|
Vlachs
[The following text was derived from the "classical" 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia
Brittanica that was published in 1911 and does not necessarily accurate or representing the
current state of knowledge and beliefs. The information is provided for historical purposes only.]
The Vlach (Vlakh, Wallach)
or Ruman race constitutes a distinct division of the Latin family of
peoples, Distriba- widely disseminated throughout south-eastern
Europe, tion of both north and south of the Danube, and extending
the Vlach sporadically from the Russian river Bug to the race.
Adriatic. The total numbers of the Vlachs may be estimated
[in 1911] at 10,000,000
or 11,000,000. North of the Danube, 5,400,000 dwell in Rumania;
1,250,000 are settled in Transylvania, where they constitute a large
majority of the population; and a still greater number are to be found
in the Banat and other Hungarian districts west and north of
Transylvania. Close upon 1,000,000 inhabit Bessarabia and the adjoining
parts of South Russia, and about 230,000 are in the Austrian province of
Bukovina. South of the Danube, about 500,000 are scattered over northern
Greece and European Turkey, under the name of Kutzo-Vlachs, Tzintzars or
Aromani. In Servia this element is preponderant in the Timok valley,
while in Istria it is represented by the Cici,
at present largely Slavonized [1], as are now entirely the kindred Morlachs
of Dalmatia. Since, however, it is quite impossible to obtain exact
statistics over so wide an area, and in countries where politics and
racial feeling are so closely connected, the figures given above can
only be regarded as approximately accurate; and some writers place the
total of the Vlachs as low as 9,000,000. It is noteworthy that the
Rumans north of the Danube continually gain ground at the expense of
their neighbours; and even the long successful Greek propaganda among
the Kutzo-Vlachs were checked after 1860 by the labours of Apostolu
Margaritis and other nationalists.
A detailed account of the physical,
mental and moral characteristics of the Vlachs, their modern
civilization and their historical development, will be found under the
headings Rumania and Macedonia.
All divisions of the race prefer to style
themselves Romani, Romeni, Rumeni or Aromani; and it is
from the native pronunciation of this name that we have the equivalent
expression Ruman, a word which must by no means be confined to
that part of the Vlach race inhabiting the present kingdom of Rumania.
The name " Vlachs," applied to the Rumans
by their neighbours but never adopted by themselves, appears under many
allied forms, the Slavs saying Volokh or Woloch, the
Its name. Greeks Vlachoi, the Magyars Oloh, and the
Turks, at a later date, INok. In its
origin identical with the English Wealh or Welsh, it
represents a Slavonic adaptation of a generic term applied by the
Teutonic races to all Roman provincials during the 4th and 5th
centuries. The Slavs, at least in their principal extent, first knew the
Roman empire through a Teutonic medium, and adopted their term Volokh
from the Ostro-Gothic equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon Wealh. It thus
finds its analogies in the German name for Italy - Welschland
(Wtilischland), in the Walloons of the Low Countries and the
Wallgau of Tirol. An early instance of its application to the
Roman population of the Eastern empire is found (c. 550 -
600) in the Traveller's Song, 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 Walaric, " Welshry." In verse 140 he speaks of the
Rum-walas, and it is to be observed that Rum is one of the
words by which the Vlachs of eastern Europe still know themselves.
The Vlachs claim to be a Latin race in
the same sense as the Spaniards or Provencals - Latin by language and
culture, and, in a smaller degree, by descent. Despite the long
predominance of Greek, Slavonic and Turkish influence, there is no valid
objection to this claim, which is now generally accepted by competent
ethnologists. The language of the Vlachs is Latin in structure and to a
great extent in vocabulary; their features and stature would not render
them conspicuous as foreigners in south Italy; and that their ancestors
were Roman provincials is attested not only by the names " Vlach " and
"Ruman " but also by popular and literary tradition. In their customs
and folk-lore both Latin and Slavonic traditions assert themselves. Of
their Roman traditions the Trajan saga, the celebration of the Latin
festivals of the Rosalia and Kalendae, the belief in the striga
(witch), the names of the months and days of the week, may be taken as
typical examples. Some Roman words connected with the Christian
religion, like biserica (basilica)=a church, botez = baptizo,
duminica = Sunday, preot (presbyter) = priest, point to a
continuous tradition of the Illyrian church, though most of their
ecclesiastical terms, like their liturgy and alphabet, were derived from
the Slavonic. In most that concerns political organization the Slavonic
element is also preponderant, though there are words like imparat =
imperator, and domn=dominus, which point to the old stock.
