most part and primarily limited to entries in the Western languages, with as much ref- erence to English materials as is possible, will ensure the volume can be used by scholars and students alike. Engel's book sets a standard that one hopes can be emu- . lated for other national histories that have traditionally lain outside the main line of medieval European historiography. .■ . Paul W. Knoll University of Southern California History of Transylvania. Edited by Bela Kopeczi. Volume I: From the Beginnings to 1606. Edited by László Makkai and Andras Mócsy. Translated by Bennett Kovrig et al. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2001. xvi, 890 pp. Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York. This work is a successful English translation of the first volume, A kezdetekt(51 1606-ig [From the beginnings to 1606], of the three-volume work edited by Bela Kopeczi, Erdily tortenete [A history of Transylvania], published by Akademiai Kiado in Budapest during the mid-1980s. Numerous Hungarian scholars, including arche- ologists and historians, all members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, took part in writing the different sections of the original three-volume set, and it was their con- scientious common effort that guaranteed the level of scholarship and integrity needed for a work of such high gravity. The topic of this three-volume set (the translation of the next two volumes is in preparation) is of importance and sensitivity, as it deals with the nearly ten-century history of Transylvania, a land, or region, that has been and remains until today the homeland of three peoples, Magyars, Romanians and Sax- ons (German settlers). Although the contributing Hungarian scholars complained that they only received very limited sympathy from their Romanian colleagues, therefore, out of political consideration, they had to do pursue their project without the coopera- tion of their Romanian counterparts, they did everything on their own to produce a work of scholarship sine ira et studio, without prejudice. The present volume, which is a mirror translation of the Hungarian original, deals with the ancient history of the Transylvania region, discusses briefly the history of the medieval Hungarian kingdom that collapsed in the battle fought with the Turks at Mohacs, in I �,26, and devotes time and space for analyzing what may be regarded as the initial phase in the formation of an emerging principality of Transylvania during the sixteenth century. The authors present new interpretations based upon archaeo- logical evidence gathered in recent decades on the ancient history of the region, with special emphasis on life in Dacia, a province of the Roman empire; further, on the ar- rival and longer-shorter stay of Turkish, Teutonic peoples, and the Slavs, whose own specific cultures rapidly replaced the Roman civilization that had been destroyed overnight, by evaluating the archaeological and anthropological finds of those peo- ■ pies, with analytical detail and precision. The formation of Transylvania in the middle ' ages had occurred within the framework, and became an essential feature, of the me- dieval Hungarian kingdom. :- The contributing authors of this volume thus discuss the settlements by the Mag- yars, Saxons (Germans), Romanians in the region, explain how the institution of the vajda (in Latin, vaivoda, or Voyvoda), Head-Reeve, the Voivode, of Transylvania - the authors should have made it clear that the term appeared in King Andrew II'ss 1224 Charter "hospitibus Theutonicis Ultrasilvanis datum" (cf. Henrik Marczali, ed., Enchiridion fontium historiae Hungarorum [Budapest, 1901], p. 147), or in Andrew III's Laws of 1291, a. 34 (ibid., p. 190f.) - had developed, and analyze how next to the three regions inhabited by ethnic Magyars, Germans and Romanians, the concept and legal entity of three nations - that of Magyar, Saxon, and Szekler - came gradu- ally into existence. They further depict the particular features of feudalism that had emerged in Transylvania. In the last section of this volume that debated the begin- nings of the principality of Transylvania, the authors reason how the eastern Hungar- ian realm of the Zápolya clan under the given political circumstances evolved into a statehood that, because of the reformation by Luther and mainly by Calvin, assumed unique cultural features that, in turn, aided the evolution of a Transylvania ethnic pride of local color, a state of mind, of nearly patriotic conscientiousness. The contents of the volume can be divided into four sections. In the first, three au- thors, Gabriel Vekony, Andreas Mocsy, and Andrew Toth, deal with Transylvania in the ancient world. Thought provoking is Mocsy's argument on the Dacian kingdom, or Toth's thesis rationalizing about the region when it was a province of the Roman empire - keeping in mind, of course, that the Roman province of Dacia was located north of the Danube river; however, by the late third and fourth centuries, Dacia, now a Roman diocese, was recorded laying south of the Danube, bordered from the east by the Diocese of Thrace. T6th's thesis can be supported by the assertion of Colin McEvedy who has pointed out that there is no evidence for the Romanian claim that they are the descendants of Latin-speaking colonists planted in Dacia in the first cen- tury AD, for there is no evidence for the survival of these colonists between the fall of the Roman province in the 270s and the first mention of the Vlachs (Romance speak- ers) in 1230; a more plausible origin for the Romanians lies in the Latin-speaking population south of the Danube, where Roman institutions struck deeper roots - cf. his The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (London-New York, 1961; 1992), p. 4, n. I . - The second section devoted to the period of the "barbarian" migrations in the ter- ritory of Transylvania, from 271 to 896, is a work written with a thoroughness based on decades of original archaeological research, and with the full support from both primary and secondary written sources, by the recently deceased archaeologist, Istvan Bona (pup. 139-329). Bona at first analyzed the concept of erdei emberek, "people from the forest"; his interpretation further included the physical presence of the Visi- goths in the region, and a discussion on the Goth's social structural framework, eco- nomic-political organization, and draws a parallel between the Teutonic and Christian supernatural ideas concerning religion. Bona deals in detail with the Gepids who en- .. tered Transylvania after the departure of the Visigoths - but prior to the entry of the Huns - as he characterizes in some depth the Gepids' society and kingship that, in a ': time frame, coincided with the rule and realm of the west-Frankish Merovingian kings. ' .