Proto-Albanian were frequent.

[74] In contrast, Schramm argues that the only explanation for the lack of early Slavic borrowings is that the Proto-Albanians separated the Proto-Romanians (who lived in the mountains in the central Balkans) from the agriculturalist Proto-Slavs (who inhabited the lowlands) for centuries.

[74] Brezeanu argues that contacts between the Romanians' ancestors and the Slavs became intense due to the arrival of Bulgarian clerics to the lands north of the Lower Danube after the conversion of Bulgaria to Christianity.

[524][558] In his study dedicated to the formation of the Romanian language, Nandriș concludes that the Latin population was "reduced to a pastoral life in the mountains and to agricultural pursuits in the foothills of their pastural lands" in the whole "Carpatho-Balkan area" (both to the north and to the south of the Lower Danube) after the collapse of the Roman rule.

[559] For historian Victor Spinei, the Slavic loanwords evince that the Romanians had already "practiced an advanced level of agriculture" before they entered into close contacts with the Slavs: otherwise they would not have needed the specialized terminology.

[557] Grigore Brâncuș adds to this list that the majority of pomiculture, numerous apicultural, and all the swineherding terms complete a view of a mixed farming society involved in both the growing of crops and the raising of livestock.

[176][569] In contrast to these views, Nandriș (although he also accepts the continuity theory) states that alone among the rivers in Dacia, the development of the name of the Criș from ancient Crisius would be in line with the phonetical evolution of Romanian.

[571] In Schramm's view, the phonetic changes from "s" to "ʃ" in the names of five large rivers also contradict the continuity theory, because Latin did not contain the latter consonant, thus only non-Romanized natives could transmit it to the peoples who settled in the north-Danubian regions after the Romans abandoned them.

[388] According to historian Coriolan H. Opreanu (who supports the continuity theory), the survival of the local names proves the native Dacians' presence in the province at the beginning of the Roman rule.

[594] Numerous place names of Latin or Romanian origin can be detected in the lands south of the Lower Danube (in present-day Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia).