The source of the following article is the first volume of the History of Transylvania, edited by Makkai László and Mócsy András, published in 1986 by Akadémiai Publishers in Budapest under the editorship of Köpeczi Béla, with the subchapter entitled “Romanian Voivodes and Keneses, Nobles and Serfs” with the editor’s subtitles. However, let me share a few words as a context before the article, based on the Hungarian Wikipedia.
Foreword
The origins of the Romanian people, and the process of its ethnogenesis, are highly controversial. Political motivations – the emancipation aspirations of the Transylvanian Romanians, Austro-Hungarian and Romanian expansionism, and Hungarian national concept – have influenced the development of theories, and “national passions” still color them today. Hungarian and German historians attribute the origin of the Romanians to immigration from the Balkans (immigration theory), while Romanian historians explain the origin of the Romanians with the theory of Dacian-Roman continuity.
As for me, I think our history is interwoven with many threads, and I don’t care who was here first, or as I used to say, “who first licked the moon shinier,” unless the origin theories are used for a discriminatory political agenda. However, I feel it necessary to write a somewhat longer article about the Romanians, whose history is so closely linked to that of the Hungarians.
The immigration theory
Based on the characteristics of the Romanian language, historians and linguists believe that the Romanians originated somewhere south of the Danube, north of the Jireček line, west of the north-south axis of Belgrade, in a mountainous area close to the Albanians. Their language is essentially Latin in origin, but the basic vocabulary was first Albanian and then heavily influenced by Slavic. The theory of immigration was built based on these characteristics and historical sources.
In the mid-6th century, after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Slavs appeared in the Balkans, initially plundering only the regions of Kosovo and northern Albania, but by the end of the century they had grown stronger and were already waging war against the Byzantine Empire. As a result of constant Serbian, Croatian, and Avar invasions, the presumably already Christian Late Roman population of northern Albania, Kosovo, and other border plains fled to the better-protected interior. The event is also recorded by Byzantine authors. It was reported that the Latin-speaking population, originally living around the Danube and Sava rivers, fled to the south and east, leaving their territories. Most of this population settled mainly in Thessaloniki.
The continuous Slavic invasions between the 7th and 9th centuries led to the beginning of the Slavization of the lowlands of northern Albania and Kosovo. In the smaller mountain settlements, the larger Roman towns, and the Dalmatian and northern Albanian port cities such as Durrës, the Albanian and Latin-speaking populations continued to preserve their languages and form a coherent population. The survival of place names of Latin origin in later local Slavic languages such as Lipljan (Lypenion), Skopje (Scupi) or Puka (Via Pubilca) illustrates this.
Later, groups from larger cities such as Nis or Sofia also migrated, although not to the same extent as from border settlements. According to the place names, in this area between Nis (Naissus) and Sofia, which includes the Timok River region, the Latin population resisted Slavic expansion, preserved its culture, began to flourish, and then migrated from here in at least three directions.
During the Middle Ages, this region was known as “Little Vlachia” and preserves many Latin place names indicating a large Vlach population. Linguists therefore believe that the large Vlach population living here during the Middle Ages is responsible for the significant linguistic differences between West-South Slavic and East-South Slavic, by isolating the two Slavic groups from each other.
There are still a large number of Vlachs living here today who have retained the mountain pastoral lifestyle of their ancestors, although most have now been absorbed into the Serbian and Bulgarian populations. (It is important to note that the indigenous Vlach population here is not identical to the descendants of the Romanians who migrated from Romania to Serbia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Although their mother tongue is an archaic version of Romanian, they are distinctly different from the Romanians).
In the 9th century, the Bulgarians conquered the ancestral homeland of the Romanians. From this time on, Romania was strongly influenced by Slavic culture, which still defines Romanian culture today. Some groups of them appeared north of the Danube as early as the 1160s. The earliest they could have arrived in present-day Romania was in the early 12th century.
