Romanian ethnic identity and language

Roman and Vlahata is a legend written in Slavonic at the end of the 15th century, beginning of the 16th, probably by some scholar at the Moldavian court. It is part of a larger collection of texts, containing also the legend of Dragoş, a noble from Maramureş the founder of Moldavia and a chronology of Moldavian rulers from Dragoş to Bogdan III (1504 - 1517; the chronology ends with his reign but his death is not mentioned).

The legend contains the story of two eponymous brothers, founders of two nations: the "Romans" from Italy and the "Romans" from Balkans. I will translate only its beginning, which is relevant enough for the topic of this thread.

Another claim which was made on Romanians is that they did not realize they spoke something different than Slavic until the 17th century, and that they were culturally Slavs until the 17th century (an even bolder version of this claim decreed that the elites were culturally Slavs until the 17th century while the masses were culturally Slavs until the early 19th century!).

That Romanian masses were "culturally Slavs" is easily dismissed. Since they were largely illiterate they did not have access to the Slavonic culture. Their language is distinctively noted to be Romanian since 16th century, their habits, their mythology, their cuisine, their costumes, etc. are recorded in the past few centuries and with all the parallelisms that can be found in the neighbouring areas, they have an undeniable specific. This should be enough to note that Romanians couldn't be culturally Slavs (moreover that Slavs do not have a unitary culture of their own, what is Slavic culture anyway?)

For this claim it was invoked Lucian Boia's Romania: Borderland of Europe. He writes at p. 31 about Romanians: "they were fully integrated in the Slavonic culture of the East. Their cultural reference points were not Latin but Greek and Slavic". Here two things should be noted. One, is that Boia never argues Romanians were culturally Slavs. Two, is that he speakes only of the literate culture, the written culture. This is obvious also in an analogy he draws on the same page: "The Poles were Slavs but belonged through their Catholicism to the Latin cultural space" (there was no Latin vernacular at this time in Europe; moreover concluding that Poles were culturally Romans is blatantly stupid).

But Boia makes some inaccurate claims (we shouldn't be too critical on him, he's not really a historian but a historiographer, but that's why we shouldn't value his work too much in terms of accuracy, rather on the general perspectives it provides). On the same page he claims: "The Romanians discovered their Latinity in the seventeenth century. This was the period when the Slavonic language, which had been omnipresent in the Church, in chancery documents in the earliest historical writings, began to give way to Romanian".

Here are few issues where I find Boia to be wrong:
1) Romanians were not all Orthodox. Not only but especially in Transylvania Catholicism and Protestantism were spread in the Romanian population.

2) Romanians' "cultural reference points" were not the same throughout the territory inhabited by them. The Hungarian influence in Transylvania or the Polish influence in Moldavia is undeniable and both these influences would have been characterized to be "Latin" by Boia.

3) It is well known the earliest texts written in Romanian (especially religious texts) are not from the 17th but from the 16th century. I'll review the ones I know of:
- 1521: The letter of Neacşu Lupu, a Wallachian merchant from C�mpulung to Hans Benkner, the Saxon Burgermeister of Braşov
- 1551-1553: The Tetraevanghel (a gospel book containing all the four gospels of the New Testament) from Sibiu. It has bilingual text (written in parallel both in Slavonic and Romanian). It was translated about a Slavonic gospel book (printed in Sibiu in 1546) and Luther's Bible.
- 1560: Christian Question, a canonical writing of Christian doctrine published in Braşov. Among its sources was the Lutheran Catechism printed in Sibiu in 1544.
- 1570: Coresi's Missal, printed in Braşov
- 1571-1575: A religious songs collection printed in Cluj. This is the first Romanian text printed in Latin alphabet (it uses Magyar orthography)
- 1573-1578: The Scheian Psalter, it also contains the Atanasian Symbol in an incomplete form. It was published in Moldova.
- 1577: The "Slavo-Romanian" Psalter printed in Braşov. It has bilingual text (written in parallel both in Slavonic and Romanian).
- 1582: Palia from Orăştie. It contains several books of the Old Testament. Among its sources is the Pentateuch printed by G�sp�r Heltai and some scholars assume even a version of Vulgata.
- 1590-1602: The Easter Homily printed somewhere in northern Hunedoara.
- 1594: Lord's Prayer written by the Moldavian boyar Luca Stroici and given to the Polish scholar Stanislaw Sarnicki who will publish it in Krak�w. The text is in Latin alphabet (it uses Polish orthography). In about the same period another version of it will be printed in Frankfurt by Hieronymus Megiser. Luca Stroici is an interesting character for our topic. When serving under Iancu Sasul (1579-1582) he signed the official papers with Latin letters, his signatures reading "Iskal Stroicz, anno 1580" and "Stroicz logofet, 19, anno 1580" (note the Polish orthography).

