Blasi and Pastores Romanorum in the Gesta Hungarorum by an Anonymous Notary

The Blachi were mentioned several times by the anonymous notary of King Béla III, the author of the first Hungarian chronicle, which preserved until nowadays. They occurred as the enemies of the Hungarians and the inhabitants of local political structures. Once they were mentioned together with mysterious herds of the Romans. In my article I try to answer the question, who were the Blachi, if we can identify them with the Vlachs, the ascendants of the Romanians and who were the Romans and their shepherds. According to the common opinion of the scholars when he wrote about the Blachi, he really mentioned the Vlachs. However, there is no concordance in the question if pastores Romanorum were identical with the Vlachs. The use of the conjunction ac suggests that the anonymous notary treated the shepherds of the Romans as a separate group as the Vlachs. They occurred west of the Danube while the Vlachs were located east of Tisza. Some scholar interpreted the shepherds as the rest of the ancient Pannonian population, which was Romanized during the Roman rule, another connected them with the Papal collectors of tithes or the Walloon colonists from the chronicler’s time. I propose to connect the notary’s story with that of the Rus’ Primary Chronicle’s fragment named by Aleksey Shakhmatov as The Story of the Book Translation about the Volokh (i.e. Frankish) rule over the Pannonian Slavs. I think that the Hungarian chronicler used the local oral tradition of the Pannonian Slavs about the Frankish priests (pastores) from the Salzburg archbishopric, who acted among them. This tradition expressed the Frankish political and ecclesiastical domination over former Pannonia in the ninth century.

It is the first, but not the only place where the Vlachs occurred in the chronicle.We find more extensive fragments in Chapters 24-27 of the work.The story there is devoted to the fights of the Hungarian incomers with Gelou quidam Blacus who reigned in the territory of western Transylvania.The Vlachs and the Slavs lived in his domain, and they chose for themselves the Hungarian leader Tuhutum (or Tétény) after Gelou's death in combat.The new Hungarian ruler of Transylvania founded a dynasty from which Sarolta, St. Stephen's mother, descended.The first king of Hungary dethroned Gyula because he refused to be a Christian and opposed him 2 .We read about Vlachs once more, as auxiliary people to the prince of Banat Glad, together with the Bulgarians and the Cumanians 3 .Glad was already mentioned earlier as Prince of Morisena, an ally of the Cumans and as an ascendant of Ajtony 4 .
As we can see, the Vlachs, or rather Blachi 5 , were mentioned a few times as enemies of the Hungarians and inhabitants of local political structures such as the domain of Gelou, who was characterized as a Wallachian ruler.Apart of them, the Romans are mentioned together with mysterious pastores Romanorum.Here arises a question important from the point of view of our subject matter: Who were the Blachi?Can we identify them with the Vlach people, the ascendants of the Romanians?Who were the Romans and their shepherds?To answer this question we must first review major suggestions in the historiography and next try to examine both the real and legendary situations of the Carpathian Basin in the time of the Hungarian conquest, as well as in the time when an anonymous notary composed the Gesta6 .
Anonymus' Vlach information is important because the first documents mention the Vlachs in the south of Transylvania as late as the 1220s7 .If we accept the most popular dating of the chronicle composition as about 1200, it will be counted as the oldest information about this people that can be found in all Hungarian sources.Moreover, according to this data they were located in the territories of their later settlement already three centuries earlier and this information suggests that they lived in Transylvania and Pannonia before the Hungarians' arrival there.It was a core for the idea of Dacian-Roman continuity in Transylvania, which started to be a cornerstone of modern Romanian national consciousness and a basis of Romanian aspirations to play an equal role in Transylvania as the Hungarians and the Saxons had played.The theory of Dacian-Roman continuity claimed that it was a Romanized Dacian population who preserved the Latin language and culture after the fall of the Roman power in Dacia.Living in the mountains and dealing with shepherding, the generations of the Roman people -the Vlachs, who called themselves the Rumâni -preserved their ancient heritage until the Hungarian conquest, and did it despite oppressive Hungarian power.Only after 1918 the Transylvanian Romanians, united with their brothers from Wallachia and Moldavia, were able to develop their national culture in their new situation.It is nothing strange that the text of the Hungarian, i.e. enemy chronicler, where Blachi occurred so many times, was so precious to them.And it was accepted as a credible source of information without any doubts8 .