Their appearance in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary dates back to the beginning of the 13th century, when they appear in the written sources of the Hungarian Kingdom. At that time, their ethnic proportion was still negligible. The majority of Romanians continued to live in the Balkans. The fact that so many Vlachs lived in Thessaly in Greece between the 12th and 14th centuries that the area was known as “Great Vlachia” is a clear indication of this. The Vlachs who remained in the area call themselves Aromanians, which is evidence of the Balkan Vlach origin of the Romanians and the common ancestry of the two peoples. Romanian historians often argue that the Aromanians arrived in their present habitat from the north, via the Carpathians, but this is rejected by the majority of Hungarian and international scholars.
The Daco-Roman theory
Let’s say a few words about the theory of Dacian-Roman continuity, according to which today’s Romanians are the common descendants of the Dacian people, indigenous to Transylvania, and the Roman conquerors, who lived continuously in the ancient province of Dacia since Roman times.
According to this theory, after the Roman conquest of Dacia in 106 AD, the Romanization of the indigenous peoples began, consisting of the official introduction of the Latin language, Roman holidays, and the adoption of the Roman way of life and culture. To achieve full Romanization, settlers were brought in from several provinces of the Roman Empire. The assimilation of the Dacians took place in a relatively short period, less than 150 years, resulting in the formation of a Latin-speaking and -cultural group of people, which theorists call Daciromanians.
The relationship between Romanian, Latin, and Italian was recognized long ago. Renaissance Latinist historiography based this on the fact that the Romanians were descendants of Trajan’s legionaries. Antonio Bonfini had already written a treatise on this subject at the end of the 15th century. For the historiography of the time, the question was considered scientifically proven.
During the next three centuries, the theory of the Latin origin of the Romanians took root, but at first, the proponents of this theory considered the Romanians to be of purely Roman origin. Later, the problem of origins was added and the indigenous Dacians were included in the theory. Thus the theory of Dacian-Roman continuity was born.
The theory of Dacian-Roman continuity states that the population of the Dacian kingdom was Romanized by staying in place, or that the settlers and the Dacians merged and this population formed the Romanians. This theory already existed in the 18th century, and in the 19th century, especially with the spread of language family theories and the linguistic-historical approach (according to which the history of a language is the same as that of its people), it became almost exclusive.
This is how the fathers of Romanian historiography, Gheorghe Șincai, and Petru Maior, described the theory of Dacioroman continuity in their book published in Buda in the first half of the 19th century:
“After the Roman emperor Trajan conquered the heart of the valiant Dacian empire between 101 and 106 AD, he ordered the massacre and deportation of the remaining Dacians, and then settled Latin-speaking colonists and soldiers in the newly established colony of Dacia. Consequently, their offspring, the later Romanians, are of purely Roman origin, an unmixed race. And when Emperor Aurelian ordered the evacuation of Dacia in 271, most of the people stayed there and their descendants continued their lives as farmers in the same area.”
It is theorized that the Daciromani, who remained in the area after the period of Roman rule, was subsequently influenced by the peoples (especially the Slavs) who migrated through the region. During the Middle Ages, other Romanized peoples settled in the area, mainly from the southwest, from present-day Albania and southern Serbia. History knows them as the Vlachs.
Questions about language and religion
However, the Romanian language is almost completely devoid of words of proven Dacian/Thracian origin, which make up less than 1% of the total. However, Romanian linguists include all words of unknown origin, often even words of obvious Hungarian origin, such as adămană (Hungarian “adomány” – donation). This can be misleading because there are no written records of the Dacian language and our knowledge of it is extremely limited. Apart from a few personal names and plant names, we do not know any Dacian words.
The question of where Romanians first encountered Christianity is still a matter of debate among scholars. However, the religious affiliation of Romanians, the vocabulary associated with religious life, and the history of the Romanian Orthodox Church provide indirect information about the origins of the people.
According to the Romanian historical narrative, the conversion of the Romanians to Christianity took place in what is now Transylvania, in the former province of Dacia, where the Romans brought the Christian religion. This theory has been challenged more thoroughly than ever before by Adrian Andrei Rusu.