After this review several conclusions can be drawn:
- In writing Slavonic began to give way to Romanian in the 16th century, not in 17th
- though the majority of texts were written in Cyrillic, the first Romanian text written in Latin alphabet dates from the 16th century
- especially in Transylvania, the "cultural reference points" are not only Greek and Slavic but also Hungarian, German and consequently Latin

4) The Romanians learnt of their mythical Roman origins also in the 16th century, not in the 17th. I already mentioned a legend recorded at the Moldavian court at the beginning of the 16th century which drew the entire Moldavian line of rulers from a mythical founder named Roman, fleeing from Venice (sic!) together with his brother, Vlahata. This, however, is not an isolated example. Here are a few more:
- Nicolaus Olahus, a Transylvanian Humanist of Romanian (Wallachian?) extraction, received in 1541 a diploma from Ferdinand of Habsburg. The diploma also said (I didn't find the original text, I'm translating after a translation): "your co-national Vlachs do not have a humble origin at all. Indeed, it is known they descend from Rome, the city of the emperors, and that they were settled in a very rich side of Dacia which is called Transalpina to stop the attacks of the ancient enemies in Roman provinces. That's why even today they call themselves Romans in their language."
- in 1561/1562, the Moldavian ruler Jacob Heraclides, better known as Despot Vodă (i.e. Despot Voivod), wrote a proclamation to his people letting them know "con voi valenti homeni et gente bellicosa discesi dali valorosi Romani, quali hanno fatto tremer il mondo" (the reporting source is Italian). As it can be seen in mid 16th century a Moldavian ruler told his people that they descend from the Romans.
- a similar episode can be extracted from the papal correspondence three decades later. In 1592/1593, trying to organize an anti-Ottoman alliance, the pope Clement VIII wrote to his messenger Alessandro Komulović to rally the Wallachians and the Moldavians to their cause "riducendo loro anco a memoria, ch'essi sono colonna d'Italiani" (remind them they are a colony of Italians)
I believe it's obvious that in political mythology and propaganda of the 16th century, the Romanians started to be regarded as descendants of the Romans and they also knew about it. I don't believe this was contributing in anyway to their ethnicity at that moment, though. Imagine a peasant who knew his father was John and his grandfather was George, that he was told by the those recruiting him that he is decendant of the Romans and he is brave and valiant as they were. But certainly the Romanian elites started to cultivate this new neo-Roman identity, which will explode in the next century (the phenomenon observed by Boia).

Anton, I do not know about what inscription are you talking about. Can you make a more ample presentation on the presence of Bulgarian north of Danube? From all I could tell, it could be there were communities of Bulgarians there, likewise there were communities of Germans (Saxons), Jews, Tartars, Armenians, Gypsies, etc.

Anton, if you expect me to read three books to find an inscription (perhaps a one-liner) about dogs, then probably you don't expect any answer soon on that question of yours. In any case, thank you for your bibliographical addition.

As for terminology, it is not invented by me ( http://books.google.com/books?um=1&q=%22Slavonic+language%22 ). If you prefer I can use OCS (abbreviation for Old Church Slavonic), though this language was used also for other texts than the religious ones.