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Romania The Age of the Great Migrations
During the two centuries of Roman rule, Getian
insurgents,
Goths, and Sarmatians harassed Dacia, and by the middle of
the
third century A.D. major migrations of barbarian tribes
had begun.
In 271 A.D. Emperor Aurelian concluded that Dacia was
overexposed
to invasion and ordered his army and colonists to withdraw
across
the Danube. Virtually all the soldiers, imperial
officials, and
merchants departed; scholars, however, presume that many
peasants
remained. Those Dacians who departed spread over the
Balkans as far
as the Peloponnese, where their descendants, the
Kutzovlachs, still
live.
Without Rome's protection, Dacia became a conduit for
invading
tribes who, targeting richer lands further west and south,
plundered Dacian settlements in passing. Dacian towns were
abandoned, highwaymen menaced travelers along crumbling
Roman
roads, and rural life decayed. The Visigoths, Huns,
Ostrogoths,
Gepids, and Lombards swept over the land from the third to
the
fifth centuries, and the Avars arrived in the sixth, along
with a
steady inflow of Slavic peasants. Unlike other tribes, the
Slavs
settled the land and intermarried with the Dacians. In 676
the
Bulgar Empire absorbed a large portion of ancient Dacia.
The migration period brought Dacia linguistic and
religious
change. The Dacians assimilated many Slavic words into
their
lexicon and, although modern Romanian is a Romance
language, some
linguists estimate that half of its words have Slavic
roots.
Baptism of the Dacians began around 350 A.D. when Bishop
Ulfilas
preached the Arian heresy north of the Danube. Soon after
saints
Cyril and Methodius converted the Bulgars to Christianity
in 864,
Dacia's Christians adopted the Slavonic rite and became
subject to
the Bulgarian metropolitan at Ohrid. The Slavonic rite
would be
maintained until the seventeenth century, when Romanian
became the
liturgical language.
Data as of July 1989
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