The theory is fundamentally contradicted by the fact that when the Romans left and emptied the province in 275 AD, Christianity was a forbidden sect and Christians were persecuted. Christianity was not made a state religion until 380 AD by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, so there could have been no formal conversion before then.
Christianity could have emerged and spread as a heretical movement in the area, but this claim is contradicted by the complete absence of early Christian churches and Christian burial sites and customs. In Transylvania, the first Christian church was commissioned by Zombor, the Gyula of Transylvania, and built in Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia) in the mid-10th century.
Its presumed ruins were found by local archaeologists in 2011. It is a basic archaeological fact that there are no remains of Romanian churches from the 10th-12th centuries or earlier. It is often argued that early Christian churches did not survive because they were wooden churches and that they were folk, not ecclesiastical, Orthodoxy, i.e. that early Romanian Christians had no church organization.
According to A. A. Rusu, “religious practice without a church organization is a myth.” In fact, until the 17th century, it was indeed difficult to distinguish the Orthodox priest from the peasant, but there is no Christian religion without a church, and no church without a church, i.e. even in this case there would have been archaeological evidence of graves, tombs, and bones in the vicinity of churches.
In Transylvania, cremation burials were common until the 9th century and were long forbidden by the Christian churches. On the one hand, this was considered a pagan custom, and on the other, the destruction of the body was contrary to one of the basic doctrines of Christianity, the resurrection. Cremation burials were replaced in the 10th and 11th centuries by burial of the body, but these were not Christian burials either, but were horse burials of pagan Hungarian and Bulgarian origin, of Eastern Steppe origin, with weapons and other objects attached.
Christian cemeteries and burial customs appeared in the area only later, in the 11th and 12th centuries, in the period of the already Christian Kingdom of Hungary, although pagan customs continued in parallel for some time. Christian artifacts from earlier periods have been found underground, but like other artifacts, they were spread throughout Europe by trade, so their presence does not yet prove the local spread of Christianity.
The appearance of Christian burial customs can only be observed in Transylvania from the 11th to the 12th century. In the other non-Transylvanian areas of present-day Romania, traces of Christianity have been found at the earliest from the end of the 10th century, in Dobruja, where Christianity had already existed, but disappeared in the 7th century.
In contrast, Christianity spread early in the large cities of the Balkans, such as Salona, Stobi, or Nicapolis. Martyrological texts suggest that early Christianity in the Balkans was highly urbanized, and in early times only the urban population was Christian, not those living in the villages. This is also suggested by the Romanian word “pagan” (păgân, pogăn, pogan), which derives from the Latin word “village” (paganus; pagus “village”), refuting the Romanian historical narrative that the Romanians evolved from the backward, village-like population of the province of Dacia.
Until the second half of the fourth century, there was relatively little physical evidence of the spread of early Balkan Christianity, the most important of which are burial customs. Painted early Christian tombs from this period have been found at many sites: Salona, Split, Sofia (Serdica), Sirmium, Viminacium, and Pécs, but no similar ones have been found in Transylvania. Christian churches became a feature of Balkan cities only in the 5th and 6th centuries.
According to another view, it was the Bulgarians who spread Christianity in Transylvania after it was adopted in 864. This is contradicted by the complete absence of Christian churches and cemeteries before the 11th century, as already mentioned, and by the fact that there is no trace of a Bulgarian Christian mission north of the Danube.
The Romanians living south of the Danube at that time were religiously attached to the Archdiocese of Ohrid from 1020 by order of the Byzantine Emperor. Bulgarian Slavic culture began to spread in Dobrogea and the lowlands north of the Danube only in the 10th-12th centuries. Most of the Slavic inscriptions in Transylvania are in Serbian rather than Bulgarian.
The oldest inscription, dating from 1313, can be seen in the church of Sztrigyszentgyörgy. According to A.A. Rusu, what Paisij Hilandarski wrote in his Bulgarian History in the middle of the 18th century should be taken seriously, namely that the Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Asen II “ordered the Romanians who had read Latin to abandon Roman law and read not in Latin but in Bulgarian. And he ordered anyone who read Latin to have his tongue cut out. And the Romanians adopted the Orthodox law and began to read in Bulgarian”.