Many words relating to kinship are also Latin, some, like vitrig
(vitricus) = father-in-law, being alone preserved by this branch of
the Romance family. But if the Latin descent of the Vlachs may be
regarded as proven, it is far less easy to determine their place of
origin and to trace their early migrations.
The centre of gravity of the Vlach or
Ruman race is at present unquestionably north of the Danube in the
almost circular territory between the Danube, Theiss and Dniester; Its
and corresponds roughly with the Roman province original of
Dacia, formed by Trajan in A.D. 106. From this home. 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 and the neighbour provinces, beneath the dominion of a
succession of invaders. The Vlachs of Pindus, and the southern region
generally, were, on this hypothesis, to be regarded as later immigrants
from the lands north of the Danube. In 1871, E. R. Roesler published at
Leipzig, in a collective form, a series of essays entitled Romdnische
Studien, in which he absolutely denied the claim of the Rumanian and
Transylvanian Vlachs to be regarded as autochthonous Dacians. 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, in
A.D. 272, and on the non-mention by historians of a Latin population in
the lands on the left bank of the lower Danube, during their successive
occupation by Goths, Huns, Gepidae, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars and other
barbarian races. He found the first trace of a Ruman settlement north of
the Danube in a Transylvanian diploma of 1222. Roesler's thesis has been
generally regarded as an entirely new departure in critical ethnography.
As a matter of fact, his conclusions had to a great extent been already
anticipated by F. J. Sulzer in his Geschichte des Transalpinischen
Daciens, published at Vienna in 1781, and at a still earlier date by
the Dalmatian historian G. Lucio (Lucius of Trail) in his work De
Regno Dalmatiae et Croatiae, Amsterdam, 1666. 1666.
The theory of the later immigration of
the Rumans into their present abodes north of the Danube, as stated in
its most extreme form by Roesler, commanded wide acceptance, and in
Hungary it was politically utilized as a plea for refusing parity of
treatment to a race of comparatively recent intruders. In Rumania itself
Roesler's views were resented as an attack on Ruman nationality. Outside
Rumania they found a determined opponent in Dr J. Jung, of Innsbruck,
who 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 farther by J. L. Pie, Professor A. D. Xenopol of Jassy, B. P.
Hasdeu, D. Onciul and many other Rumanian writers, who maintain
that, while their own race north of the Danube represents the original
Daco-Roman population of this region, the Vlachs of Turkey and Greece
are similarly descended from the Moeso-Roman and Illyro-Roman
inhabitants of the provinces lying south of the river. On this theory
the entire Vlach race occupies almost precisely the same territories
to-day as in the 3rd century.
Its Latin character
On the whole
it may be said that the truth lies between the two extremes. Roesler is
no doubt so far right that after 272, and throughout the early middle
ages, the bulk of the Ruman people lay south of the Danube. Pie's view
that the population of the Roman provinces of Moesia and Illyria 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 inscriptions,
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 Moesian 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 medieval diplomas and by other traces of a
Romanic race still represented by the Ladines of the Tirol, 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 (483-565), the official connexion with the old Dacian
province was not wholly lost, as is shown by the erection or restoration
of certain fortified posts 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
migra- diminished there. The open country, the broad plains of what
is now the Rumanian 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 6th century a
large part of Thrace, Macedonia and even of Epirus had become
Latin-speaking.
