Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/292

Rh 268 V I Z V L A the raja five years afterwards clear of all incumbrances. It again came under their charge in 1827, during a minority, but on the raja s coming of age it was again restored with a surplus. VIZIER (Arabic Wazir}, literally the &quot;burden bearer&quot; of the sovereign. The office of vizier, which spread from the Arabs to the Persians, Turks, Mongols, and other Oriental peoples, arose under the first Abbasid caliphs, and took shape under their great ministers the Barmecides (see vol. xvi. p. 591). The vizier stood between sovereign and subjects, representing the former in all matters touch ing the latter. This withdrawal of the head of the state from direct contact with his people was unknown to the Omayyads, and was certainly an imitation of Persian usage ; it has even been plausibly conjectured that the name is but the Arabic adaptation of a Persian title. 1 It appears, however, in the Koran (xx. 30, xxv. 37), where Aaron is called the wazir of Moses, and these passages are appealed to by Arabic writers as giving divine sanction to the institution. The title of ivazlr was often given to ministers of a special department, such as the treasury or the police, but the wazir (the grand vizier, as Europeans say) bore the whole burden of the state, and, although his position was absolutely uncertain, depending on the mere will of the sovereign, his power was unlimited. His place was one of dizzy grandeur but of extreme difficulty. He was expected to be able to answer all questions, realize every wish of the caliph, keep the coffers of the state full, and yet find time to cultivate the personal favour of the sovereign by the display of social gifts. Such were the Barmecide viziers, the brilliant type of which all subse quent Oriental ministers are more or less imperfect copies. Ultimately under the caliph lladi the grand vizier gave way to a mayor of the palace called the amir al-omard, but the old office and title were continued at the courts of the princes who rose on the decline of the caliphate. In Spain, where the chamberlain (hdjib) was the greatest officer of state, the title of ivazlr was given to governors of towns, and in this sense the word was the parent of the Spanish alguazil. VIZZINI, an inland town of Sicily, in the Italian province of Catania, 39 miles E.N.E. of Terranova and 34 miles W.N.W. of Syracuse, is a prosperous country place of 13,966 inhabitants (1881). It has several churches (S. Gregorio, Minori Osservanti, S. Maria de Greci), with pictures of some artistic or antiquarian interest. VLACIIS. Vlach, otherwise written Wallack, is a general name for all the members of the Latin-speaking race inhabiting eastern Europe. The name is in its origin identical with our &quot; Welsh,&quot; &quot; Welshman,&quot; and represents a Slavonic adaptation of a generic term applied by the Teutonic races at the time of the migration of peoples to all Roman provincials. It thus finds its analogies in the German name for Italy Welschland (Walischland), in the Walloons of the Low Countries, the &quot; Wallgau&quot; of Tyrol, &c. An early instance of its application to the Roman population of the Eastern empire is found in the Traveller s Sony, where in a passage which in all probability connects itself with the early trade-route between the Baltic staple of Wollin and Byzantium, the gleeman speaks of Caesar s realm as Walarie = &quot;Welshry.&quot; In verse 140 he speaks of the &quot; Rum-walas,&quot; and it is to be observed that &quot; lum &quot; is one of the words by which the Vlachs of eastern Europe still know themselves. The Slavs, at least in their principal extent, first knew the Roman empire through a Teutonic medium, and adopted their terms Vlach, Voloch, from the Ostro-Gothic equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon &quot; Wealh.&quot; The name is thus of foreign origin, the native Vlachs continuing to this day to call 1 See Lagarde, Armenische Studien, p. 147, and Noldeke s trans lation of Tabari, pp. 53 n, 444 n. themselves &quot; Rumeni,&quot; Romeni, or even Romani; and it is from the native pronunciation of the Roman name that we have the equivalent expression Rouman, a word which must by no means be confined to that part of the Vlach race inhabiting the present kingdom of Roumania. This Vlach or Rouman race constitutes a distinct division of the Latin family of peoples, widely disseminated throughout eastern Europe, both north and south of the Danube. North of the Danube the Roumans inhabit, besides Walachia and Moldavia, Bessarabia and the adjoining South-Russian districts, a large part of Transylvania and the Hungarian Banat, and extend sporadically from the Bug to the Adriatic. South of the Danube the central glens of Pindus form the principal nucleus of Rouman habitation, but there is besides a considerable colony in the Epirote district of Musakja, in /Etolia and Acarnania, in various districts of Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia, and the Bulgarian principality. In Servia this element is preponderant in the Timok valley, while in Istria it is represented by the Cici, at present largely Slavonized, as are now entirely the kindred Morlachs of Dalmatia. The centre of gravity of the Vlach or Rouman race is at present unquestionably north of the Danube, and corre sponds roughly to the limits of Trajan s Dacian province. From this circumstance the popular idea has arisen that the race itself represents the descendants of the Romanized population of Trajan s Dacia, which was assumed to have maintained an unbroken existence in Walachia, Transylvania, &c., beneath the dominion of a succession of invaders. The Vlachs of Pindus, etc., on this hypothesis, were to be regarded as later immigrants from the lands north of the Danube. In 1871 Roesler published, in a collective form, a series of essays, in which he absolutely denied the claim of the Roumanian and Transylvanian Vlachs to be regarded as Dacian autochthones. He laid stress on the statements of Vopiscus and others as implying the total withdrawal of the Roman provincials from Trajan s Dacia by Aurelian, and on the non-mention by historians of a Latin popula tion in the lands on the left bank of the lower Danube, during their successive occupation by Goths, Huns, Gepidtc, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars, and other barbarian races. He found the first trace of a Rouman settlement north of the Danube in a Transylvanian diploma of 1222. Roesler s thesis has been generally regarded as an entirely new de parture in critical ethnography. As a matter of fact, his conclusions had to a great extent been already anticipated by Sulzer in his Geschichtc des Transalpinischen Daciens, published at Vienna in 1781, and at a still earlier date by the Dalmatian historian Lucius of Trail in his work De Regno Dalmatise et Croatia?, 1666. The theory of the later immigration of the Roumans into their present abodes north of the Danube, as stated in its most extreme form by Roesler, commanded wide accept ance, and in Hungary it was politically utilized as a plea for refusing parity of treatment to a race of com paratively recent intruders. In Roumania itself Roesler s views were resented as an attack on Rouman nationality. Outside Roumania they found a determined opponent in Dr Jung, of Innsbruck, who in his Anfdnge der Romdnen upheld the continuity of the Roman provincial stock in Trajan s Dacia, disputing from historic analogies the total withdrawal of the provincials by Aurelian ; and the reaction against Roesler was carried still further by T. Lad. PiS (Ueber die Al&amp;gt;stammung der Rumdnen, 1880) and Prof. A. D. Xenopol of Jassy (Les Roumains au Moyen Aye, 1885). On the whole, as often in controversies, it may be said that the truth lies between the two extremes. Roesler is no doubt so far right that at the time of the migration of peoples, and indeed throughout the early Middle Ages, the bulk of the Rouman people lay south of the Danube.