Leaving aside the historical errors and ambiguities of
Sylvester's additions to Nestor's text (and I repeat,
these glosses are the only mentions of the Wallachians
found in the Old Ukrainian Chronicles), we may
nevertheless conclude that in 1116 Kyivan
policy-advising intellectuals believed the following
to be true of their contemporary Romanians:
(1) That Romanians were descendants of imperial Roman
colonists of the Balkans.
(2) That Romanians were closely related to Italians.
(3) That there were no politically significant
communities of Romanians in the Hungarian state.
(4) That there were politically significant
communities of Romanians in "Bulgaria".
NB. To Nestor and Sylvester, writing in 1091-1116,
"Bulgaria" was the autonomous political entity which
existed north of the Rhodope Mountains to the Danube
(and sometimes even north thereof, up to the
boundaries of the Galician Principality), which had
been conquered from the Byzantines by Pecheneg
warlords in 1049 [it was reconquered ca. 1123/1125 by
John Comnenes]. These warlords by accepting Bulgarian
Christianity had become "Bulgarians".
As to (3). I now believe that the Tale cannot be used
to assert the non-presence of Romanians north of the
Danube in 1116 since, as mentioned, its aristocratic
bias simply ignored lower class populations as
irrelevant (unless a direct mention was required for
some purpose). In fact a case could even be made that
the theory of Wallachians being "chased out" of
Hungary might be an indirect confirmation that many
visible "leaderless" communities of villagers and
pastoralists existed there, whose insignificant status
needed to be explained by some sort of "loss of
leaders" theory...But I grant that this is purely speculative.******
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