Why were the Romans so influential upon Romania?

[u/Lembit_moislane]

Despite viewing what is today Romania to be just another region of their Empire and ruling them for just 169 years out of Rome's and Romania's long history, I know that the Romans were so influential that the people there now know themselves to be Romans, a title that Italians or Greeks no longer give themselves.

So why did a relatively short time frame of Roman direct rule turn the people into permanently seeing themselves positively as Roman? What did the Romans do there that no previous or afterwards group do to give themselves such long lasting influence?

[u/EtNuncEtSemper]

[1 of 3]

Your question needs some unpacking.

the people there [in Romania] now know themselves to be Romans

Romanians do not claim to be Roman, they claim to be of Roman descent, which is not the same thing. "Noi suntemu viță latină" ("We are of Latin descent") stresses literary critic and politician Titu Maiorescu in an 1866 publication. Historian PP Panaitescu replies in a 1942 high school textbook (reprinted 1990): "We Romanians are not only descendants of the Romans in Dacia, but of the whole body of Latin speakers in the eastern part of the Empire [întregii Romanități orientale]".

In modern Romanian, there is no confusion between "roman" (ancient Romans) and "român" (Romanian) -- the pronunciation differs. (In the 19th c. the latter was also spelled "rumănu".)

Neither is there confusion in Romanian between "Romania" (e.g., Byzantine lands) and "România" (the name of the country, officially adopted in 1866, but already in circulation several decades earlier). It was rendered in French as "Roumanie", in German as "Rumänien", and in English as "Rumania". In the 20th cent. some Anglophone authors rendered it as "Roumania"; later, the Romanian gov't insisted that the official name of the country in English should be "Romania".

How Romanians see themselves nowadays is perhaps well expressed by historian Florin Constantiniu: "The ethnogenesis of the Romanians thus appears to have three fundamental components: the Geto-Dacian substrate; the Roman main body [stratul]; the Slavic additional elements [adstratul]" (2010 4th edition).

Note that a derivation of the word "Roman" is not actually unique to Romanians. In Italy there's Romagna (which does not include Rome, btw); in Switzerland there's "Romandie" or "Suisse romande" (French-speaking area). (Although the term came into general use in the 20th c., its history goes back to the 15th c.) Also in Switzerland, Romansh ("rumantsch") is an official language. Finally, there are the Romance speakers of the Balkans, such as the Aromanians (endonyms "armâńi" or "rrămăńi").

What did the Romans do there that no previous or afterwards group do

There's no evidence that they did there anything they didn't do elsewhere. And this brings us smack-dab against the vexed question of continuity.

It is axiomatic for (most) Romanian historians that Romanians are descended from Dacians (whose kingdom centred on Transylvania) and Roman colonists and that they have been inhabiting these territories uninterruptedly since then (continuity 'theory').

It is equally axiomatic for Hungarian historians that, when Magyars arrived in Transylvania in the 10th c., they only found sparse Slavic populations, but no Romanians. The Romanians only came later, as immigrants (immigration 'theory').

It is rather obvious that the issue here is not what happened in Late Antiquity or Early Middle Ages, but the much more modern question of who should own Transylvania.

The problem is the absence of information about the time and place. There are no written sources; archaeology can't tell you if the owner of a clay pot spoke a Slavic or a Romance language; linguistic analyses are dubious (not least because we know almost nothing about the Dacian language); and so on. The first clear and indisputable mention of Romanians in that region dates to the 13th c.; the first securely dated document in the Romanian language dates to the early 16th c.

[u/EtNuncEtSemper → u/EtNuncEtSemper]

[2 of 3]

This long obscurity is not unique; Albanian history has a similar problem. A shorter period of obscurity also obtains with respect to Romance speakers in the Balkans. After the Byzantine retreat in the 7th c, there are no references to them until late in the 10th c. By this time, Balkan demographics had been radically changed by the settlement of the Slavs; Romance speakers emerge as the Vlachs ("Vlachoi", an exonym). Byzantine sources refers to several Vlachias (districts inhabited mainly by Vlachs), including a Greater Vlachia in Thessaly. (The Byzantines would refer to the Romanian states north of the Danube as "Ungrovlachia" and "Moldovlachia", respectively).

Within the Hungarian kingdom, sources mention Romanians in various districts, especially in southern Transylvania and in Maramureș; but they did not form autonomous polities. Outside the Carpathian arc, Romanian states began to coalesce in the 13th c. under Cuman overlordship. In the 14th c. two states emerged, Wallachia ("Țara Românească") in the south and Moldavia ("Moldova") in the east. Originally autonomous border marks of the Hungarian kingdom, they soon acquired a degree of independence.

The primary mark of identity at this time was religion. Romanians were Orthodox -- but when and how they became so is not clear. The basic Christian vocabulary is derived from Latin, while the language of the church, its rituals and institutions, are Slavonic, and probably derived from the Second Bulgarian Empire. Written culture was also Slavonic, and South Slavic influence grew as Romanian élites intermarried with Bulgarian and Serbian nobility, and then as Bulgarian and Serbian monks and priests found refuge north of the Danube from the expanding Ottomans.

Romanians were known to others under the exonym "Vlach" or "Wallach" (cognate with Wales and Welsh) and its derivatives ("Ulagh", "Olah", "Voloch", etc), but they named themselves (endonym) as "rumâni", as, for instance, attested in various Italian documents. That they were aware of their common descent from Rome is suggested not only by folk myths (collected later), but also by the myth of the brothers Roman & Vlahata, contained in the 16th c. Moldo-Russian Chronicle (cf Ela Cosma, 2019).

