After centuries of living outside of the empire and in isolation from other Romance peoples, the Romanics of the Balkans develop a language of their own and transform into a new people.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to A history of Romania.

Season 2, Episode 12: Keystone

Last time, we explored the khanate which the Bulgars established south of the Danube and saw how they entrenched themselves on the borders of the Roman empire while intervening in its affairs. We ended by looking at the communities which lived under Bulgar authority, and today, we’ll pick up the thread of the Romanics to see their story quilted into a new tapestry.

As we know, the Romanics and the Slavs had by now been in close contact across the Balkans for generations. The degree of proximity obviously varied across regions; some communities merely traded with one another, others had members who worked alongside each other, and others even intermarried. By the end of the seventh century, such prolonged contact led many Romanic and Slavic individuals to become bilingual, meaning that they were able to speak each other’s language, namely Eastern Romance and Slavic.

Two episodes back, we explored this mingling of cultures by considering a hypothetical situation in which the son of a Romanic shepherd and the daughter of a Slavic farmer married each other. They themselves would be bilingual, and so would their children. Yet if they settled in the husband’s village as was the custom in the region, their children would have more opportunities to speak Eastern Romance than Slavic, since they’d be surrounded by Romanics in daily situations, like when they bartered in the marketplace, or ploughed a field, or enjoyed a story around a campfire.

Of course, these children would continue to speak Slavic with their mother and her relatives, as well as with the Slavs living in nearby villages, and they’d probably pass on both languages to their own children as well. But after a few generations, the bilingual descendants of that original couple would have increasingly little use for the Slavic language in their Romanic community. Eventually, that tongue would fall out of use in everyday interactions and they’d exclusively speak Eastern Romance. In effect, these Slavic descendants would fully integrate their Romanic community and adopt the language and culture of their more numerous neighbours.

But though now everyone in that community spoke a single language, those decades of bilingualism had left an indelible influence. The Romanics of the eighth century used some Slavic sounds, prefixes, words, formulations, and sayings which had been adopted into their language over that period of linguistic flux. Whereas their great-grandparents would’ve called a rooster a gallus, they would’ve said cocoş; and whereas their ancestors would’ve had difficulty pronouncing the h sound, these speakers regularly referred to food as hrană. It’s important to note, though, that these Slavic influences mainly affected vocabulary, and that their effects were much smaller in the areas of grammar, morphology, and phonology. In all cases, this Balkan Romance language maintained its core Latin character.

While it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact steps of its evolution, linguists generally agree that the period of bilingualism was drawing to an end by the beginning of the eighth century. With the integration of the Slavs into Romanic communities and the end of borrowings from their language, the Romance language spoken in the Balkans stabilised and crystallised into a new form. The tongue which emerged was decidedly different from the Eastern Romance which had been spoken in the region for centuries; and so, linguists have come to consider it its own, entirely new language, one they’ve called străromână, meaning Ancient Romanian.

Now, when did Ancient Romanian actually emerge as a distinct language? Well, we know that the Slavs started living next to the Romanics in the late sixth century, when many of them moved along the Danube and began migrating into the Carpathian basin, so the period of bilingualism must’ve begun sometime in the seventh century. On the other hand, the first record of a Romanian name comes from an inscription found in Dobrogea, dated to 943, which mentions a certain leader named “Dimitrie”; this Dimitrie must’ve been born in the early tenth century, and since he’s unlikely to be the first ever Romanian, he probably came from a Romanian community which already identified as such in the ninth century. And so, we can say that, sometime between the seventh and ninth centuries, the Romanians emerged as a distinct ethnicity with their own language.

However, it’s impossible to pinpoint when exactly that language formed, because a living language evolves seamlessly through numerous stages, and we can’t say that a particular stage is the beginning of a language.

I think a good way to understand the problem is to use the paradox of the sand heap. Imagine you wanted to make a pile of sand one grain at a time. How many grains would you need? Say you go to the beach and pick up a single grain of sand to begin our experiment. Then, you add a second grain to it, and a third, and a fourth, and so on and so forth. Eventually, your smattering of sand begins to coalesce into something resembling a pile. But it’d be hard to argue that 2,000 grains of sand look drastically different from 2,001, and that that’s the point at which they change from a loose collection of grains to a coherent pile.

Alright, so if we can’t find the answer that way, what if we tackle the question from the other side? Say you grab a handful of sand, and we all agree that it does look like a heap. After counting how many grains it contains, we come up with the number 3,403. What if we now remove a grain? Your pile will look much the same with 3,402 grains. And if we continue, we won’t see much difference at 3,401 or 3,400. We know that if we go all the way down to 3 grains, it’ll no longer be a heap. But at which point between 3,400 and 3 does it stop being a heap?

