>*****GK: Incidentally perhaps you might focus on
>the spread of Christianity among the Vlachs (and
>Romanians) as an indicator of their history. The
>"official" view is I think that the Romanians
>converted to Christianity in the latter stages of the
>Roman Empire. This seems quite unlikely to me. For in
>that case their liturgy would have been Latin.
If there had been preserved an intact, Latin-speaking
clergy! Nothing of the kind. The Proto-Romanian
speaking population (to be stressed here: having a
very low social status, kind of marginalized population
in the entire area *for centuries*) kept though a series
of fundamental Christian terminology of Latin extraction.
Even the word "basilica" ( > "biserica"), which is unique
in the Romance-speaking world, where the other Greek
term has prevailed, Latinised ecclesia > Ital. chiesa,
Sp. iglesia. This "biserica" might be interpreted as a
further sign of Protoromanians existing outside the
official "paths" of clergy activity in the Eastern Roman
empire, a clergy that anyway soon ceased to speak
Latin and, instead, spoke Greek. So, it was a natural
occurrence for the Romanians to adopt the slavonic
variant of Orthodoxy since their overlords were Slavs
of the Bulgarian kind. They themselves didn't have
(until the Asens brethren) the social status and the
military + political power in order to be looked at with
... respect, so much so that the Constantinople hierarchy
could've acknowledged them a metropolitan see.
Sort of... cuius regio, eius religio. Even so the language
did preserve Romance termini, so that only the Holy Ghost
(R. sfântul or sântul duh) is slavic, but Dumnezeu
(< Dominus Deus) is Latin. (Hopefully, I ain't too
blasphemous in these lines. :-)
>As it is the Vlachs (Romanians) used the Slavonic liturgy
>for centuries, beginning to switch to Romanian in the
>17th
Not only that: the official, gov't papers were also written
in the OCS idiom (which no average Romanian can read :-).
It played the role Latin played in catholic and protestant
countries. Because Romanians insisted to stay Orthodox
(or "schismatic", as Catholics used then erroneously to
say, and hence Hungarian policy, under Vatican pressure,
tended to suppress everything "schismatic" esp. after
the Hungarian dynasty of the Arpadians was replaced by
the d'Anjou dynasty (the Neaples line; the 1st king of it
being Charles Robert at the beginning of the 14th c.)
>I understand that there are no Greek loan
>words for religious or pastoral terms.
I think there are some.
>All this tells me that the ancestors of the Romanians did
>not live close to centers of either Latin or Greek
>Christianity.
For this, there's no need of wild speculation: for a long
period of time, the official intermediary for... Tzarigrad
were the Bulgarians (and their Church sees in Ohrid and
elswhere.
>The historical records settle this in favour of the South
>methinks.
Even when polities evolved as pretty strong and viable
in the North, the southern Church hierarchic sees must
have had the upper hand -- until the higher hierarchy
(Constantinople) granted a new status. Church has never
been a... chaotic, but almost a military-like structure.
Even kings and emperors had to obey (now and then :-).
Even the anonymous Hungarian chronicler of the 12th-13th
century, king Bela's notary, tells us that Menu-Morout,
a "duke" over the Wester part of Transylvania, up to the
Tisza river in the Hungarian plane, (a fictitious or a real
character, we don't know), had his bosses way down in
the South, in Vidin and Constantinople. And, according
to the same chronicler, the guy seems to have been a
semi-converted pagan (hence the presumption he was
a Bulgar or even a Khazar, since in his territory dwelled
the "Cowars", a branch of the Khazars). So, the Slavic-
Turkic symbiosis seems to have been everywhere, both
in Transylvania and in Hungary proper (where in the
center thereof ruled a Salanus "duke", a Proto-Bulgar,
with his mostly Slavic subjects; in the war in which he
was defeated by the Hungarians he was supported by a
Bulgarian-Greek army). Se non e vero, e ben trovato. :)
George