The "shepherds of the Romans" (Latin: pastores Romanorum) were a population living in the Carpathian Basin at the time of the Hungarian conquest of the territory around 900, according to the Gesta Hungarorum and other medieval sources.
The identification of the lowlands east of the Middle Danube as pasturing lands was first recorded in Emperor Constantine VII's De administrando imperio ("On Administering the Empire") in connection with the towns of Dalmatia.
[3] According to an early 13th-century report by one Friar Ricardus, a lost Hungarian chronicle—The Deeds of the Christian Hungarians—stated that Hungary had been called the pasturing lands of the Romans before the Magyars conquered it.
[3] The identification of Hungary as the one-time pascua Romanorum ("the Romans' pasturing lands") was also mentioned in the Rhymed Chronicle of Stična from the 1240s, in Thomas the Archdeacon's History of the Bishops of Salona and Split, which was written after 1250, and in the Anonymi descriptio Europae orientalis from the early 14th century.
[5] According to the chapter 9 of the Gesta Hungarorum, Rus' princes informed the Magyars who marched by Kyiv towards "Pannonia" that in that land "there lived the Slavs, Bulgarians, Blachii, and the shepherds of the Romans" (quam terram habitarent Sclavi, Bulgarii et Blachii ac pastores Romanorum).