Origin of the Romanians

Several theories, in great extent mutually exclusive, address the issue of the origin of the Romanians. The Romanian language descends from the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken in the Roman provinces north of the " Jireček Line" (a proposed notional line separating the predominantly Latin-speaking territories from the Greek-speaking lands in Southeastern Europe) in Late Antiquity. The theory of Daco-Roman continuity argues that the Romanians are mainly descended from the Daco-Romans, a people developing through the cohabitation of the native Dacians and the Roman colonists in the province of Dacia Traiana (primarily in present-day Romania) north of the river Danube. The competing immigrationist theory states that the Romanians' ethnogenesis commenced in the provinces south of the river with Romanized local populations (known as Vlachs in the Middle Ages) spreading through mountain refuges, both south to Greece and north through the Carpathian Mountains. Other theories state that the Romanized local populations were present over a wide area on both sides of the Danube and the river itself did not constitute an obstacle to permanent exchanges in both directions; according to the "admigration" theory, migrations from the Balkan Peninsula to the lands north of the Danube contributed to the survival of the Romance-speaking population in these territories.

Political motivationsthe Transylvanian Romanians' efforts to achieve their emancipation, Austro-Hungarian and Romanian expansionism, and Hungarian irredentisminfluenced the development of the theories, and "national passions" still color the debates. In 2013, authors of ''The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages'' came to the conclusion that the "historical, archaeological and linguistic data available do not seem adequate to give a definitive answer" in the debate. Their view was accepted by scholars contributing to ''The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages'', published in 2016, which reiterates that "the location and extent of the territory where "Daco-Romance" originated" is uncertain.

Historic background

Three major ethnic groupsthe Dacians, Illyrians and Thraciansinhabited the northern regions of Southeastern Europe in Antiquity. Modern knowledge of their languages is based on limited evidence (primarily on proper names), making all scholarly theories proposing a strong relationship between the three languages or between Thracian and Dacian speculative.

The Illyrians were the first to be conquered by the Romans, who organized their territory into the province of Illyricum around 60 BC. In the lands inhabited by Thracians, the Romans set up the province of Moesia in 6 AD, and Thracia forty years later. The territory between the Lower Danube and the Black Sea (now Dobruja in Romania and Bulgaria) was attached to Moesia in 46.

The Romans annihilated the Dacian kingdom to the north of the Lower Danube under Emperor Trajan in 106. Its western territories were organized into the province of Dacia (or "Dacia Traiana"), but Maramureș and further regions inhabited by the Costoboci, Bastarnae and other tribes remained free of Roman rule. The Romans officially abandoned Dacia under Emperor Aurelian (''r.'' 270–275). Along with the abandonment of Dacia, Aurelian organized a new province bearing the same name (" Dacia Aureliana") south of the Lower Danube. Roman forts were erected north of the river in the 320s, but the river became the boundary between the empire and the Goths in the 360s. Meanwhile, from 313 under the Edict of Milan, the Roman Empire began to transform itself into a Christian state. Roman emperors supported Christian missionaries in the north-Danubian territories which were dominated by the Goths from the 340s.

The Huns destroyed all these territories between 376 and 406, but their empire also collapsed in 453. Thereafter the Gepids exercised control over Banat, Crișana, and Transylvania. The Bulgars, Antes, Sclavenes and other tribes made frequent raids across the Lower Danube against the Balkans in the 6th century. The Roman Empire revived under Emperor Justinian I (''r.'' 527–565), but the Avars, who had subjugated the Gepids, invaded the Balkans from the 580s. In 30 years all Roman troops were withdrawn from the peninsula, where only Dyrrhachium, Thessaloniki and a few other towns remained under Roman rule.

The next arrivals, the Bulgars, established their own state on the Lower Danube in 681. Their territorial expansion accelerated after the collapse of the Avar Khaganate in the 790s. The ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire, Boris I (''r.'' 852–889) converted to Christianity in 864. A synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church promoted a liturgy in Old Church Slavonic in 893.