You can probably see the pattern: Whether we start from zero or go down from an upper limit, we can’t isolate a precise number for what constitutes a pile of sand; instead, it’s vague range, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,400.

Now let’s apply the logic of this paradox to our linguistic question: When did Romanian emerge as a distinct language? Well, Latin was introduced to the Lower Danube in the first century CE, and the language began to transform as soon as it came into widespread use: people invented slang, Dacians used some their own native words, and colonists from across the empire made their own tweaks to the tongue. Changes accumulated and accumulated throughout the centuries until, by the eighth century, enough of them had accrued to create a new language: Ancient Romanian. But where’s the dividing line between Latin and Romanian? Is it the year 731? 750? 792? Was it one language one year and another language the next? Obviously, we can’t isolate its emergence to a specific year: Vulgar Latin gained a local flavour and became Balkan Latin; then, after the empire abandoned its provinces in the area, the language spoken by its former provincials evolved in its own manner and transformed into Eastern Romance; and finally, that tongue became Ancient Romanian with the addition of Slavic influences, with all of these changes occurring in innumerable, imperceptible steps. The best we can say is that the language developed over hundreds of years and that, by the eighth century, its latest iteration was decidedly different from Vulgar Latin as well as all other Romance tongues; it had gained a unique character and could be considered a language of its own.

In addition to the question of when the Romanian language emerged, there’s also a great debate about where it emerged. We explored this issue in depth in season 1, episode 28, but basically, there are two main theories: one argues that the communities where străromână formed lived exclusively north of the Danube, whereas the other posits that they lived exclusively south of it. As I said in that earlier episode, I’m personally not convinced by either option; linguistic evidence points to influences from peoples on both sides of the river. Romanian has some Dacian influence from north of the Danube, but it also underwent some changes similar to languages south of the river, like Albanian. And so, instead of placing the formation of the language exclusively north or exclusively south of the Danube, I take a third option proposed by some scholars, namely that the Romanian language formed in a region that straddled both banks of the river, from the Carpathians to the Balkan Mountains.

Indeed, the two sides of the Danube had maintained strong links throughout centuries of instability and continued to influence each other. You see, while Romanic communities were predominantly farmers, they also relied heavily on pastoralism as a way to protect their livelihood. Generations of Romanics had seen the nomadic Huns and Avars raid their settlements, as well as the Goths and Gepids threaten them into submission, and it was nearly impossible for a peasant family to defend their fields in the face of such armed gangs. But if they had a large enough flock, they could simply flee at the approach of these raiders, keep hold of their valued animals, and survive on their milk and meat. Don’t get me wrong: Agriculture was still the mainstay of the Romanic communities in the region, but a good part of their food came from their animals, more so in the eighth century than in the fourth.

A single person would need about thirty sheep or goats to ensure their survival, and while that may seem like a lot, a single shepherd could manage up to four hundred animals. He’d herd them to grassy fields, bring them to water sources, guard them against predators, help them with deliveries, and milk them regularly. To ensure they had enough grass and were well protected, he would drive his herd to different regions depending on the season. In summer, a Romanic shepherd north of the Danube would graze his flock in the remote regions of the Carpathian Mountains, while one south of the river would do so in the Balkan Mountains; in these highlands, there was less risk of raiders, and so these shepherds would spend the warm months there and sometimes build temporary shelters for themselves and enclosures and wells for their animals to make their lives more comfortable. In winter, when it got too cold to stay in the mountains, shepherds on both sides of the river would return to the pastures neighbouring their villages on either side of the Danube.

Indeed, though shepherds migrated for their flocks, they were closely bound to permanent settlements where their families lived and tended fields and orchards. As such, these herders maintained a constant connection between Romanic communities on either side of the Danube, as they regularly crossed the river, and met, traded, and talked with the Romanics on the other side. Of course, while they spoke the same language, there must’ve been different dialects in different regions of the Balkans, but such variations were minor and didn’t prevent these communities from understanding one another.

Alright, so these shepherds criss-crossed the region to tend to their herds and in so doing wove webs between the Romanic communities on both sides of Danube. But where did these communities actually live?

As we’ve seen in episode four, farmers regularly relocated their entire villages every few years as fields lost their fertility and they needed to find new arable land. To be sure, these villagers didn’t relocate tens of kilometers away; they stayed nearby to come back to their previous settlement zones once these had regained their fertility, which means that they migrated within well-defined areas. Put another way, these villagers didn’t remain in the same exact location for generations, building larger and denser settlements; rather, they moved around slightly on the same local territory which they knew well. Evidence shows that many new settlements in the seventh and eighth centuries were built over existing settlements from the fifth and sixth centuries.