The religious vocabulary of their language suggests that they were introduced to Christianity at a very early age, in a Latin-speaking environment. The Lord’s Prayer developed earliest around 1000 AD. All but three of the words in the Romanian version are of Latin origin. Of these, the words ‘heaven’ (rai) and ‘hell’ (iad) are of Slavic origin. Words relating to church organization are generally of Greek and Slavic origin.
The above facts suggest that Romanians south of the Danube, near the then Latin-speaking cities of the Balkans, were introduced to Christianity at an extremely early stage, but that the church organization was not established until later, in a Bulgarian-Byzantine context. It was from here that they brought their religion to Transylvania and the two Romanian principalities of Transylvania and Moldavia.
The earliest Romanian architectural monuments in Moldavia date back to no earlier than the 13th-14th centuries. For example, the first wooden church in Máramaros dates back only to 1377. In Romania (outside Transylvania), they date from the 12th century. Transylvania has a rich archaeological record of all migratory peoples, except the Romanians, who are said to be indigenous to the area.
The Chronicle of Cantacuzino
The Letopisetul Cantacuzinesc (Cantacuzino Chronicle), written in Romanian in the early 1700s, tells the story of the Romanians’ migration north. The full title of the chronicle is Istoria Țării Românești de când au descălecat pravoslavnicii creștini (1290-1690), i.e. ‘The history of Wallachia since the settlement of the Orthodox Christians (1290-1690)’.
“But first [let’s talk] about the Romanians, who broke away from the Romans [Byzantines] and migrated northwards. So they moved towards the waters of the Danube, crossing at Szörényvár; some to Hungary to the waters of the Olt, the waters of the Maros, the waters of the Tisza, reaching as far as Máramaros. And those who crossed at Szörényvár reached the foot of the mountain range at the waters of the Olt. Some went down along the Danube, and so filled the whole place with themselves, and came to the border of Necopoi.”
The Vlachs
In the Middle Ages, the Romanians were called Vlachs (Hungarian: Oláhok), but it is important to note that the ethnonym Vlach in the early texts did not refer only and exclusively to the ancestors of the Romanians. The meaning of the word has often changed in the course of history. It depended on the time and place of origin of the source, as well as on the mother tongue of the author. The word Vlach has its origin in the Old Germanic *walhaz, meaning foreigner, and was usually used to refer to peoples who spoke some kind of Celtic or Latin language.
Slavic sources also used the name Vlach for the Catholic Franks~French. The meaning of the word changed over time. It was also widely used to refer to shepherds who spoke Slavic, Greek, and Turkish, leading to a general meaning of ” not settled “.
For all these reasons, it is advisable to treat and put into context such texts with caution, as it is not always clear whether a given text refers to the ancestors of the Romanians.
Modern research
The majority of independent, Western researchers still consider the issue a kind of Hungarian-Romanian conflict and are therefore reluctant to take a position on it, with exceptions of course. In his 1998 book, British academic Noel Malcolm argued for the southern origin and immigration of the Romanians.
At a conference held in Freiburg in 2001, the invited researchers – mostly Germans – sought answers to questions about the origins of the Romanians in an interdisciplinary discussion, based on five themes. Except for their Romanian colleague, all agreed that the Romanians originated south of the Danube and migrated north from there.
In 2013, the authors of The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages concluded that “the theory of continuity, according to which Romanian is a continuation of Dacian Latin, is not generally accepted. Some scholars believe that the Romanian language originated partly or entirely south of the Danube and that the current distribution area of Romanian is the result of internal migrations. Historical, archaeological, and linguistic data do not seem sufficient to provide a definitive answer” to the debate.
A book by Dan Alexe, a Romanian linguist living in Belgium, was published in 2023, in which he sharply criticizes the theory of the Dacian-Roman continuity.
The Romanians in Transylvania
While in the 13th century Romanian settlements appeared sporadically only in the southern half of Transylvania, in and near the mountains, at the beginning of the 14th century the number of records of their settlements suddenly multiplied and, except for the Eastern Carpathians occupied by the Székelys, they populate the mountains and even the hills of Transylvania.
