To close out season one, we discuss the impact of the Goths, Huns, and Gepids in the region, ask how we can discern ethnicity in our sources, and consider the effects of Christianity north of the Danube. We also explore some of my storytelling choices and glance at what’s next for the podcast.

If you can spare a few minutes, please send me an email with your thoughts and comments at ahistoryofromania@gmail.com

Transcript

Hello and welcome to A history of Romania.

Season 1, Episode 29: Threads of beginnings

Last time, we began our thematic tour of season one and talked about the legacy of the Dacians, Romanization in the province of Dacia, and contrasting historical theories about the origins of the Romanian people. This episode, we’ll bring the thematic tour to an end along with the season itself – but not before I tell you what comes next.

As we’ve seen last time, official Romanian histories focus a lot on the Dacians and Romans because these two peoples are considered the ancestors of the Romanians. But after the empire abandoned the province of Dacia in the 3^rd century, quite a few other players took centre stage north of the Danube: the Goths, Huns, Gepids, and Avars. Official histories treat these peoples as passersby who made an explosive entrance, ruled the region for a short time, and were soon swept away by other migratory peoples without leaving much of a legacy.

This sentiment is widespread well beyond Romanian academia, as various books I’ve read treat the Goths, Huns, Gepids, and Avars primarily as unsophisticated and ephemeral antagonists to the Romans. There are two reasons why these peoples aren’t given proper attention in their own right. First, they didn’t write their own histories. Whereas the Romans had Pliny and Priscus and Procopius to write their story, the Goths and Huns had no one; they were secondary characters in tales told by their enemies. And second, these peoples haven’t left us modern-day nation-states to carry their legacies. Unlike the Franks, for instance, no one considers the Gepids or the Avars to be their ancestors. Their stories were of no use to nationalist narratives, so no one advocated for their importance.

But the lives of these peoples matter, and their impact on the Carpathian region shouldn’t be overlooked. If we take the case of the Goths, general histories mainly deal with them in relation to the Crisis of the Third Century, the Battle of Adrianople, and their later kingdoms in Italy and Hispania. Yet there’s a whole lot more to their story. For instance, while researching, I was surprised at just how little is said about the province of Gothia.

The accepted narrative of the Roman empire along the Danube is that, after it abandoned Dacia, the territories north of the river were lost forever. But in truth, sixty years after the evacuation, Constantine reconquered those lands and established the province of Gothia between the Carpathians and the Danube in 332. The emperor built a permanent stone bridge to connect this territory with the rest of the empire – the first such bridge in two centuries – and chose the town of Sucidava as the centrepiece of the province; this settlement received the first church attested north of the Danube and was connected to the old provincial city of Malva as the road between them was repaved. For the next three decades, Gothia was treated like an imperial province: locals were conscripted into the army, coinage was used in everyday transactions, Roman goods flooded the markets, and Latin once more became a common language. During this period, the lands north of the Danube also received their first bishop – Ulfilas, who was a descendant of Romans born in Gothic lands. Ulfilas spread Christianity among the Goths and even translated the Bible into their language after inventing a Gothic alphabet. Indeed, the province of Gothia was a joint Gothic and Roman project, as Gothic warriors patrolled the frontiers alongside Roman soldiers, and Gothic nobles collaborated with imperial administrators.

The project came to an end in the 360s as anti-Roman sentiment led Gothic dissenters to rebel. The three decades that it lasted might not seem like a long time, but it’s enough for an entire generation to come of age, become the main workforce of their communities, and have children of their own. The very existence of the province of Gothia speaks to how the lands north of the Danube weren’t lost to the empire forever after the abandonment of Dacia, and that the empire’s relation with its barbarian neighbours is a lot more nuanced than simple antagonism.

The Huns, too, influenced the region in their own way. One example is how they indirectly changed the patterns of settlement and the culture north of the Danube. In the late 4^th century, the people who still lived in the old Roman cities of Dacia fled at the approach of the nomads and sought the protection of Gothic chieftains. These Romanized refugees settled next to Gothic communities and influenced their new neighbours: within a few generations, the Goths stopped cremating their dead and began burying them, a custom which was the norm in the empire and amongst Christian communities.

