Talk:Founding of Moldavia/Archive 1

It's absurd to claim that there were no Romanians in 14th century. "Vlachs" is simply the name which the Slavs, Greeks and Hungarians used for Romanians.

Your claim that the Romanians of Maramureş were not Romanians in 14th century is simply your own POV, unsupported by any sources or scholarship.

The comparison with Charlemagne is a fallacy. He was a Frank, probably speaker of their Germanic language, so he couldn't have been French. bogdan (talk) 22:37, 22 June 2008 (UTC)


 * No that's only your POV. All sources from the period call them Vlachs. That Vlachs is not just the name of Romanians is proved by the fact that none of the languages you quoted use it to refer to the Romanians of today. Yeah, Romanians evolved from a part of the Vlachs, but to speak of Romanians in the 14th century is simply false. Just because they are fewer Moldovans here that's no reason to bully them to push your POV (you'd never dare to call the Asens Romanians because of the strong Bulgarian community here) Xasha (talk) 22:52, 22 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Xasha, accusations of POV-pushing are generally unhelpful. Let's take a look at what Peter Jordan has to say on p. 184 of Linguistic Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Christina Bratt Paulston and Donald Peckham, shall we? (Note that none of these people are themselves Romanian.) (Emphasis mine) "Already in the thirteenth century there must have been enough Transylvanian Vlachs or Romanians to populate Moldavia and Wallachia by emigration right after their devastation by the Mongols and to give these regions a distinct Romanian character... Nobility [in Transylvania] was accessible only for Catholics; most Vlachs/Romanians, who refused conversion from Orthodoxy, became serfs".
 * As you can see, the terms as used in modern scholarship are interchangeable for at least as early as the 13th century. No point in pursuing this further. Biruitorul Talk 02:19, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Types of Vlachs
Nobody made a difference between types of Vlachs during those times.

Every historian I've read assumed they were Romanians. It's absurd to claim they were Aromanians. From their language are derived both Maramureşean and Moldovean speeches. It's clearly that it was a dialect of Romanian, not Aromanian.

bogdan (talk) 22:41, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Vasary says they came from the Balkans. And WIkipedia doesn't work on original research, even if its the original research of an administrator.Xasha (talk) 22:52, 22 June 2008 (UTC)


 * But Vasary also calls them "Romanians" :


 * The first Vlakhs must have appeared in Maramaros (Romanian Maramureş) at the end of the thirteenth century, but the first written evidence of the colonising activity of Vlakh knezes can be dated to 1326. It is disputed whether the Romanians of Maramaros took part in Lackfi’s Tatar campaign in 1345, but it seems plausible to reckon with their participation.
 * The social and political organisation of the Romanian populations in north-west Moldavia and in Maramaros followed similar lines. The basic elements of this system had been taken over from the Slavs of the Balkans much earlier: knezes were the chiefs of villages, and several knezes would choose the voivode from among their number. (p. 157)
 * bogdan (talk) 23:23, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
 * That's still anachronistic.Xasha (talk) 23:35, 22 June 2008 (UTC)


 * What is anachronistic? The Romanians called themselves români or rumâni before that and after that. The Hungarians and Slavs called the Romanians "Vlachs" (Olahs, whatever) before and after that. The word "Olah" was in common use in Hungary until the 19th century. bogdan (talk) 00:09, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
 * The word "Romanian" is first mentioned 2 centuries later, so your claim has no proofs. The word Olah was used for every vlach there was, and not only for Romanians.Xasha (talk) 08:26, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

The debate about Bogdan
Actually that debate is part of the Romanian-Hungarian debate over "who was here first". The Hungarians say there's no reason not to believe that the two Bogdans refer to the same person, while the Romanians say there's no reason to believe it's the same person. Both sides are arguing for the sake of argument, there's not much evidence for either version. I try to keep this kind of debate out of this article, it's not quite relevant to Moldavia.

Nevertheless, I added the information to Bogdan I of Moldavia and this kind of facts should be added to articles connected to Origin of Romanians, but I'm not going to touch that article anytime soon. It's much too messy and too full of POV-warriors, fighting on both sides. bogdan (talk) 22:57, 23 June 2008 (UTC)