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

Abstract

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.