After the Hunnic confederation collapsed, the Gepids established their own kingdom. The Gepids are often treated as a temporary power that inconvenienced Justinian, but they’d been in the region since the 3^rd century, and would endure as a distinct group into the 7^th. Their kingdom encompassed the entire territory of the former province of Dacia, and more. Their royal family established itself in the city of Sirmium on the south bank of the Danube and set up a mint there, the first since the imperial mint in Dacia three centuries earlier. A vast network of mines and workshops produced Germanic jewellery which was admired even within the empire in Thrace and Crimea. The Gepids were a major player in the region, and for me, the best way to think about them is to compare them to their Germanic cousins who established kingdoms in the West, like the Goths in Hispania. Both groups were military aristocracies which adopted imperial ideas in an attempt to solidify control over their varied subjects. The main difference between the two is that the Goths in Hispania endured longer and so receive more attention; they ruled the peninsula for three hundred years before they were defeated by Muslim forces in the early 8^th century; the Gepids, in contrast, ruled for a third of the time, but might’ve survived much longer and built a stronger realm had the Avars not arrived from the steppes.

These are just a few impacts I’ve drawn from our sources – a bishop who preached in Gothic north of the Danube, communities which influenced the burial practices of their neighbours, and the establishment of a mint by a barbarian nation – but there are surely hundreds of others which we can’t analyse because they weren’t recorded. For example, we can’t precisely know how Roman citizens abducted by the Huns passed on their habits, or what trade routes the Gepids established within their realm, or how Avar tribute demands affected what local artisans produced.

We could try to find answers by applying logic. For instance, given that the Avars relied on pastures, we might expect that neighbouring agricultural communities lost grazing land and were forced to rely more on crops than livestock. Such a change would be a real and important influence on the region, but it’s just a guess. While this guess might make sense rationally, humans also have the element of choice; and sometimes, we act contrary to what is rationally expected because of our preferences.

To illustrate my point, consider the !Kung and the /Aise, which are two foraging groups in Botswana in southern Africa. Both of them have access to mongongo nuts, which are abundant, highly nutritious, and offer great energy return for the effort spent gathering them. Logically, we’d expect both groups to eat lots of mongongo nuts, and indeed, the !Kung have made it a staple of their diet. Yet the /Aise refuse to eat them. The explanation is simple: in their culture, mongongo nuts aren’t considered tasty. It’s completely unexpected based on what we think makes rational sense, but it’s understandable if we take into account individual preferences.

We could do a similar mental exercise for the Gepids. Given the abundance of sheep in the Carpathian Mountains, we could expect sheep meat to be a big part of their diet. But perhaps their nobles disdained the work of shepherds and prided themselves in eating meat from hunted deer, which could lead to shepherding communities being marginalized while hunters jostled to provide the best cuts for royal feasts; this attitude would alter what professions people chose, the goods traded in the region’s markets, and the trade routes in the realm. It may be a silly example, and it remains a mental exercise because we don’t have sufficient archeological evidence to take a stance. But my point is that we can’t explain everything in history through deterministic theories; people’s attitudes and choices are crucially important as well.

So even though our sources might not talk about these peoples in detail, we should keep in mind that their passions and preferences did shape the region, even if we can’t exactly say how they did so. All peoples – whether they have a strong presence in the annals of history or not – deserve our attention, which is why I’ve tackled the Goths, Huns, Gepids, and Avars in the same way as I did the Dacians and Romans, and told their story from their perspective. We should take these communities as seriously as we would like future historians to take us.

It’s an unfortunate truth that history is skewed towards places and periods with lots of sources; it’s why we know more about Caesar than Burebista. And most of the sources we have for this period were written by elite Roman men, whose perceptions and assumptions inevitably influenced their works. When I say “elite Roman men,” each of those three words matter: “elite” because they moved in powerful social circles and so focused on the deeds of emperors, kings, and generals, not on the masses which comprised most of the population; “Roman” because their histories were centred on how events affected the Roman empire; and “men” because, in this period, it’s almost always men who write, and their patriarchal biases pervade their works.