The Hungarian historiography has discussed the value of the Gesta Hungarorum as a primary source from the very moment of its publication.The positivistic methods of source criticism led scholars to general questioning of information given by the chronicler.They underlined his words that he had composed rather a heroic romance, such as Historia Troiana, which he had also composed in his scholarly time, the fact that we know from his Preface 9 .His story had an aim to describe brave acts of the Hungarian leaders, thanks to which they could settle in a new homeland.It was a legitimization story of Hungarian presence in Europe.These rulers had right to rule because the Árpáds were Attila's descendants; in the same way, they earned it thanks to their victorious fights against the settled people and their estates.It seems that Anonymus deduced the existence of these duchies and their rulers from the toponymy, thinking that a lot of place-names commemorated Hungarian as well as local heroes 10 .
However, it would be a mistake to suspect that all his information was false.Let us analyse the existence of the principality of Menumorout.According to our chronicler, he was a prince of Bihar, who was defeated by the Hungarians.A story about him was broken by a narration about Gelou, which we have mentioned above.Only at the end of his Gesta the chronicler "remembered" about Menumorout and wrote about his peace treatment sealed by the marriage of his daughter with the Hungarian dauphin Zulta.It was another legitimization argument of the Hungarian power over a part of their new homeland territory.Of course, Menumorout never existed and never ruled over Bihar.But the modern explanation of this name leads us to understand that it was not an invented person.The scholars interpret his name as a compound made of two words.The first one was a Turkish word 'ménü' with the sense 'great', and the second of the Dacian-Roman continuation).For critical approach to the theory of the Dacian-Roman continuity see U. Fiedler, Pochodzenie ludności romańskiej (Wołochów i Rumunów) na Półwyspie Bałkańskim.Głos w dyskusji, "Acta Archaeologica Carpathica" 1997Carpathica" -1998, 34, pp. 119-134. 9 , 34, pp. 119-134. 9 An.Eng., pp.2-3 and An.SRH, p. 33.Cf.L. Hadrovics, Der südslawische Trojaroman und seine ungarische Vorlage, "Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hungariae" 1955, 1, pp. 49-135 -according to the researcher our chronicler was an author of the Latin version of Historia Troiana, which later was translated into Hungarian (by himself?) and afterwards was a basis for the South-Slavic versions.
10 Information about the source value of the Gesta Hungarorum is contained in all recent numerous editions of this source.Apart of An.Eng. and An.SRH cf.G. Silagi and L. Veszprémy (eds.),Die "Gesta Hungarorum" des anonymen Notars.Die älteste Darstellung der ungarischen Geschichte, Sigmaringen 1992 -Latin-German; L. Veszprémy and J. Bollók (eds.),Anonymus, A magyarok cselekedetei.Kézai Simon, A magyarok cselekedetei, Budapest 1999 -Hungarian; V. Múcska (ed.), Kronika anonymného notára kráľa Bela, Bratislava 2000) -Latin-Slovak; A. Kulbicka et al. (ed.), Anonimowego Notariusza króla Béli Gesta Hungarorum, Kraków 2006 -Latin-Polish.one is the Hungarian ethnonym meaning 'the Moravian'.Now it becomes clear for us that Menumorout was a personification of the Great Moravian ruler, probably Svatopluk, and Anonymus did not know about him at all11 .One can observe some traces of Hungarian -Moravian contacts also in a story of the conquest of Nitra that was defended by Prince Zobor.In fact, it is a name of a hill, on which a famous Benedictine monastery was founded.
As can be seen, Anonymus created his story using several components.He based it on oral tradition of some noble families, he filled it with his language deductions 12 and his own observations.He frequently projected the reality of his time into the past.We encounter such a situation when he mentioned that auxiliary troops of prince Glad consisted of the Vlachs, the Bulgarians and the Cumanians.It reflected the official title of the Bulgarian tsars from the Second Bulgarian State of the Asenid dynasty after 1185, which means from our chronicler's contemporary time 13 .No wonder because the medieval chroniclers thought in the categories of their own times deducting that if there were no written sources telling the contrary or presenting other options, the past reality did not differ much from what they experienced in their times.