In the documents of the 14th century, the history of the settlement of eastern Hungary shows a very turbulent picture: in regions that had been silent or completely uninhabited, a long line of villages appeared, some of which soon disappeared, only to be replaced by new ones or by new ones in their vicinity. There is no doubt that this process was caused by the movements that accompanied the mass settlement of the Romanian population and the resulting instability and fluctuation of their settlements, which also manifested itself in frequent name changes.
In 1365 one of the Romanian districts of the Szörény region had 5 villages, but in 1404 13 settlements were recorded, by that time only one of the original five had survived, and even this did not put an end to the population fluctuation, because in 1510 the district consisted of 36 villages, but of the 13 villages only two have names, 11 have disappeared and 34 new ones have been founded. The settlement of the Romanians took a long time and generally lasted until the end of the Middle Ages, as can be seen from the frequent changes of the village names, as in the case mentioned above.
Population movement in the 14th century
Compared to the previous century, the Romanian population movement in the 14th century was so huge that it cannot be explained by the natural population growth of the Romanians in southern Transylvania. There is also evidence that many of them came from outside the borders of Hungary. In 1334, a certain Voivode Bogdan moved into Hungary (de terra sua in Hungariam), bringing with him such a large number of people that it took more than nine months to settle him, and the Archbishop of Kalocsa, one of the noblest dignitaries in the country, was sent by the king to carry out the operation.
In 1359, six members of a Romanian noble family from the Wallachian region settled in Temesköz (relictis omnibus bonis in terra Transalpina habitis, nostre maiestati semet ipsos obtulerunt fideliter servituros), where the king gave them 13 villages for their retinue, and six years later another 5 estates. In 1365, Václav Balk and his four brothers left Moldavia for Hungary (in regnum nostrum Hungarie advenit). Their arrival triggered a veritable mass migration, and in the following years the hitherto largely uninhabited northern mountains of Transylvania were rapidly populated by the Romanians they brought with them, and one brother even led Romanian settlers into Poland.
As the charters of the Serbian kings in the Balkans mentioned the Romanians less and less, their number in Hungary increased until in the 15th century, their Balkan homeland having been completely emptied, the speakers of the northern dialect were all settled on the left bank of the Danube. The royal estates in eastern Hungary were no longer sufficient to accommodate them, and the Hungarian kings, who had given up the exclusive right of settlement, allowed private landowners to settle them without special permission.
On the estates of the various ecclesiastical and secular lords, however, the Romanians found themselves in very different circumstances. Not only was their economic and legal position less favorable, since they did not perform military duties and their material services were greater but also pastoralism on private estates was limited to a narrower geographical area than on royal estates, which covered an entire mountainous region in one vast, continuous block. The landowners took care that the Romanians they settled did not cross the borders of their estates with their herds, otherwise, they would have lost the income they received from them in exchange for the use of the pastures.
As soon as a large part of the royal estates were donated to various private individuals, the increasing density of the estates’ boundaries and the envious insistence of the owners on their tax-paying subjects created such obstacles to the shepherds’ migration that it had to wither away, giving place to grazing between the village boundaries, and pastoralism survived only on the outer slopes of the Southern and Eastern Carpathians. Permanent Romanian settlements were first established at the foot of the mountains, on the borders of pre-existing Hungarian, Slavic, and German villages, as the linguistic origin of the village names attests, and only later, mainly in the 15th and 16th centuries, did this process reach the high mountain areas, where the immediate neighborhood of other peoples did not influence the Romanians’ way of life. Only these late Romanian villages bear names of Romanian origin.
They also settled in the villages of Inner Transylvania.
Until the middle of the 14th century, Romanian immigration only populated the already uninhabited mountain ranges and their immediate surroundings, and the coherent block of Hungarians and Germans in the center of the Transylvanian Basin was not diluted by sporadic Romanian settlements. The terrible plague of 1348-49, which devastated the whole of Europe and decimated the population of Hungary from several local and foreign sources, opened the way for the Romanians to enter the villages of the devastated Hungarians and Saxons. The landlords, who were short of labor, resettled the Romanians, who had been less affected in the mountains and who were already constantly migrating, in their partially or completely depopulated villages in the interior of Transylvania.