Indeed, there’s been a marked absence of women in our story. The women we have encountered had a role in our sources due to their relation to men: they were sisters, wives, and daughters who didn’t have many chances to attain positions of power and influence events. Yet I’ve tried to include them in our narrative whenever possible, since they did make up half of the population: I’ve talked about the Roman leader Julia Maesa and the Gepid princess Austrigosa, as well as women who weren’t part of the elite.

In episode 10, we recounted the story of Theudote, a woman captured beyond the borders of Dacia who was enslaved and given a different name; and we also told the tale of Passia, a six-year-old girl abandoned on the streets who was abducted and then enslaved in the mines. Finding a record of these two humans and telling their story is honestly what I’m most proud of in this season.

In history – and especially ancient history – we often focus on politics and war, and while these areas of study are important, focusing on them at the exclusion of others puts aside so many human experiences. Whenever we have the opportunity, we should also talk about ordinary individuals and their lives; what they went through, how they saw the world, and what they hoped for. Passia’s life was just as valuable as Caesar’s.

I also want to note that pronunciation is always a challenge in historical podcasts. For more famous individuals, I’ve said their names as we commonly know them in English; though the Romans would’ve said Traianus, I said Trajan, simply because that’s how most people know him and because pronouncing his name “properly” would’ve confused the narrative more than anything. But when it comes to lesser-known individuals, I’ve done my best to pronounce their names as they were spoken at the time or, if the language hasn’t survived, in the closest related language. For example, instead of saying Dio Chrysostom, I said Díon Chrysóstomos. I realize my pronunciation of Greek isn’t perfect, but by saying the names of these individuals in their own language, we’re showing respect to them and their culture.

I’ve also used the names of places as they were known at the time. For example, the Roman city of Naissus eventually became the Serbian city of Niš, but in the narrative, I didn’t call it that because it only became Niš in the Middle Ages. At the time of our narrative, everyone would’ve known it as Naissus, and I wanted you to hear place names as they sounded at the time and to give due honour to these places; calling it Niš straightaway would imply that the city of Naissus was just a transitionary settlement which is only important because it led to the development of the modern city. But these settlements – really the individuals and communities which comprised them – are worth talking about on their own merit. Even if Naissus wouldn’t have led to a modern city, the experiences of those who made it their home are worth talking about.

As we try to fill the gaps left by our sources, it’s sometimes hard to know who we’re actually talking about. Groups beyond the empire’s borders commonly overlapped, and drawing distinctions between them can be difficult.

One consideration is that people can identify with more than one group. You might consider yourself a resident of your city, a supporter of a sports team, a citizen of your country and a member of an ethnic group; all these identities are valid, and they don’t cancel each other out. In the same way, a particular person may have considered themselves part of their village community, a warrior loyal to a chieftain, a follower of a specific religion, and a member of a wider, regional linguistic group.

Another consideration is that ethnicity is different from culture. An ethnic group can share many cultural aspects with another group – the same language, material culture, physical appearance, and so on – and still be different, like Canadians and Americans, for instance. One key differentiator between groups is the name they give themselves, because it shows that they see themselves as distinct from others.

But here’s yet another consideration to complicate things: ethnicity isn’t static. An ethnic group arises from a collection of diverse communities in a particular period and in particular circumstances. As each individual in the group slowly changes, so does their community, even if the name of the group stays the same. For example, the Goths which we first encountered on the fringes of the empire in the 3^rd century are not the same Goths as those who ruled Hispania in the 7^th century; they changed tremendously over the four hundred years they’ve been in our story; we shouldn’t think of peoples as fixed, monolithic units.

The same is true of the descendants of the Dacians and Romans, which historians call “Daco-Romans.” Historians apply the term to those who lived in the province of Dacia as well as to those who remained north of the Danube after the retreat. But I decided to call them different names as our story progressed.

When these individuals lived inside the empire, there’s a good chance they thought of themselves as Romans, since that’s what they were legally and culturally. However, after the abandonment of Dacia in the 3^rd century, things get more complex. For the first few decades after the retreat, I continued to refer to the provincials who had stayed behind as Romans since they had been born in the empire, spoke Latin, and continued to embody Roman values and customs. When their children came of age in the early 4^th century, I called them Romanized individuals because while they were different from the inhabitants of the empire, their adherence to Roman ways distinguished them from the other peoples north of the Danube.