Bulgaria was invaded by the Magyars (or Hungarians) in 894, but a joint counter-attack by the Bulgars and the Pechenegsa nomadic Turkic peopleforced the Magyars to find a new homeland in the Carpathian Basin. Historians still debate whether they encountered a Romanian population in the territory. The Byzantines occupied the greater part of Bulgaria under Emperor John I Tzimiskes (''r.'' 969–976). The Bulgars regained their independence during the reign of Samuel (''r.'' 997–1014), but Emperor Basil II of Byzantium conquered their country around 1018.

The Hungarians' supreme ruler, Stephen, was baptized according to the Western rite. He expanded his rule over new territories, including Banat. Pecheneg groups, pushed by the Ouzesa coalition of Turkic nomadssought asylum in the Byzantine Empire in the 1040s. After the Ouzes there followed the Cumansalso a Turkic confederationwho took control of the Pontic steppes in the 1070s. Thereafter, specific groups, including the Hungarian-speaking Székelys and the Pechenegs, defended the frontiers of the Kingdom of Hungary against them. The arrival of mostly German-speaking colonists in the 1150s also reinforced the Hungarian monarch's rule in the region.

The Byzantine authorities introduced new taxes, provoking an uprising in the Balkan Mountains in 1185. The local Bulgarians and Vlachs achieved their independence and established the Second Bulgarian Empire in coalition with the Cumans. A chieftain of the western Cuman tribes accepted Hungarian supremacy in 1227. The Hungarian expansion towards the Pontic steppes was halted by the large Mongol campaign against Eastern and Central Europe in 1241. Although the Mongols withdrew in a year, their invasion caused destruction throughout the region.

The unification of small polities ruled by local Romanian leaders in Oltenia and Muntenia led to the establishment of a new principality, Wallachia. It achieved independence under Basarab the Founder, who defeated a Hungarian army in the battle of Posada in 1330. A second principality, Moldavia, became independent in the 1360s under Bogdan I, a Romanian nobleman from the Voivodeship of Maramureș.

Theories on the Romanians' ethnogenesis

Romanians, known by the exonym Vlachs in the Middle Ages, speak a language descended from the Vulgar Latin that was once spoken in south-eastern Europe. Inscriptions from the Roman period show that a line, known as the " Jireček Line", can be drawn through the Balkan Peninsula, which separated the Latin-speaking northern provinces, including Dacia, Moesia and Pannonia from the southern regions where Greek remained the predominant language. Eastern Romance now has four variants, which are former dialects of a Proto-Romanian language. Daco-Romanian, the official language of Romania, is the most widespread of the four variants. Speakers of the Aromanian language live in scattered communities in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and North Macedonia. Another two, by now nearly extinct variants, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, are spoken in some villages in North Macedonia and Greece, and in Croatia, respectively. Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian are spoken in the central and southern regions of the Balkans (to the south of the Jireček Line), indicating that they migrated to these territories in the Middle Ages.

Among the first to note the Latin character of the language were Italian humanists Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Biondo. One of the first scholars who systematically studied the Romance languages, Friedrich Christian Diez (1797–1876), described Romanian as a semi-Romance language in the 1830s. In his ''Grammar of the Romance Languages'' (1836) Diez highlights six languages of the Romance area which attract attention, in terms of their grammatical or literary significance: Italian and Romanian, Spanish and Portuguese, Provençal and French. All six languages have their first and common source in Latin, a language which is 'still intertwined with our civilization'. Harald Haarmann considers that any discussion about the position of Romanian within the Romance philology was definitely decided with the Grammar of Diez. After the publication of his ''Grammar of the Romance Languages'', Romanian is always listed among the Romance languages.
In 2009, Kim Schulte likewise argued that "Romanian is a language with a hybrid vocabulary". The proportion of loanwords in Romanian is indeed higher than in other Romance languages. Its certain structural featuressuch as the construction of the future tensealso distinguish Romanian from other Romance languages. Some peculiarities connect it to Albanian, Bulgarian and other tongues spoken in the Balkan Peninsula. Nevertheless, as linguist Graham Mallinson emphasizes, Romanian "retains enough of its Latin heritage at all linguistic levels to qualify for membership of the Romance family in its own right", even without taking into account the " re-Romancing tendency" during its recent history.