This is how the typical twin villages of the Transylvanian Mezőség and river valleys came into being, where the same village name (always Hungarian or Saxon) is accompanied by the adjective “Magyar”, “Saxon” or “Oláh”, which distinguishes the two nationalities. The date of the foundation of these twin villages is easy to determine, since their names appear without any nationality indication in the 14th century, and to a large extent before the 15th century, when the population was still ethnically homogeneous, so the arrival of the Romanians must be placed between the last mention of the village in this form and the first appearance of the nationality distinction indicating the division.
These double village names also show that the Romanian population was settled separately from the other nationalities, which can be easily understood from the religious differences between the Latin Christian Hungarians and the German and Greek Orthodox Romanians (in the late 14th century “Oláh chapels” are mentioned in the Romanian twin villages), but also from the still existing differences in lifestyle. However much the Romanians resembled the peasant way of life, their main occupation remained pastoralism.
When the king’s tax collectors visited the villages of Mezőség in 1461 to collect the fiftieth sheep tax, two landlords testified that “last year he delivered sheep, but this year he had no Romanians”, meaning that the Romanian shepherds were trying to bring their sheep to Mezőség, apparently from the Transylvanian Central Mountains. However, this forested mountain range had no meadows, and summer pastures could only be obtained by clear-cutting. The deforested forest soon grew back, but the cattle continued to graze the saplings but did not touch the thorny bushes that increasingly overgrown the pastures.
Later the shepherds of the Mezőség from the “Mócvidék” (Móc region), tired of the constant summer thorn killing, stopped wintering and settled down permanently between the borders of the Hungarian and Saxon villages of the Mezőség, which had been visited only occasionally before, founding double settlements called “Oláh”, but still keeping shepherding as their main occupation. Nothing is more characteristic of their strong adherence to this than the fact that in the Middle Ages, all the Romanians in Hungary paid taxes only on their sheep, after fifty of them.
Voivodes and Keneses
From the middle of the 14th century, the Transylvanian Romanian society also underwent a great restructuring. The Romanian voivods and keneses, whose social and legal position was very similar to that of the Saxon gerébs, attained nobility through the same stages of ascent as the gerébs, but the development had different consequences for the Romanians as a whole than for the Saxons. The kings granted nobility to certain voivodes and keneses as a reward for their military merits, at first with certain restrictions, but still with the provision of material services and a precisely defined number of soldiers for the voivodeship or keneses.
The documents refer to these semi-nobles as “noble voivodes” or “noble kenezes” (nobilis vaivoda, nobilis kenezius), whose social status corresponded exactly to that of the Hungarian conditionarius nobles, whose nobility was linked to a fixed service. The bishops of Várad and Transylvania rewarded their Romanian vassals who were soldiers in their armies in a similar way: they granted them an “ecclesiastical nobility” similar to the conditional nobility.
Thus, the estate, which had originally been entrusted only to their administration, became a private property enjoyed by the nobility, and the free Romanians living there could dispose of it as their serfs, but the actual ownership remained with the king or the bishop, and instead of the county noble court, they remained under the jurisdiction of the royal or episcopal castle-mayor.
While this dependency of the semi-noble bishop’s vassals lasted until the beginning of the modern age when the great ecclesiastical estates ceased to exist with the Reformation, the royal noble vassals, and keneses continued to rise in society and soon reached the status of unconditional, so-called national nobility, i.e. they became fully equal to the Hungarian nobility in terms of rights and duties.
The main difference between the Romanian nobility and the Székely and Saxon nobility is that the former received the property of the nobility outside the Székely and Saxon territories, while the Romanian vassals and keneses received the property of the nobility in the counties, which they had previously administered as officials. However, the necessary side effect of this circumstance was that the common Romanians lost their freedom and became the serfs of the ennobled voivods and keneses.