As we entered the 5^th century, the lines between these Romanized individuals and their migratory neighbours blurred significantly, mainly because these neighbours had largely adopted Christianity as well. Religion impacts all aspects of culture; besides its spiritual elements, it dictates what people consider moral and lawful, what holidays they celebrate, what foods they eat at different times of the year, what stories they tell their children, what figures they look up to.

And so, with Romanized and migratory communities aligning ever more closely on these issues, one of the last, key differentiating factors between them became their language. As we’ve seen in our story, these migratory peoples didn’t have the resources – or even the desire – to impose their language and culture on their subjects; their rule was nothing like the Roman colonization of Dacia or like the government policies of modern states; and so, it’s conceivable that, without a strong and continuous push from above, the Romanized individuals who lived in scattered villages continued to speak their own language and to pass it on to their children. Since this language was likely a dialect of Latin, I decided to call them Romance people from the 5^th century onwards.

I’m not an academic historian, so I can understand if I receive criticism for the names I’ve chosen to call these communities over the centuries: Roman, Romanized, and Romance. But the point I was trying to make in telling the story this way is that identity changes as the individuals in a community change; and I wanted to bring attention to the fact that this group adapted and redefined itself with and even within each generation.

Of course, tracking these Romance peoples is extremely difficult due to a lack of evidence. The area south of the Danube is easier to follow since it remained part of the empire for longer. When Aurelian abandoned the original province of Dacia, he created a new province of Dacia south of the river and settled refugees in it; their numbers weren’t immense, as evidenced by the fact that no new settlements were created to accommodate them, but there must’ve been a substantial number of magistrates, public servants, landowners, artisans, and farmers who relocated into the empire. The mother of emperor Galerius, for instance, was one of these Dacian refugees who fled at the approach of the Goths and Carpi, and gave birth to her son south of the river.

By the end of the 3^rd century, Diocletian’s authoritarian reforms froze these refugees in place; you couldn’t change jobs or move to another settlement without permission. Accordingly, it’s likely that these refugees remained where they had first settled and continued to do the jobs they’d done in the original province of Dacia. If you had been a blacksmith, you would continue to ply your trade here as well; and you’d also have knowledge of your old province, knowing which communities mined iron, which communities sold charcoal, and even knowing some of the people who had stayed behind and who now came south to trade.

Indeed, the people who had remained north of the Danube had continuous contact with their imperial neighbours. When the empire retreated from the province, it kept a few towns on the north bank of the river as bridgeheads for the army. In the decades following the retreat, emperors expanded the walls of these settlements, erected towers, and built roads to connect them. It was from these reinforced positions that Constantine was able to push north in the late 320s and maintain an imperial presence in the area for more than three decades.

When the Huns arrived, relations between the two banks of the river obviously suffered, but they weren’t severed; even at the lowest point when Attila destroyed the town of Sucidava, the Hunnic confederation and the Roman empire agreed on trading posts in their treaties. Eighty years later, in the 520s, Justinian rebuilt Sucidava, along with a few other positions on the north bank of the river, and the town once again received a church and became a respectable trading hub.

It’s likely that the Romance communities living to the north facilitated commercial transactions between the empire and the various barbarian peoples who ruled the region over the centuries. Since these communities spoke Latin – or a dialect of it – they could act as interpreters or even strike out as independent traders, and return with highly-coveted Roman goods.

Indeed, Roman culture had a strong draw even for the enemies of the empire; the tribes beyond the frontiers had sought to emulate Roman ways for centuries. We’ve seen this most notably with the Dacians, but this cultural diffusion applies to many other peoples as well. For example, we saw how Attila built a permanent, fortified capital for himself complete with a bathhouse, which was directly lifted from the Roman lifestyle. We also saw how, when Priscus was travelling towards Attila’s residence, he was given a sour ale made from malted barley by some villagers; this drink wasn’t a Hunnic staple but a Roman brew, which shows how Roman culture endured and was diffused amongst the masses as well. So generally, we can say that it was much more likely for a barbarian to adopt Roman ways than for a Roman descendant to abandon their ancestral customs and adopt those of their overlords.

