Lajos Kazar: Facts against fiction

OTHER ENCYCLOPAEDIAS OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD

,,T. corresponds with the Roman Dacia, which was overrun by the Huns under Attila in the 5th century. This invasion was followed by incursions from the Gepidae, the Avars, the Slavs, and the Magyars under Almus, who appeared at the close of the 9^th century. In the 13^th century many thousands of Germans settled in T.".

N.B. The sentence beginning with ,,From the down of history" is in need of thorough revision. - Momentous events: in 1848, Hungarian legislature abolished serfdom in Transylvania, too, following the reunion of that area with Hungary; after the Central Powers had lost WW I, the Vlachs/Rumanians of Transylvania proclaimed union with the Kingdom of Rumania at Gyulafehérvár, Rumanian Alba Iulia, on Dec. 1st. 1918. As to the rights of the national minorities in the annexed territory, THE BRITISH ENCYCLOPAEDIA remarks: ,,Saxon and Magyar minorities are guaranteed absolute political freedom". That guarantee was a shameless lie from the very beginning.

,,Transylvania (Ardeal), a division or province in W. Rumania. Until Dec. 1, 1918, it formed part of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy. ... Transylvania was known to the Romans as part of Dacia, and was conquered by the Magyars under Stephen I in 1004. It passed into Turkish hands until the peace of Carlowitz, when it was joined to Austria (1699). Area 22,312 sq.m.; pop. c. 2,668,400".

N.B. Transylvania was, indeed, conquered by Stephen I, but he took it from his own Hungarian/Magyar uncle who wanted to rule a separate kingdom. Hungarians/magyars first took possession of the area in question at the end of the 9^th century.

N.B. The Latin name TRANSYLVANIA co-existed for a while with ULTRASYLVANIA, both being the translations of Old Hungarian ERDEL, a shortened form of earlier ERDÖ ELVE, 'the land beyond the forest', as seen from the Great Hungarian Plain. Rum. Ardeal is an adapted pronunciation of Old Hungarian Erdel. Neither word means exactly 'forest land'.

,,The Magyars first entered Transylvania in the 10th century, but a century probably elapsed before they had fully occupied it. ... The valleys behind the eastern passes were settled with the Szekels (q.v.) and in the south and north-east with Germans (the so-called Transylvanian Saxons). Both the Szekels and the Saxons, in return for their dangerous task of repelling invaders from the steppes, were granted extensive personal and corporate rights. ... Whether Transylvania contained any Rumanian population at the time of the Hungarian conquest continues to be a matter of controversy between rival national historians. Rumanians are recorded in early documents, although not in the earliest, figuring only in one area, and there only for a short period, as enjoying corporate organization on a large scale. They usually appear as masterless men or as serfs, but some achieved Hungarian nobility".

The section ,,History" is a revised version by C.A. Macartney of his corresponding section printed in the 1950 edition. In relation to Rumania's aspirations to incorporate Transylvania prior to 1920, we find in both versions the following sentences:

,,Rumania itself began to rank the acquisition of Transylvania among its foremost national objectives and on 17 Aug. 1916 secured from the Allies, as part of the price for entering the war on their side, a promise of all Transylvania and a substantial area west of the historical frontier. As the war closed the Transylvanian Rumanians, meeting at Alba Iulia on 1 Dec. 1918, themselves proclaimed the union with Rumania, promising national equality to the other nationalities".

,,Part of Rumania, formerly a province. From 1868 until the break up of the Dual Monarchy, Transylvania was part of Hungary -- called by the Magyars Erdély -- beyond the forest from the wooded heights of the Bihar Mts., which separate it from the Alföld. By the Germans it was called Siebenbürgen, the country of the seven strongholds. ... ... Under the Hungarian regime the officials, nobility, and gentry were usually magyars; with the Szeklers, an isolated group of people of Magyar origin in the E. Carpathians, they formed a third of the population. The peasants were chiefly Rumanians, who formed more than half the total population. ... Transylvania was conquered about 1000 by King Stephen of Hungary, and remained part of that kingdom until the catastrophe at Mohacs in 1526".

