The Second Bulgarian Empire

chapter 31 The Second Bulgarian Empire There is hardly any ethnic group in the medieval history of Southeastern Europe that has created more confusion among historians than the Vlachs. Their documented presence in places as far from each other as Thessaly and Transylvania has invited explanations emphasizing migrations concocted out of thin air, against all evidence produced by written sources or archaeology. Romanians are said to have come to the present-day territory of their country in waves over several centuries, some as late as the 13th or 14th centuries.1 Place names of Latin origin, the existence of Vlach communities in the modern Balkans, as well as the close relations between their dialects and the Romanian language have all been treated as sufficient evidence for migrations either from south to north (across the river Danube), or from north to south.2 Molecular anthropology has recently been harnessed to elucidate the problem, but with no definitive results so far.3 Meanwhile, historians of the medieval Balkans have failed to note that the earliest mention of the exonym “Vlach” cannot be dated before AD 1000.4 It was against the background of the Byzantine conquest of the Balkans (see chapter 12) that the Vlachs appear as key elements of the military, 1 Friedwagner, “Über die Sprache”; Darkó, “Die Übersiedlung”; Stadtmüller, Geschichte, pp. 207 with 205 map 12; Boba, “Vlachs”; Kramer, “Sprachwissenschaft”; Rabinovich, “Iskushenie”; Czamańska, “Problem”; Fiedler, “Pochodzenie,” pp. 130 and 125 fig. 2. This has often been re- garded as a form of return migration, since the Latin-speaking population of the province of Dacia was also believed to have migrated to the Balkan Peninsula after the abandonment of the province in the late 3rd century. For the historiographic debate surrounding the presence of Vlachs (Romanians) in Transylvania, see Auzká, “Meziválečná rumunská a maďarská historiografie.” 2 Some maintain that Vlachs of present-day Greece came from the northern parts of the Balkan Peninsula, others that the Vlachs of Epirus, Thessaly, southern Macedonia and Albania migrated to northern Bulgaria under the pressure of the Normans at the end of the 11th and in the early 12th century (Christou, Aromounoi; Stanev, “Migraciiata,” pp. 214–17). 3 Comas et al., “Alu insertion polymorphisms”; Bosch et al., “Paternal and maternal lineages.” 4 The word “Vlach” is of (South) Slavic origin and may have been a loan from a Germanic language in which it operated much like Wal(s)chen in modern German or Welsh in modern English. In other words, the term (which is believed to derive from the name of the Celtic tribe of the Volcae) was employed by outsiders to refer to a population speaking a Romance language. That the word “Vlach” is an exonym results from the fact that in most dialects spoken by Balkan Vlachs, the self-designation is derived from the Latin word for “Roman” (Vătășescu, “L’ethnonyme”). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395190_032 672 chapter 31 administrative, and ecclesiastical reconfiguration in the region.5 The earliest mention of the Vlachs in a Greek narrative source is the prescriptive hand- book conventionally known as the Strategikon of Kekaumenos, which was most likely written during the last regnal years of Emperor Michael VII Dukas (1071–1078). According to Kekaumenos, in ancient times the Vlachs were called Dacians and Bessi, and he describes their migration from the northern parts of the Balkan Peninsula into central Greece.6 Much ink has been spilled on this passage and on the significance of its testimony for the history of both Romanians and the Balkan Vlachs.7 However, the idea of a Vlach migration is simply based on Kekaumenos’ misinterpretation of the ancient sources (primarily Dio Cassius) that he employed at that point in the narrative.8 He has otherwise only bad things to say about the Vlachs, primarily because of the need to exculpate his father-in-law, Nikulitzas Delphinas, who, although gov- ernor of Larisa (Thessaly; Fig. 31.1), found himself—allegedly unwillingly—at the head of a revolt against a tax surcharge imposed by Emperor Constantine X (1059–1067). Nikulitzas belonged to a prominent family in the city. In 980, Emperor Basil II had appointed his grandfather as leader (archon) of the Vlachs, the same group that was at the center of the rebellion of 1066–1067. The leaders of that rebellion were all prominent men of Larisa and two of them are specifically said to have been Vlachs: Slavota Karmalakis and a certain Beriboes (Berivoi), in whose house the conspirators used to gather to discuss their plans.9 In addition, the rebellion appears to have drawn large numbers of Vlachs from the hinterland of Larisa, but among the rebels, Kekaumenos also mentions Bulgarians. In anticipation of serious military turbulence, the Vlachs had sent their wives and children to the “mountains of Bulgaria,” which may suggest that they had more or less permanent settlements there and were 5 The Vlachs are mentioned for the first time in Greek in the second chrysobull of Emperor Basil II for the newly established archbishopric of Ohrid (1019). They are described as living all across the whole of Bulgaria, i.e., the territory previously controlled by Samuel (Gelzer, “Ungedruckte und wenig bekannte Bistümerverzeichnisse,” p. 46; Komatina, “Pojam bugar- ske”; for Vlachs in Macedonia, see Sidovski, “Vlasite”). In Latin, the Vlachs are mentioned for the first time in the Annals of Bari sub anno 1027, as soldiers in an army sent in 1027 to southern Italy to begin the conquest of Sicily (Gyóni, “Vlakhi”). For Vlachs in southern Italy, see also Olajos, “La deuxième attestation.” 6 Kekaumenos, Strategikon IV 187, p. 226. 7 Djuvara, “Sur un passage.” 8 Saramandu, “Despre coborârea.” For the description of the Vlachs as modeled on a rhetorical exercise, see Roueché, “Defining the foreign.” 9 Kekaumenos, Strategikon IV 175, p. 211. For the rebellion of 1066–1067, see Madgearu, “Urban unrest.”.

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