Let us return to the main question: Who were the Blachi, the Romans and their shepherds in the chronicle?According to a basic analysis of the problem made by Gyula Kristó, Anonymus, when he wrote about the Vlachs, thought in fact about the Vlachs themselves 14 .The same is the opinion of a number of scholars.However, no such concordance is seen when it comes to the question whether or not the Blachi were to be identify with the Roman shepherds.Some scholars, not only from Romania, say yes as their answer.One of their argument was that the conjunctive ac was used by the anonymous chronicler meaning 'that is', which means as an expression of the relation of implication, when one subject is called with another term.They translate the fragment of the Anonymus' text as 'the Blachs that is the Roman shepherds'.Dennis Deletant, nevertheless, said that he never met such a meaning of this conjunctive, which always expressed the relation of conjunction, that is a connection of two sepa-rate subjects15 .Therefore, pastores Romanorum were not identical with the Blachs.Moreover, Gyula Kristó made an important observation that the Vlachs were mentioned only in the context of the territories located east of Tisza, while the Romans and their shepherds occurred only in historical Pannonia, in territories situated west of the Danube, in Transdanubia (Dunántúl) 16 .In many scholars' opinion the Romans were the Romance population but rather of western Romance origins, maybe they were the Latinized people from former Pannonia or the Latinized group of people from the Alps to the Danube (Rhaeto-Romanians or Dalmatians).One understood this term as the Walloons, new settlers in the medieval Hungary or even in political and economic sense as the Papal collectors of tithes or the representatives of the East-Roman Empire, which is the Byzantium 17 .Gyula Kristó might be right when he mentioned that our chronicler, who received a classical education somewhere in France (maybe in Orléans), had the ancient Romans on his mind 18 .
However, we have to ask whether the traditional belief about the presence of the Romans in Pannonia and their escape to Germany out of fear of the Hungarians is rooted in the ancient times?The Old-Rus' Primary Chronicle or Povesť vremennykh let seems to offer an answer to this question.We read here about Pannonia as a homeland of the Slavs.They were subordinated to the Vlachs (Volokhi, Volkhi).After the Hungarians had come to Pannonia, they expelled the Vlachs and subdued the Slavs 19 .According to Aleksey Shakhmatov, this part of the Primary Chronicle includes the West-Slavic tradition of the Great-Moravian origin.It is a part of the Story of the Book Translation (Povesť o prelozheniyu knig), as he proposed to call this frag-ment, in which the cultural of Great Moravia was preserved 20 .Analyses of the Pannonian history of the 9 th century show that the Old--Rus' tradition preserved the real facts from the history of the Pannonian Slavs, who were the subject of the Frankish power in the 9 th century.The Frankish supremacy collapsed after the Hungarians conquered the land.Therefore, I believe that the Volokhi of the Primary Chronicle should only be identified with the Frankish Carolingian Empire, which had a dual, German-Romance, ethnic character 21 .
The Anonymus probably did not know the Old-Rus' sources.But he must have heard about the local tradition concerning the Pannonian Vlachs, the Franks.It did not have the Great-Moravian, but rather local Pannonian origins.The Anonymus probably as an educated person changed the name of those Vlachs to the Romans, but he properly noted down that they escaped to Germany.I think that the 'pastoral' interpretation of pastores Romanorum is the most reasonable.The Roman shepherds could be priests, mainly from the archbishopric of Salzburg, for whom one should pay tithes.As we know, the trials of Kocelj to weaken the links with Salzburg and to include Pannonia in the Pannonian metropolis of St. Methodius finished unsuccessful 22 .But they could be the real shepherds of our chronicler, who was aware of what one of the basis of the economic wealth of Hungary was 23 .
It could be a next part of the Slavic tradition preserved in the Hungarian medieval historiography.The current research shows that this tradition was richer than anyone could have earlier suspected 24 .But the story of the Vlach prince Gelou does not belong to the Slavic story.I think the key to solving the meaning is hidden at the end of this fragment when the Anonymus wrote about the descendants of the Hungarian leader Tuhutum (Tétény).It was the family of the Transylvanian Gyulas, who finally rebelled against St. Stephen and did not want to accept Christianity.The creation of the alleged state legitimized its further incorporation into Hungary in the time of St. Stephen.The alleged founder of the Gyulas dynasty was elected a prince after he had killed Gelou and one of his granddaughters was St. Stephen's mother25 .But the reference to the Vlachs as far as northern suggests that they settled there earlier than previously accepted, maybe in the first decades of the 12 th century.If not, the Anonymus would have not acknowledged them as the natives living in Transylvania in the time of the Hungarian conquest.
To sum up, the Anonymus, who wrote his Gesta Hungarorum about 1200, mentioned the Vlachs, Romans and their shepherds a few times in his work.All these people were separate groups for him.I think that the Vlachs in his Chronicle were the ascendants of the present-day Romanians, while the Romans represented the ancient Empire.The term 'shepherds of the Romans' underlined the economic model in Pannonia.Who were they in reality?I think that the Vlachs were really the East-Romance population who came to Transylvania earlier than previously accepted, maybe in the first few decades of the 12 th century.The Romans and their shepherds came from the oral tradition of the Pannonian Slavs and expressed the Frankish political and ecclesiastical domination over former Pannonia in the 9 th century.