What had occurred in Trajan's Dacia in
the 3rd century was consummated in the 6th 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 Roman
element was uprooted from its fixed seats, and swept hither and thither
by the barbarian flood. Nomadism became an essential of independent
existence, while large masses of homeless provincials were dragged as
captives in the train of their 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 (d. A.D. 306) we find an
account of such a Roman colony, which, having been carried away from
South-Illyrian cities by the Avar khagan (prince), 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. 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 Pascua Romanorum;
and the Russian Nestor, writing about 1 i oo, makes the same invaders
fight against Sla y s and Vlachs 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
Chonae that they were to be found already in 1164 as far afield as the
borders of Galicia; and the date of a passage in the Nibelungenlied,
which mentions the Vlachs, under their leader Ramunc, in association
with the Poles, cannot well be later than 1200.
Nevertheless, throughout the early middle
ages the bulk of the Ruman population lay south of the Danube. It was in
the Balkan lands that the Ruman race and language took their
characteristic mould. It is here that this new Illyrian Romance first
rises into historic prominence. Already in the 6th century, as we learn
from the place-names, such as Sceptecasas, Burgualtu, Clisura, &c.,
given by Procopius, the Ruman language was assuming, so far as its Latin
elements were concerned, its typical form. In the somewhat later
campaigns of Cornmentiolus (587) and Priscus, against the Avars and Sla
y s, we find the Latin-speaking soldiery of the Eastern emperor making
use of such Romance expressions as torna frate! (turn, brother!),
or sculca (out of bed) applied to a watch (cf. Ruman a se
culca=Italian coricarsi+ex-(s-) privative). Next we find this
warlike Ruman 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 period of the surviving Latin population with the
Slavonic settlers of the peninsula impregnated the language with its
large Slavonic ingredient. The presence of an important Latin element in
Albanian, the frequent occurrence of Albanian words in Rumanian, and the
remarkable retention by both languages of a suffix article, may perhaps
imply that both alike took their characteristic shapes in the same
region. The fact that these peculiarities are common to the Rumans 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 Ruman history 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
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 Ruman race was destined
almost imperceptibly to shift its centre of gravity.
Byzantium, which had ceased to be Roman,
and had become Romanic, renewed its acquaintance with the descendants of
the Latin provincials of Illyricum through a Slavonic medium, and
applied to them the name of Vlach, 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 tsar Samuel's brother " by certain Vlach wayfarers," at a spot
called the Fair Oaks, between Castoria and Prespa. From this period
onwards the Ruman inhabitants 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 Vlachia. A
short synopsis may be given of the most important of these, outside the
limits of Rumania itself.
- The Bulgaro-Vlach Empire.
- After the overthrow of the older Bulgarian tsardom by Basil
Bulgaroktonos (976-1025), the Vlach population of Thrace, Haemus and the
Moesian 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 leadership of two brothers, Peter and Asen, to
found a new BulgaroVlachian empire, which ended with Kaliman II. in
1257. The dominions of these half-Slavonic half-Ruman emperors extended
north of the Danube over a great deal of what is now Rumania, and it was
during this period that the Vlach population north of the river seems to
have been most largely reinforced. The 13thcentury French traveller
Rubruquis speaks of all the country between Don and Danube as Asen's
land or Blakia.
- Great Walachia (Μεγάλη
Βλαχία). - It is from Anna Comnena, in the second half of the 11th
century, that we first hear of a Vlach settlement, the nucleus of which
was the mountainous region of Thessaly. Benjamin of Tudela, in the
succeeding century, gives an interesting account of this Great Walachia,
then completely independent. It embraced the southern and central ranges
of Pindus, and extended over part of Macedonia, thus including the
region in which the Roman settlers mentioned in the Acts of St
Demetrius had fixed their abode. After the Latin conquest of
Constantinople in 1204, Great Walachia was included in the enlarged
despotate of Epirus, but it soon reappears as an independent
principality under its old name, which, after passing under the yoke of
the Serb emperor Dushan, was finally conquered by the Turks in 1393.