After a few sporadic attempts at resistance, the Romanian common people resigned themselves to their fate. It was not in the king’s interest to defend the freedom of the common Romanians, who did not do military service anyway, against the military-minded voivodes and keneses, and so by the end of the Middle Ages, the Romanians were in large numbers partly serfs of the Hungarian or Saxon nobility and partly serfs of the Romanian nobility who had risen from their ranks. This is also the reason why a separate Romanian “nation” of the nobility could not be formed, since the serfs, regardless of their nationality, had no political rights, and the nobility, again without distinction of nationality, formed a single nation.
In Máramaros
The process of the social rise of the Romanian ruling class took place most rapidly outside Transylvania, in Máramaros, because in the 14th century, it was on the northeastern border that Hungary faced the most serious threat, the still aggressive Tatar power. The Romanian governors and kenezes of Máramaros took part in the campaigns of King Károly Róbert and Louis the Great against the Tatars, then against the Lithuanians, and finally against the rebellious Romanian governor Bogdan of Moldavia, and in the middle of the century, more and more of them gained nobility.
In 1326 the Szurdok, in 1336 the Bedőházi, in 1360 the Váralji and Felsőrónai kenéz families were granted “true” nobility, which exempted them from all taxes and imposed services. Around 1380, the Romanian nobles of Máramaros also established their self-government modeled on the Hungarian noble counties, electing magistrates and jurors from among themselves to serve alongside the king-appointed Comes. In the 14th century, the first Hungarian aristocrats of Romanian origin, who were also members of the vassal families of the Máramaros, mainly the Drágfi family, who owned more than 100 villages, were the first Hungarian aristocrats of Romanian origin to play a role in national politics.
In the Castle Districts
In Transylvania, in the 14th century, we do not yet encounter fully entitled Romanian nobles. Until the end of the 15th century, the Romanian castle districts of both the Hunyad County and the counties of the Szörényi Banat that remained in Hungary were governed by a castellan appointed by the Transylvanian Voivode or the Ban (Duke) of Szörény, and the castellan was assisted by a council of kenezes who paid land rent and a fiftieth tax for the villages they administered, and also performed personal military service. The Turkish threat, however, had a lasting effect on the military service of the kenezes of the castle districts along the southern border.
In present-day Bánát and Hunyad County territory, a long line of Romanian keneses gained the noble rank of conditionarius, to join the ranks of the national nobility at the end of the 15th century. It is no coincidence that the mass ennoblement of the Romanian keneses is attributed to the great general Hunyadi János, who himself grew up among them and understood the aspirations of this emerging class. He was the first Transylvanian voivode to unite the offices of Voivode and Székely Comes into his hands. In addition to his Hungarian and Székely “family members” (people who joined him), he was accompanied by many Romanian keneses, and, understandably, it was these, the personal supporters of the powerful governor, who were the main beneficiaries of their patron’s favor.
The later illustrious careers of the Romanian kenezian families of Nádasdi Ungor, Malomvizi Kenderesi and Kendeffy, Csulai, Csornai, Bizerei, Mutnok, Dési, Temeseli, Macskási from the Szörényi Banat region started from Hunyadi’s side. Not to mention the Romanian nobility of the areas outside Transylvania proper, only in Hunyad County we can find many Romanian noble families, newly established in the second half of the 15th century, which rivals that of any Hungarian nobility in any county.
For example, the descendants of the kenezes of the royal fortress districts of Hátszeg, Déva and Jófő (Bajesdi, Barbátvizi, Bári, Brettyei, Csolnokosi, Farkadini, Fejérvizi, Galaci, Karulyosdi, Kernyesti, Klopotivai, Lindzsinai, Livádi, Macesdi, Oncsokfalvi, Ostrói, Pestényi, Ponori, Puji, Riusori, Szacsali, Szentpéterfalvi, Szilvási, Totesdi, Vádi, Várhelyi, Zejkányi), including large landowners with many villages, such as the kinship of the Szálláspataki and the Demsus Muzsinas, in addition to those already mentioned.
