The origin of romanians

The origins of the Romanian people, as a vibrant ethno-linguistic community (Romanophones), remain a captivating topic of historical discourse. Presently, the prevailing notion, drawing closer to consensus, suggests their ancestry from the Romance-speaking populations nestled in the expanse of the Lower Danube basin, specifically north of the enigmatic Jireček Line, which demarcated the sway of Hellenism to the south. Yet, this prevailing view isn't impervious to intellectual contestation. Scholars such as Nicolae Iorga, Theodor Capidan, P. P. Panaitescu, and Constantin Papanace proffer a dissenting perspective, repudiating the very existence of the Jireček Line. Instead, they cast a wide net for the genesis of the Romanian people, encompassing the entire Balkan Peninsula and the expanse north of the Danube up to the northern foothills of the Carpathian Mountains and the shores of the Dniester River. A dearth of historical sources from the first millennium, the tumultuous context of migration periods, and the political milieu of the 19th and 20th centuries, when scholarly pursuits concerning this matter burgeoned, have all engendered a plethora of divergent theories concerning the formation of the Romanian populace. Central to this ongoing debate is the question of the locale and extent of the ethno-genesis territory: was it situated north or south of the Danube, or perhaps sprawled across both riverbanks? Did it encompass a broader expanse than the present-day states (encompassing Romania and its neighbors), or was it confined to isolated pockets of land?

Over the course of the last two to three centuries, various historiographical currents have posited distinct origins:

1. The purely North Danubian hypothesis, postulating descent from the population of Roman Dacia, which was thoroughly Romanized by the time of Aurelian's withdrawal. Here, it's theorized that the South Danubian Romance communities were born of migrations originating from Dacia.

2. The exclusively South Danubian notion proposes the Romanian ancestry to be rooted in the population of Moesia. In this view, the North Danubian Romance communities are thought to have stemmed from migrations initiated in the early Middle Ages, traversing from Serbia, Bulgaria, or Macedonia into what is now Romania.

3. The combined North and South Danubian thesis contends that both regions contributed to the Romanian mosaic. The differentiation between North and South Danubian dialects is expounded in this theory not as an outcome of migratory waves but rather as a continuous process of Romanization south of the Danube post-3rd century. This transition was succeeded by a partial Hellenization after the 5th century. Meanwhile, to the north of the Danube, a process of Slavic assimilation took the forefront.

Beyond the scholarly complexities that extend to fundamental contentions between the Vienna and Toronto schools of historical thought, a multitude of studies have been galvanized by the political debate surrounding the historical primacy of the Romanians. This pertains to the North Danubian territories that Romania claimed and later secured (most notably in Transylvania, where tensions between Romanians and Hungarians ran high), or to the presence of the Romanian populace predating the Slavs in the South Danubian territories that today belong to the Slavic Balkan states.

The earliest concrete reference to Eastern Romance communities can be unearthed in the chronicles of Theophilact Simocatta, harking back to the year 587. A notable episode therein features the evocative expression "Torna, torna, fratre!"

By the mid-9th century, the annals of Romania's current domain resonate with the presence of the V.n.nd.r. people, a sizable and Christian community emanating from the lands of Rum. The initial records of Romanians, identified as "vlachs" (blachi) by exonym, grace Byzantine chronicles of the 10th century. Remarkably, the stela from Gothland stands as a potent testament to their presence north of the Danube by the 11th century. The 12th century offers attestations of the exonym on both banks of the river.

The endonym "români" (derived from "roman") makes its inaugural appearance in Neacșu's epistle during the early 16th century. It's widely acknowledged that this term has always been an integral component of their common lexicon. Curiously, there are conjectures that the name of Duke Ramunc, a figure from the Vlach folklore immortalized in the Nibelungenlied, might trace its origins to the Romanian endonym.