N.B. Around 1000 King Stephen I took away Erdély/Transylvania from his own Hungarian/magyar uncle, who wanted to rule a separate kingdom. From 1526 until 1687 it was a semi-independent principality under Turkish suzerainty, ruled by Hungarian nobles who always regarded Transylvania as an essential part of Hungary.

Magyars, Germans, Romanians, and other peoples settled the area. ... After World War I the region was ceded to Romania. Hungary annexed N Transylvania in 1940; after World War II it was returned to Romania,,.

N.B. As a historical region Transylvania was 55,146 km², but the Transylvania given to Rumania in 1920 comprised 102,787 km². The whole article is quite scanty and cannot be recommended as a reliable source of information.

,,Rumania, also Roumania or Romania [Rumanian Romîna], people's republic, SE Europe. ... The backbone of Rumania is formed by the Carpathian Mountains and the Transylvanian Alps. Between the mountains and the [Danube] river lie the Danube lowlands, which are divided into two sections: Wallachia, south of the Transylvanian Alps, including Oltenia and Muntenia; and Moldavia, east of the Carpathians, including Bukovina,,.

N.B. Under the heading ,,Rumania,, only the term ,,Transylvanian Alps" constitutes any link with Transylvania which is not mentioned as an area constituting present-day Rumania.

,,The withdrawal of the Romans in the third century in response to the arrival of the Goths left the Rumanians a partly Christianized Dacian-Roman people. The heritage of Latin, the principal parent tongue of modern Rumania, was retained. ... During the following centuries, as Dacia was overrun by successive waves of Goths, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Slavs, and other barbarian peoples, the early Rumanians are believed to have sought refuge in the mountains or to have migrated south of the Danube. The early Dacian-Rumanian people were known about the seventh century as the Slavic-influenced Vlachs (Wallachians)".

N.B. There is no proof at all that a ,,Dacian-roman people" lived in Dacia. roman history does not say a single word about it. On the other hand we know that the father of Wallachian/Rumanian historiography, Gheorghe Sincai, claimed in the early 19th century that the Roman conquerors had utterly wiped out the Dacians, therefore the Wallachians were a ,,pure race", i.e., of pure roman blood.

Thus a ,,Dacian-roman-Rumanian,, people can only be a fiction invented after Sincai's claim had been proven to be fictitious. It has yet to be proven that there was in Dacia a ,,partly Christianized Daco-roman people", as church record either in Byzantium, or in Rome have no entries about such a people.

Because it has not been established at all that the Dacians or the Romans were the ancestors of present-day Rumanians -- the Latin grammar and approx. one third Neo-Latin vocabulary of Rumanian do not prove descent by blood, for language does not have to be linked with blood relationship --, it is wrong to attribute Roman descent to the Rumanians. President Ceausescu's efforts to make the world believe the roman descent of himself as Conducator as well as of his people was sheer propaganda.

,,The historic regions of Rumania include Moldavia in the northeast, Walachia in the south, and Transylvania in the northwest. ... Rumanians are descendants of the old roman colonists, the native Dacians, as well as of the Slavs and various other peoples who wandered through their land; besides the Rumanians, there are large groups of other nationalities, including Hungarians, Germans, and Jews,,.

N.B. Since not a single Dacian word has been objectively shown to form part of the Rumanian language, whereas Dacian women, especially, are claimed to have played a prominent role in the ancestry of the Rumanians, the claimed Rumanian descent from ,,the native Dacians" appears incredible. Nor has it been proven that the Rumanians are descendants of the ,,old Roman colonists" of 2nd and 3rd century Dacia, for a Latin-based language could have been acquired on the Balkan Peninsula as shown beyond a shred of doubt by modern linguistics. That being the case, any group even fractionally descendant from peoples which once inhabited the land now known as Rumania could claim it, including, of course, the Hungarians whose possession and settlement area was the land now known as Transylvania, from approx. 895 until 1920, and whose vassal territories and partly settled areas were Wallachia and Moldavia from 1227 until approx. 1600.