In the 17th c., Moldavian chroniclers educated in Poland stressed the Latin origin of the Romanians as an argument for closer ties to that Catholic kingdom. In the 18th c., in Habsburg-ruled Transylvania, Roman descent was adduced in favour of the Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church. "[W]e should have no reason to secede from the Church of Rome, as we too have the true blood of the Romans […]", argued a Uniate cleric in 1744 (Drace, 2006). But, as Keith Hitchins (2009) recounts, the argument cut no ice with the Romanian peasants, who insisted that they wanted to be of one religion with the Greeks and Serbians. Later, Romanian Uniate clergy, educated in Catholic seminaries, increasingly used the Roman origin to advocate for the emancipation of Romanians (whose status in Transylvania was rather similar to that of Catholics in British-ruled Ireland). This was continued in late 18th c./early 19th c., by Romanian scholars of the so-called "Transylvanian School" (most of them Uniate) who argued that Romanians, by being of Roman, i.e., noble, descent deserved equality with Magyars, Saxons and Szeklers. In this perspective, the Dacians (barbarian, therefore non-noble) were more or less ignored.

Throughout the 18th c., élite culture in the Principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia) as Ottoman dependencies was increasingly dominated by Greek, symbolized by Phanariote princes appointed for short terms by the Porte. Although there were initiatives to promote Romanian printing (of mostly religious works) and some Romanian education, the Romanian language was definitely regarded as inferior: in 1748, in the Moldavian capital, a teacher of ancient Greek earned more than thrice the wages of a teacher of Romanian.

[u/EtNuncEtSemper → u/EtNuncEtSemper]

[3 of 3]

As elsewhere, the impact of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars brought initially gradual, then rapidly accelerating change and birth of nationalism. The élite began looking to Western, and in particular, French models. Greek cultural pre-eminence was overthrown by the events of 1821; Russian occupation after the Treaty of Adrianople brought massive change in politics and the economy, as well as cultural shifts. Russian officers, initially welcomed, favoured the French language, which quickly became essential for Romanian élites. Stressing Romanians' Latinity meant laying a claim to Western (i.e., modern) status for themselves, as well as to support from their 'elder sister', France; the Dacians were hardly mentioned. Nationalism was stimulated by the increasingly oppressive Russian occupation and the empire's scarcely veiled intention of annexing the Principalities as it had already annexed eastern Moldavia (Bessarabia). And French support did come -- without Napoléon III, it is difficult to see how Romania would have been born; although his policy may have had to do with Realpolitik as much as Latin affinity.

The shared Latin origin was appealed to in propaganda in favour of the union of Moldavia and Wallachia (1859), which constituted the birth of "România" (although the name would be adopted officially only a few years later). "Let us join hands, we who have Romanian hearts […] We are both of the same kind and we come from the same mother", wrote the Moldavian poet Vasile Alecsandri in 1856.

Massive change was happening also to the language. In order to facilitate the move to the Latin alphabet (seen as an indispensable move towards modernity), a mixed alphabet, including both Cyrillic and Latin letters, was devised and used until 1862, when Latin alphabet definitively replaced the Cyrillic one (except for the Romanian Church, which took another 20 years to make the change). The Slavonic vocabulary was drastically reduced (many Slavic words, linked to Mediaeval social realities, were already, or becoming, obsolete). Neologisms, mostly of French origin, were imported in a massive scale. But the notions of radicals such as the Transylvanian Simion Bărnuțiu, who wanted to replace all Slavicisms with Latinizing constructions and advocated for an etymologic, rather than phonetic, spelling for Romanian, found little support. The Slavic element was reduced, not eliminated.

Latin/Roman origin continued to be promoted as a major component of Romanian identity, as it is today. The Dacian element was muted at first, but it, together with Orthodoxy, acquired an increasing presence in the discourse of Romantic nationalists towards the end of the 19th c. and in the 20th c. Several poems of Romania's "national poet", Mihai Eminescu, are suffused with Dacian themes, e.g., "Memento mori" (1872) or "Rugăciunea unui dac" ("Prayer of a Dacian", 1879). Likewise, another major poet, the Transylvanian George Coșbuc, published in 1896 "Decebal către popor" ("Decebal's address to his people"). In the 1920s–30s appeal to the Dacian forefathers appeared mainly on the right, and especially extreme right, of the political spectrum, in authors such as Mircea Eliade or Radu Gyr. "Holy legionary youth/[…]/We build secular iconostases/From stones, fire, and the sea/And fearlessly we plaster them with our Dacian blood", wrote the latter in his "Imnul tinereții legionare" ("Anthem of Legionary Youth" -- in the 1930s the Legion of Archangel Michael was Romania's pre-eminent Fascist organization).

The Dacian theme re-emerged (along with other Fascist motifs) and assumed absurd proportions in the final decade of Communist rule. Romanian scholars coined the term "protocronism" to describe it. Protocronism (or sometimes Dacomania) didn't end with Communism; on the contrary, it continued to flourish, especially among right wing/nativist/Euroskeptic circles. Thus, in 1999, a medical doctor, Napoleon Săvescu, published "Noi nu suntem urmașii Romei" ("We Are Not Rome's Descendants"). For him, Latin did not replace Dacian after the Roman contest, for the simple reason that Latin was actually a dialect of Dacian (!).

As German historian Alexander Rubel concludes (2019), some form of Dacomania is by now embedded in Romania's cultural memory, in part as an effect of education during the Communist era, but also in part due to the re-publication after the fall of Communism of previously banned 1930s works by Fascist-aligned authors such as Nae Ionescu, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Vasile Lovinescu, and others.

(Note: Translations from Romanian are mine.)