As such, instead of imagining Romanian communities as static points on a map, it’s more accurate to think of them as living in pockets. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough evidence to posit where these pockets were located exactly, or which river and mountain valleys housed these communities. What we can say, however, is that there was continuous agricultural habitation from the Carpathians to the Balkan Mountains, and that there was a regular pattern of concentrations and dispersals.

And so, we can’t pinpoint one location where the Romanian language emerged, because the language was spoken over a wide area. When Ancient Romanian formed in the eighth century, it probably did so as several mutually intelligible dialects. Together, these dialects formed one language which had regional diversity along both sides of the Danube.

But this process didn’t happen all at once, because Romance speakers lived over a large region corresponding with the former Latin-speaking Balkan provinces of the Roman empire. And so, it may be that the Ancient Romanian language crystallized in some communities in the eighth century, and that the shift was only completed by the beginning of the ninth in other communities hundreds of kilometres away. As such, there’s no “cradle” of the Romanian people, no single valley or river which acted as the nucleus of this new ethnicity. Rather, what we can say is that a new ethnicity began to emerge in the Carpathians, along the Danube, and around the Balkan Mountains in the eighth century, and that the process was completed in the ninth.

The development of the Romanian language is such a crucial topic because scholars assume that when Romanian emerged as a distinct language, so did the Romanians as a distinct ethnicity. The reasoning is that a united language allowed multiple communities to see themselves as part of the same group over generations. But though the emergence of Romanian is the central pillar in the formation of the Romanian people, it isn’t the only one.

As we explored in a previous episode, one way to think about ethnicity is that it forms when individuals identify with a group; when this group marks itself as different from others through its customs, rituals, and myths; and when this group is perceived as distinct by outsiders. Besides language, some other traits which can mark a group are religion, culture, and common descent. These are often overlooked when talking about the emergence of the Romanians, but I believe they are key parts to seeing the whole picture.

If we look at religion, there was a great deal of diversity in the Balkans at this point in history; the Avars and Bulgars had faiths centered on the sky god Tengri, whereas the Slavs had a polytheistic religion. In contrast, the Romanic communities of the region were the only Christians in the Balkans outside of imperial control; they had converted to Christianity in the third and fourth centuries and maintained their beliefs ever since.

On the surface, the Romanics were similar to the Slavs in their sedentary and agricultural lifestyle, but their faith singled them out not only in their inner beliefs, but also in their culture, because religion affects all aspects of life.

You see, the Slavs’ polytheistic religion had one central god, Perun, who was the ruler of the world and the god of storms, rains, and fertility; there were several minor deities too, for instance one for the harvest, one for fire, and one for the hearth. The Slavs brought sacrifices of wild and domesticated animals to their gods, as well as agricultural goods, and worshipped their deities out in the open in nature. They also revered particular rivers, springs, copses, and stones, which were thought to house spirits and to emanate power; at the same time, the Slavs avoided other areas, such as bogs and forests where bad spirits lived.

When a person died, they were incinerated to free their soul from their body through the purifying force of fire. Particularly friendly spirits of the familiar dead remained nearby and helped in the home. Others, who died by suicide, hanging, in labour, or on their wedding day, became unquiet dead who wandered the earth as blood-sucking demons.

In contrast, the Christian god of the Romanics wasn’t tied to specific locations and didn’t require sacrifices; rather, the community came together to worship him and pray to him while guided by a priest, who was their local spiritual leader central to village life. Priests were the ones who were entrusted with the Bible, the holy text of Christianity, and they were supposed to interpret its teachings and guide their community in both belief and practice. However, the Romanics of the Balkans couldn’t maintain physical copies of the Bible in good condition decade after decade due to the rural environment in which they lived. Instead, the knowledge this holy text contained was passed on verbally from one generation of priest to the next, allowing these spiritual leaders to shepherd their communities through the key moments of their lives.

The first was baptism, a ritual in which young believers were immersed in water to symbolically wash away their sins and come out spiritually reborn. Thereafter, the priest would periodically led believers in the eucharist, a ritual in which bread and wine are consecrated and shared to remember Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection. When believers found a lifelong partner, the priest was present then too to officiate their union before the entirety of the community as well as their god. And when a believer came to the end of their life, the priest administered last rites and thereafter buried them in the earth.

Besides these four key moments in a Christian’s life – baptism, mass, marriage, and death – their religion also influenced numerous other aspects of their everyday experience. We can think of their yearly rhythms and the days which were most important to them, like Easter, the foremost holiday of the year held in the spring to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. We can also consider how religion affected dietary restrictions, like setting out forty days of fasting for Lent in preparation for Easter. Religion also had an effect on their appearance, as people wore necklaces with crosses on them or inscribed Christian symbols on their vases and other belongings. And their faith obviously affected their moral laws as well, such as dictating that marriage was only between two people, as opposed to the Slavic practice of one man being allowed to marry multiple women.