The expression ,,their land" in the above quotation is odd. The area in question was not the land of the Wallachian and Moldavian ancestors of modern Rumanians until those ancestors had established their independent states on it. The ,,Slavs and the various other peoples" wandered through the land which in 1862 became Romîna, but was not the land of the Rumanian ancestors at the time of the great migration of peoples. In other words, there was no ,,Daco-Roman continuity".

,,In the 2nd and 3rd centuries Rumania was the roman colony of Dacia; during this time it became completely Romanized. When the Romans withdrew, various other peoples wandered through the land. Around 1400 Moldavia and Walachia, the basis of present-day Rumania, became independent feudal states. Although they held off the Turks for a few centuries, they were finally absorbed into the Turkish Empire. Transylvania was under Hungarian control".

N.B. To what extent Dacia became Romanized, one can only guess. The expression ,,it became completely Romanized,, is the stock-in-trade slogan of Rumanian propagandists. After 275 there is no vestige of Roman survival in the entire area of former Dacia. The principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia arose as late as the 14th century. Around 1400 they became feudal states, but hardly independent, for they were in vassalage to Hungary and/or Poland. -- The sentence: ,,Transylvania was under Hungarian control" suggests -- in terms of Bucharest propaganda -- that while Moldavia and Wallachia as ,,ancient Daco-roman territories" and ,,historic regions of Rumania,, had to endure the rule of the Turks, the third ,,ancient Daco-roman territory", i.e., Transylvania had to endure the rule of the Hungarians. Maybe the writer of the quoted article was unaware of such Daco-roman propaganda implications.

This encyclopedia has no separate entry for Transylvania.

,,The roman legions withdrew from Dacia in 275, evacuating many of the provincials to comparative safety south of the Danube frontier, but abandoning the rest to their fate. Many died but others took to the hills with their flocks -- and their Latin language -- to reappear centuries later as ancestors of the modern Romanians".

N.B. roman history states clearly that the civilian population of Provincia Dacia was transferred first to areas south of the Danube. The legions stayed to the last, charged with the total destruction of everything the Goths, who had made many irruptions, could use in their efforts to plunder Roman territories. The above quotation is correct so far as the evacuation is generally concerned. From the clause: ,,but abandoning the rest ..." the statement is Daco-roman propaganda.

,,Goths, Huns and Avars overrun the Balkan provinces, bringing the laboriously built culture of the region to ruin. These were the dark times, and it may be that they were darkest of all in these south-eastern provinces of Rome. But from the forgotten tragic years of the fifth, seventh and eight centuries the ethnic and linguistic map of the modern Balkan states takes its origin".

N.B. The Balkan Peninsula and, north of it, Provincia Dacia did not constitute the ,,south-eastern provinces of rome,,, but the north-eastern ones. The ethnic and linguistic map of the modern Balkan states is partly due to the migration of peoples started in 375 A.D., but between the 3rd and 11th centuries the ancestors of the modern Rumanians were hardly in the area of present-day Rumania. Otherwise how it is explained that the Rumanian language does not contain a single loan word from the Germanic languages of the Goths and Gepids who certainly lived for centuries on the land where modern Rumania is situated, and whose immediate neighbours the alleged Daco-Roman ancestors would have been, if they also had lived there. In the area in question no encapsulated existence of any people has ever been possible, especially not after the acceptance of Christianity. ... This encyclopedia has no separate entry for Transylvania.

,,It is not known whether the SZEKELY, a Turkic people who adopted the Magyar language, came into Transylvania with or before the Magyars. The Szekely were the ancestors of most of the magyar-speaking population of Transylvania. In the 12th and 13th cent. the kings of Hungary settled large numbers of German colonists in Transylvania, where they were active in building fortified towns. The German settlers were (and still are) called Saxons, although they came from various parts of Germany,,.