One of the most important legacies which the Romans left north of the Danube is Christianity. The religion first arrived in the region in the 1^st century CE when one of Jesus’ twelve apostles, Andrew, travelled to the province of Thrace to preach, then continued up the coast into Moesia Inferior and beyond the borders of the empire. Because Andrew passed through lands that are now part of Romania and preached to the locals, he is now the patron saint of Romania.

For the next couple centuries after his passage, we have no evidence of Christians in Dacia, though it’s likely that there were Christians in the province practicing secretly. After the abandonment of the province, Christian objects start to appear north of the Danube, due probably to Christians fleeing imperial persecutions under Diocletian and to preachers heading north once the empire had embraced the religion under Constantine.

The Goths were resistant to the spread of Christianity, but as we saw in episode 20, people from all different ethnic groups converted, and Gothic chieftains couldn’t force them to recant; the villagers they ruled had no issue with Christians practicing their religion, and even their warriors were reluctant to punish these heathens.

The Huns, too, didn’t like Christianity, but people obviously continued to adhere to the religion, because when Attila’s confederation collapsed, the Gepids were able to openly practice the religion. By the end of the 5^th century, most of them – including their elites – were Christians, and in the 560s, the Gepid king appointed a bishop to sit in his capital and administer the priests of his realm. This appointment was a significant development which is often forgotten because the Gepids are seen as an ephemeral power; but they were the first people north of the Danube to elevate a bishop for themselves without an imperial appointment.

We ended the first season at the beginning of the 7^th century for two main reasons. First, because the next period of history is distinctly different from Antiquity; for me, the Middle Ages truly begin with the emergence of Islam, which completely sweeps away the world we’ve known so far in our narrative. I see the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean world as defined by the interplay between Islam and Christianity, which influenced both communities of believers, as well as people outside of those groups.

The second reason we ended this season in the year 602 is that the Romanian people will emerge in the following centuries, and we needed to set the stage before we got to that story. The geography of the region, the linguistic and religious legacy of the Romans, and the arrival of the Slavs are all key factors in the origins of the Romanian people. It is here in the first season that we introduced those threads, and it will be our job in the second season to weave them together.

Besides finally bringing the Romanians into this podcast, the second season will also cover the evolution of the Christian faith, the emergence of Slavic kingdoms, the arrival of the Hungarians in Europe, the adventures of the Crusaders, the conquests of the Mongols, the enduring Roman empire, and a bunch more great Medieval stuff. I’ll take a break to recharge before starting work on season two, and though I’ll research as I go, I also need to get a solid understanding of the period before we start the narrative. That means that my break will be followed by several months of research before I launch the first episode. I can’t commit to a specific date for the beginning of season two, but I’m hoping to be back sometime in the latter half of 2025.

Until then, there are plenty of wonderful history podcasts to satisfy your curiosity. If you’re interested in learning more about peoples that have played a role in our story, you can check out Trevor Culley’s History of Persia; Ryan Stitt’s The History of Ancient Greece; and Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome, which is an absolute classic. Or, if you want to take a head start on the upcoming period, check out Robin Pierson’s The History of Byzantium and Eric Halsey’s Bulgarian History Podcast.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this season of this podcast. If you can spare a few minutes, please send me a message or an email with your thoughts telling me what you enjoyed, what you didn’t enjoy, what’s your take on the various historical theories we’ve discussed, what podcasts you like to listen to, or what you’d like to see in season two. I read your comments on the various platforms this podcast is broadcast on, and I’m excited to hear more from you.

Before I go to recharge, though, there’s one more story I want to tell from season one. You see, there was a bit of narrative that didn’t quite fit into the general storyline, but was too good to leave out. It’s the story of an enslaved man who worked for one of Trajan’s generals, was captured by the Dacians, and sent with an embassy to the Persians. This man served at the court of the King of Kings before managing to escape and return to the Roman empire, where his adventure was recorded and relayed to Trajan himself. This man’s name is Callidromus, and I’ll tell you his story in an episode that will drop in two weeks.

Thank you so much for listening and accompanying me on this journey. I hope you found a few fascinating bits along the way and that, above all, you enjoyed the story.