In this way, Christian beliefs and teachings suffused the daily life of Romanic communities and helped define their laws, their norms, and their customs; it would be readily apparent to anyone visiting a Romanic village that this community was different from other peoples in the Balkans.

These distinguishing cultural practices were reinforced by a sense of common descent, which was recognized by those inside the community as well as those outside of it. Evidence of how the Romanians understood their common descent comes only a bit later because we don’t have written sources from the eighth century. The Romanians themselves didn’t use writing at this time and it would be a while until foreign writers took notice of them, because they were spread out in decentralized village communities which didn’t coalesce into a political force wielding military power worth discussing. As such, the first mention of Romanians comes a few centuries after they had formed; the Roman scholar Ioannes Skylitzes wrote his Synopsis Historiarum in the eleventh century, and in it, he mentions a “Vlach coachman” who was involved in events in 976.

The term “Vlach” comes from the Germanic walhaz, which originally meant “stranger.” Over the centuries, as Germanic peoples came into contact with the Romans, the meaning of the term changed to “Romance-speaker.” Then, when the Slavs arrived in the region, they adopted the word into their own language, and its pronunciation changed to Vlah. Thereafter, many peoples in the Balkans, from the Slavs to the Greek-speaking Romans, came to use that term to refer to speakers of Eastern Romance languages.

The point here is that Vlach is an exonym, meaning a term applied by outsiders – and it’s quite telling that it was applied to the Romanics of the Balkans. It would be one thing to use “Vlach” to refer to the inhabitants of Gaul who still lived in the old imperial cities and were clearly descended from the Romans. In contrast, the Romanians were spread out over the Balkans in small village communities, so how did these outsiders learn of their Roman roots? Well, first off, some of these outsiders, like the Greek-speaking Romans, knew what Latin sounded like, and they recognized the language of the Romanians as a Latin language in a sea of other tongues. And secondly, the Romanians shared the fact that they were descended from Romans with any neighbours willing to ask.

You see, the Romanians didn’t refer to themselves as Vlachs; they simply called themselves “Roman,” like their Romanic ancestors had done since the days of the empire. It’s just that the word itself changed as their language evolved. The Latin term romanus, meaning “Roman,” changed to ruman in the language of their descendants in the Balkans; and over the course of generations, ruman became rumân, from which we get the term român, or in English, Romanian.

It’s interesting to note that as the empire splintered and abandoned the region, these Roman descendants didn’t coalesce around local identities. As the legions retreated from Dacia, Pannonia, Moesia, and Dardania, the provincials who were left behind could’ve very well felt rejected by the empire; instead of identifying with the Romans, they could’ve identified with their neighbours as fellow Dacians, Pannonians, Moesians, and Dardanians. But they didn’t; they continued to call themselves Roman even centuries after the empire had abandoned them. Clearly, their Roman heritage was a core aspect of their self-identity. They even referred to their language simply as the “Roman language,” which in their tongue was română, and in English is Romanian.

The fact that Romance communities over such a vast geographic area both north and south of the Danube referred to themselves by the same single term – român – shows that they were in constant communication and so had maintained the idea that they were, in some sense, part of the same community.

Throughout the podcast, I want to call people what they called themselves, which is why, for instance, I’ve never used the term “Byzantine” for those living in the eastern Roman empire; instead, I continue to call them “Roman,” because that’s how they thought of themselves and how they referred to themselves. Regarding the Romanians, though they were called “Vlachs” by outsiders, they called themselves români, and that is what I will call them: Romanians.

If we put all these threads together, we see that the Romanic communities of the Balkans had a distinct religion, culture, and sense of common descent, and that the emergence of a new language, namely Ancient Romanian, was the keystone that brought all these elements together. The individuals who spoke that language identified with each other, marked themselves as different from others through their customs, rituals, and myths, and were perceived as distinct by outsiders – thus forming a new ethnicity.

This genesis didn’t happen all at once, though, since Romance-speaking populations were spread out between the Carpathians and the Balkan Mountains; the linguistic and cultural changes which led them to become a new ethnicity may have crystallized in some communities during the eighth century while only being completed in others by the ninth. What had been Romanic communities now became Romanian ones.

At last, after forty-two episodes, the main characters of our story have entered the stage.

Next time, we’ll take the narrative into the second half of the eighth century and return to the Bulgars and Romans to see them entangle themselves ever deeper in dialogue and war.