N.B. As regards the Hungarian/magyar language of the Székelys, see the notes under the first quotation from The Columbia Viking Desk Encyclopedia (1965?), here on pages 94 and 95.

,,The German influence became more marked when, early in the 13th century, King Andreas II of Hungary called on the Teutonic Knights to protect Transylvania from the Cumans, who were followed (1241) by the Mongol invaders of Batu Khan. At that period also began the penetration of Transylvania by the Rumanians, called Vlachs or Walachians, a penetration which continued for centuries. The Vlachs were for the most part seminomadic shepherds, but most of them soon settled down to agriculture".

N.B. The above quotation is correct.

,,In the revolutionary years 1848-49 the Rumanians rose against the Magyar national state established by the revolutionists; they were aided by Austrian troops who with the help of Russian intervention put down the Hungarian republic of Louis Kossuth. A period of Austrian military government followed (1849-60); while it was disastrous for the Magyars, it greatly benefited the Rumanian peasants, who were given land and otherwise favoured by the Austrian authorities. However, in the compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867 which established the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Transylvania was made an integral part of Hungary, and the Rumanians, after having tasted equality, were once more plunged into subjection to the Magyar magnates".

N.B. The expression ,,subjection to the magyar magnates" is certainly an exaggeration. It was exactly the 1848 Hungarian legislation which wiped out serfdom in Transylvania, too, and gave decent areas of land, free of charge, to all former Wallachian serfs, while in the areas of former Wallachia and Moldavia serfdom survived until 1864 and conditions for the peasants remained decidedly worse than in Transylvania. Cf. notes under the third quoted passage from the Columbia Viking Desk Encyclopedia (1965?). On the whole, the article ,,Transylvania,, as offered in this edition of Columbia Encyclopedia is correct.

,,The region was part of the Roman province of Dacia and has retained its Romanic speech despite centuries of invasions and foreign rule. Though theoretically part of the Byzantine Empire, Walachia was successively occupied (6th - 11th cent.) by the Lombards, the Avars, and the Bulgarians. By the 12th century, it has passed under the CUMANS, who in turn succumbed (1240) to the Mongols,,.

N.B. This description of the early history of the area later known as Wal(l)achia could be correct if the clause ,,... has retained the Romanic speech" did not bring in the Daco-roman propaganda, according to which ,,the Daco-roman population" stayed on ,,in the Carpathians" after the thorough evacuation of Provincia Dacia around 271. Bucharest propagandists insist on the continuity of ,,the Daco-roman population" in the area in question.

,,When the Mongol wave receded, the native population descended from their mountain refuges, and the principality of Walachia was founded (c. 1290) by their leader Radu Negru or Rudolf the Black. The name Vlachs (or Walachs or Wallachs) was given them by their Slavic neighbours. Though it is claimed by some that the Vlachs are the direct descendants of the Dacians (mainly on the ground that they preserved their Latin speech), it is more than likely that they represent a composite ethnical mixture".

N.B. It is somewhat surprising that ,,the native population" which ,,has retained its Romanic speech" has not preserved the memory of its victories or other battles with the Mongols, while somewhat further north, in Transylvania, the Hungarian-speaking Székelys and Magyars as well as the German-speaking Saxons have. Maybe in 1241-42 the number of Wallachians in the area in question was so small as to be insignificant.

The claim that the Vlachs/Wallachians are the direct descendants of the Dacians is as yet unproven. By the way, how did it happen that the self-styled descendants of the proud Dacians and Romans have not preserved ethnic names of their own deriving either from the Dacians and/or the Romans, but were content until the second half of the 19th century to go under the names Vlach/Walach/Wallach or Moldavian? The name Rumîn occurring mainly among Moldavians referred to descent from the territory of the Byzantine Empire at times referred to as Rum. Perhaps the collective memory of a Balkan people, which the Wallachian ancestors really were, could not possibly retain an ethnic name which it never had.

