Re: [tied] Walachians are placed far North the Danube in Nestor (10

--- george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:

>

There is another aspect of the

> Nestor/Sylvester approach to historical events which
> needs to be mentioned. When they talked about
> "peoples" they almost always referred to these
> peoples' aristocracies. So we see for instance the
> odd
> contention that the "Carolingians" were a "people".
> On
> that basis my conclusions about the non-presence of
> Wallachians north of the Danube in 1116 according to
> the Kyivan Chronicle is not necessarily devastating
> for the Romanian claim. All this really meant to the
> Old Ukrainian writers is that the Wallachians were
> an
> irrelevant political and social factor in the
> territories of "Hungary" and (northern GK)

"Bulgaria" at that

> time.
> If they were there, they were a leaderless (as the
> chroniclers understood "leadership"), insignificant
> set of "lower class" individuals (these writers were
> not only imperialists but also chauvinists...).
> Their
> erstwhile aristocracies, stemming from the Romans,
> had
> been historically eliminated ("chased away" as the
> Chronicle put it). So it is as if the ethnos no
> longer
> "existed"...

*****GK: I would like to add that the expression
"chased away" also suggested that organized Wallachian
communities (with leaders) existed somewhere beyond
the boundaries of the "Hungarian Land". Microanalysis
of the Tale's text indicates that this "somewhere"
started with Bulgaria south of the Danube. It is the
Onogurs, according to Sylvester, who "chased away" the
Wallachians from the territory of southern Romania and
Moldavia in the 7th c. But the Bulgarians did no
"chasing away". Which implies that the Wallachian
aristocracy continued to exist south of the Danube,
along with Slavs and dominant Bulgars. And this was
surely in line with historical reality. This is why
the Kyivan policy makers of 1116, intent on reviving
the imperial dreams of Svyatoslav, were suddenly
interested in the Wallachians.****





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