Many of their old privileges were accorded to the inhabitants, and their
taxes were limited to an annual tribute. Since this period the
Megalovlachites have been largely Hellenized, but they are still
represented by the flourishing Tzintzar settlements of Pindus and its
neighbourhood (see Macedonia).
- Little Walachia
(Μικρή Βλαχία) was a name applied by Byzantine writers to the Ruman
settlements of Aetolia and Acarnania, and with it may be included "
Upper Walachia," or Άνω Βλαχία. Its inhabitants are still represented by
the Tzintzars of the Aspropotamo and the Karaguni (Black Capes) of
Acarnania.
- The Morlachs (Mavrovlachi) of
the West. - These are already mentioned as Nigri
Latini by the presbyter of Dioclea (c. "50) in the old
Dalmatian littoral and the mountains of what is now Montenegro,
Herzegovina and North Albania. Other colonies extended through a great
part of the old Servian interior, where is a region still called Stara
Vlaska or " Old Walachia." The great commercial staple of the east
Adriatic shores, the republic of Ragusa, seems in its origin to have
been a Ruman settlement, and many Vlach traces survived in its later
dialect. Philippus de Diversis, who described the city as it existed in
1440, says that " the various officers of the republic do not make use
either of Slav or Italian, with which they converse with strangers, but
a certain other dialect only partially intelligible to us Latins," and
cites words with strong Ruman affinities. In the mountains above Ragusa
a number of Vlach tribes are mentioned in the archives of that city, and
the original relationship of the Ragusans and the nomadic Alpine
representatives of the Roman provincials, who preserved a traditional
knowledge of the old lines of communication throughout the peninsula,
explains the extraordinary development of the Ragusan commerce. In the
14th century the Mavrovlachi or Morlachs extended themselves towards the
Croatian borders, and a large part of maritime Croatia and northern
Dalmatia began to be known as Morlacchia. A Major Vlachia
was formed about the triple frontier of Bosnia, Croatia and Dalmatia,
and a " Little Walachia " as far north as Pozega. The Morlachs have now
become Slavonized (see Dalmatia).
- Cici of Istria. - The
extreme Ruman offshoot to the north-west is still represented by the
Cici of the Val d'Arsa [Arsa Valley] and adjoining Istrian districts. They
represent a 15th-century Morlach [not so!]
colony from the Isles of Veglia, and
had formerly a wider extension to Trieste and the counties of Gradisca
and Gorz. The Cici have almost entirely abandoned their native
tongue, which is the last remaining representative of the old Morlach
[not so!],
and forms a connecting link between the Daco-Roman (or Rumanian) and the
Illlyro or Macedo-Roman dialects.
- Rumans of Transylvania and
Hungary. - As already stated, a large part of the
Hungarian plains were, at the coming of the Magyars in the 9th century,
known as Pascua Romanorum. At a later period privileged Ruman
communities existed at Fogaras, where was a Silva Vlachorum, at
Marmaros, Deva, Hatzeg, Hunyad and Lugos, and in the Banat were seven
Ruman districts. Two of the greatest figures in Hungarian history, the
15th-century rulers John Corvinus of Hunyad and his son King Matthias,
were due to this element. For its later history see Transylvania.
See, in addition to the books already
mentioned:
- J. L. Pic, Ober die Abstammung der
Rumcinen (Leipzig, 1880);
- A. D. Xenopol, Les Roumains au
moyen age (Jassy, 1886);
- B. P. Hasdeu, " Stratii si Substratti:
Genealogia poporeloril balcanice," in Annalele Academies, ser.
II, vol. 14 (Bucharest, 1893);
- D. Onciul, " Romanii in Dacia
Traiana," &c., in Enciclopedia Romana, vol. iii. (Bucharest,
1902).
Editor's notes:
- The celebrated Slavist, Franz
Miklosich (1813-91), held the opinion that the old Slavonic or Church
Languages, as it was sometimes called, was old Slovenish - i.e., the older
form of the language now spoken in Styria, Carinthia, and a part of Southern
Hungary. {Source: The Academy, March 21, 1891 - No. 985, page 286.]
|