,,Transylvania ..., German Siebenbürgen, Hung. Erdély, Rumanian Transylvania or Ardeal, historic region, Rumania.Cities: Cluj, Brasov, Sibiu. ... The large Magyar and German-speaking minorities are mostly urban and largely Protestant. Part of ancient Dacia, Transylvania came, after many invasions, into possession of Hungary (11th cent.). With the Székely (originally a Turkic tribe which arrived with or before the Magyars and adopted the magyar language) and the 'Saxons' (German colonists who settled in the 12^th cent.), the magyars formed the three privileged 'nations' of Transylvania,,.

N.B. The area later known as Transylvania became Hungarian/magyar possession around 895 A.D., and not as late as the 11th century. There existed theories which said that the Székelys were originally a Turkic tribe. Those theories have not stood rigorous testing. If the Székelys had arrived in the Carpathian Basin as speakers of a Turkic language before the magyars, then it would have been impossible for them to learn Magyar in a non-magyar environment.

If they arrived with the Magyars around 895 and spoke a Turkic language, then they had only about a century in which to learn magyar before being settled in the south-eastern corner of the Kingdom of Hungary, having as immediate neighbours the Turkic-speaking Pechenegs and Cumans and from 1143 onward the German-speaking Saxons. Thousands of toponyms created by the Székelys prove that they must have been magyar/Hungarian -speaking whenever they settled in the Carpathian Basin.

,,The Rumanians (called Vlachs or Wlachs) began to arrive in the 13th cent. and formed the bulk of the peasant serfs. A voivode (royal governor) governed the seven countries of Transylvania for the Hungarian Crown".

N.B. It is correct to state that the Wallachian/Rumanian ancestors began to arrive in Transylvania in the 13th century, but they certainly did not form ,,the bulk of the peasant serfs" until the late 19th century. The number of Wallachians in the Kingdom of Hungary grew from some 150,000 in 1700 to some 547,000 in 1760, and 787,000 by 1784 (Siculus Verus, op. cit. p. 136). This sudden surge was due to their mass-flight from the Turkish-occupied principalities Wallachia and Moldavia to free Hungarian territories where they found protection and livelihood.

,,Under the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (estab. 1867), full Hungarian control was restored, much to the detriment of the Rumanian peasants. Transylvania was seized by Rumania after World War I and was formally ceded by Hungary in 1920. The Magyar magnates were expropriated, their estates redistributed among the peasants".

N.B. It is plain that the writer of the above sentence had lots of Rumanian propaganda literature at his/her disposal and consulted few sources telling the view of the other side. Otherwise he/she would hardly have written the clause ,,much to the detriment of the Rumanian peasants". In fact, the Rumanian peasants, whose ancestors in Transylvania were largely refugees and immigrant shepherds, fared very well due to the Hungarian-legislated liberation of all serfs in 1848, as a result of which the former Rumanian serfs received considerable tracts of land per family, entirely free of payment, whereas the Székelys had to pay for their allotted land. In 1784 and 1848-49 the Wallachians/Rumanians had been incited by the Habsburg court of Vienna against the Hungarians/Magyars, and so expected to be richly rewarded for the terrible butcherings and even to become the dominant element in Transylvania.

When in 1867 the Habsburgs had to come to a compromise with the Hungarians, the expected reward did not materialize, hence the propaganda slogan: ,,detriment of the Rumanian peasants".

On this core it is appropriate to mention that the outrageous expropriation in 1921-23 of the Hungarian landed class in Transylvania was described by Dr. Hugh Seton-Watson, a well known friend of Rumania, as a national revenge. The expression ,,vast estates" is certainly an exaggeration, for in Transylvania there were no ,,vast estates" by 1920. The distribution of land benefited almost exclusively ethnic Rumanians. If Hungarian peasants received some land, they often had to join the Rumanian Orthodox Church, which act would automatically take them and their families into the Rumanian camp at the next census.

Lajos Kazar: Facts against fiction