Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/293

Rh V L A C H S 269 Pic s view that the population of the Roman provinces of Mucsia, &c., 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 inscrip tions, 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 Mcesian 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 mediaeval diplomas and by other traces of a Romanic race still represented by the Ladines of Tyrol, 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, the official con nexion with the old Dacian province was not wholly lost, as is shown by the erection or restoration of certain tetes- de-pont and castella 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 strongholds. It was, however, on any showing greatly diminished there. The open country, the broad plains of what is now the Roumanian 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 Gth century a large part of Thrace, Macedonia, and even of Epirus, had become Latin-speaking. What had occurred in Trajan s Dacia in the 3d century was consummated in the Gth 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 overthrow of civic life and break-down of provincial organization was complete. 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. On the other hand, large masses of homeless provincials were dragged off as captives in the train of their barbarian 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 we actually find an account of such a Roman colony, which, having been carried away from South-Illyrian cities by the Avar khagan, 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. It is certain that 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 Pasc^la Romanorum; and the Russian Nestor, writing about 1100, makes the same invaders fight against Slavs and Vlachs (Volochi) 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 diona? that they were to be found already in 11G4 as far afield as the borders of Galicia. It is nevertheless true that throughout the early Middle Ages the bulk of the Rouman population lay south of the Danube. It was in the Balkan lands that the Rouman race and language took their characteristic mould. It is here that this new Illyrian Romance first rises into historic prominence. Already in the Gth century, as we learn from the place names, such as Sceptecasas, Burgualtu, Clisura, &c., given by Procopius, the Rouman 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 Slovenes, we find the Latin-speaking soldiery of the Eastern emperor making use of such Romance expressions as &quot; torna, frate!&quot; (turn, brother!), or &quot;sculca&quot; (out of bed) applied to a watch (cf. Rouman &quot; a se culca &quot; = Italian &quot; coricarsi&quot; + ex-(s-) privative). Next we find this warlike Rouman 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 periodof the surviving Latin population with the Slovene settlers of the peninsula impregnated the language with its large Slavonic ingredient; and the considerable Albanian element in Rouman, as well as the still greater element of Rouman in Albanian, is alone sufficient to show that the two languages took their charac teristic shapes in a contiguous area. The fact that these peculiarities are common to the Roumans 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 Rouman his tory 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 en masse 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 Rouman race was destined almost imperceptibly to shift its centre of gravity. Byzantium, which had ceased to be Roman, and become Romaic, renewed its acquaintance with the descendants of the Latin provincials of Illyricum through a Slavonic medium, and applied to them the name of &quot; Vlach,&quot; 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 czar Samuel s brother &quot; by certain Vlach way farers,&quot; at a spot called the Fair Oaks, between Castoria and Prespa. From this period onwards the Rouman inhabit ants 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 &quot; Vlachia.&quot; Within the limits of the present article it is impossible to give more than a short synopsis of the most important of these, while for a history of the later Rouman princi palities of Walachia and Moldavia the reader is referred to the article ROUMANIA. 1. The B ulgaro- Vlach Empire. After the overthrow of the older Bulgarian czardom by Basil Bulgaroktonos, the Vlach population of Thrace, H;emus, and the Mcesiau 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 leader ship of two brothers, Peter and Ascn, to found a new Bulgaro- Vlachian empire, which ended with Kaliman II. in 1257. The dominions of these half-Slavonic half-Kouman emperors extended north of the Danube over a great deal of what is now Roumania, and it was during this period that the Vlach population north of the river seems to have been most largely reinforced. The French traveller Rubruquis speaks of all the country between Don and Danube as &quot;Asen s land&quot; or &quot;Blakia.&quot; 2. Great IValachia (MeyaArj BAax^a). It is from Anna Com- nena, in the second half of the llth century, that we first hear of