The territories south of the Danube were subject to the Romanization process for about 800 years, while Dacia province to the north of the river was only for 165 years under Roman rule, which caused "a certain disaccord between the effective process of Roman expansion and Romanization and the present ethnic configuration of Southeastern Europe", according to Lucian Boia. Political and ideological considerations, including the dispute between Hungary and Romania over Transylvania, have also colored these scholarly discussions.

Accordingly, theories on the Romanian ''Urheimat'' or "homeland" can be divided into two or more groups, including the theory of Daco-Roman continuity of the continuous presence of the Romanians' ancestors in the lands north of the Lower Danube and the opposite immigrationist theory. Independently of the theories, a number of scholars propose that Romanian developed from the tongue of a bilingual population, because bilingualism is the most probable explanation for its peculiarities.

Historiography: origin of the theories

Byzantine authors were the first to write of the Romanians (or Vlachs). The 11th-century scholar Kekaumenos wrote of a Vlach homeland situated "near the Danube and  ..nbsp;the Sava, where the Serbians lived more recently". He associates the Vlachs with the Dacians and the Bessi. Accordingly, historians have located this homeland in several places, including Pannonia Inferior and Dacia Aureliana. When associating the Vlachs with ancient ethnic groups, Kekaumenos followed the practice of Byzantine authors who named contemporary peoples for peoples known from ancient sources. The 12th-century scholar John Kinnamos wrote that the Vlachs "are said to be formerly colonists from the people of Italy". William of Rubruck wrote that the Vlachs of Bulgaria descended from the ''Ulac'' people, who lived beyond Bashkiria. According to Victor Spinei, Rubruck's words imply that he regarded the Vlachs a migrant population, coming from the region of the Volga like their Hungarian and Bulgarian neighbors. The late 13th-century Hungarian chronicler Simon of Kéza states that the Vlachs (''Blackis'') were "shepherds and husbandmen of the Huns" who "remained in Pannonia". 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".

Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian scholar was the first to write (around 1450) that the Romanians' ancestors had been Roman colonists settled in Dacia Traiana. In 1458, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini stated in his work ''De Europa'' (1458) that the Vlachs were a ''genus Italicum'' ("an Italian race") and were named after one Pomponius Flaccus, a commander sent against the Dacians. Piccolomini's version of the Vlachs' origin from Roman settlers in Dacia Traiana was repeated by many scholarsincluding the Italian Flavio Biondo and Pietro Ranzano, the Transylvanian Saxon Johannes Lebelius and the Hungarian István Szántó in the subsequent century. Laonikos Chalkokondylesa late-15th-century Byzantine scholarstated that he never heard anyone "explain clearly where" the Romanians "came from to inhabit" their lands. Chalkokondyles wrote: "the race that inhabits Dacia and the mount Pindus also spread into Thessaly: both groups are called Vlachs, but I cannot tell which group migrated to the region of the other" claiming also that it is said they have come "from many places and settled that area". This means Chalkokondyles knew that the Balkan Romanians were of common origin. He also says that the Dacians' language is "similar to Italian but very altered" and that their country "stretches from '' Ardelion'', in the Paionian Dacia, to the Black Sea". The 17th-century Johannes Lucius expressed his concerns about the survival of Romans in the territory of the former Dacia Traiana province, exposed to invasions for a millennium.

A legend on the origin of the Moldavians, preserved in the ''Moldo-Russian Chronicle'' from around 1505, 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''". '' Logofăt'' Istratie and other 17th-century Moldavian historians continued to credit "King Vladislav" with the settlement of the Romanians' ancestors in Maramureș. Grigore Ureche's ''Chronicle of Moldavia'' of 1647 is the first Romanian historical work stating that the Romanians "all come from ''Rîm''" (Rome). In 30 years Miron Costin explicitly connected the Romanians' ethnogenesis to the conquest of "Dacia Traiana". The oldest Muntenian chronicle, the ''Letopisețul Cantacuzinesc'', preserving significant popular tradition among Wallachians, wrote "But first the Romanians splitting up from the Romans wandered to the north, their chief being Trajan and his son Siverie, crossing the waters of the Danube, some settled at Turnu Severin