Hunyadi’s mother came from the latter. The ancestors of the Meregjói Botos, Kalotai Vajda, Csicsei Vajda, and Danki Vajda families from Sebesvár in Kolozs County and the Lupsai Kendés from Lower Fehér County also received noble titles and estates.
In the region of Fogaras, the legal relations of the Romanian ruling class were still governed by the voivods of the Wallachian voivodship, at a time (in the second half of the 14th century and the first half of the 15th century) when the manor was their private fiefdom, donated by the Hungarian kings, and therefore the social class corresponding to the keneses here bore the Bulgarian name ”boyar”, derived from the name of the Wallachian nobility.
The boyars of Fogaras, by the way, reached about the same level of serving nobility as the kenezes of the other royal manors, only their services were greater, but not one of them rose to the ranks of the national nobility, like the Mayláds, who played such a great role at the beginning of the early modern age.
Assimilation
The Romanian nobles, of course, took over not only the title, but also the whole legal system, the administrative framework and institutions, and the way of life from the Hungarian nobility. In Máramaros, as we have seen, the county system developed in every respect following Hungarian conditions, and in the second half of the 15th century the kenezes of the districts of Szörény developed into a regular county court, and the “krajnik”, the official who prepared and executed the judgments, took over the role of the magistrate.
A similar process started in the Hátszeg region. In the 14th century, it was the royal castellan who convened the meetings of the keneses, and it was his will that guided the negotiations; in the first half of the 15th century, the keneses met without him, issued judgments and decrees, and thus exercised self-government similar to that of the nobility. However, since the county of Hunyad had an old Hungarian nobility, and thus an already established noble court, the Romanian nobles were integrated into the already existing framework, and the seat of the Kenez ceased to exist.
The Catholic religion was not adopted by all the Romanian noble keneses. A considerable number of the inhabitants of Máramaros remained Greek Orthodox. The conversion was forced by the Hungarian kings only in the southern border regions, mainly for political reasons, because the “oath-breaking voivodes of Wallachia” tried to create confusion also on the Hungarian territory. From the point of view of language, only the part of the population that had closer contact with the Hungarians became Hungarian, but from the point of view of thinking and way of life, the identification with the Hungarians was as complete as that of the medieval Slovak-speaking nobility.
The Romanian nobility proudly declared themselves members of the noble “Hungarian nation”, and while the Romanian voivodes and their boyars of the Transylvanian and Moldavian provinces, with one or two sporadic exceptions, increasingly adopted the position of compromise with the Turkish power, the Romanian nobility of Hungary took up and devotedly continued the struggle on the side of the Hungarians, which was a condition of their privileged position.
The Hungarian public did not consider the Romanian noble as a foreigner. In the second half of the 15th century, the kings successively elevated Romanians to positions of trust and national dignity without any objection from the Hungarian nobility. At that time, however, the Hungarian nobility had a strong national consciousness. Csornai Mihály from 1447 to 1454, Mutnoki István and Mihály from 1467 to 1469, and Macskási Péter at the end of the century held the responsible office of Ban (Duke) of Szörény, while Malomvizi Kenderesi János and Pestényi Mihály, and later Temeseli Dési Péter were the Comes of Máramaros and Bereg counties.
The father of Nádasdi Ungor János, who had taught Hunyadi János how to bear arms, was one of the most beloved supporters of King Matthias; through his wife, a daughter of Lendvai Bánffy, he was related to the oldest aristocratic families of the country, and as a fortunate general he gained huge estates in donations. The career of the Csula family in the Hátszeg region is typical. Five of the seven sons of the noble Kenez of Csulai Vlad, who had a modest property, reached high public office: Ficsor László of Jajca, then of Szörényi, Kende Miklós of Szabács, Móré György of Szörény and Nándorfehérvár, Báncsa János of Bálványos and Móré Fülöp of Pécs, who married into the noble families of Bethlen, Haranglábi and Dóczi.
This article does not discuss the path of the Romanians until today. By now they have slowly outnumbered the Hungarians, whose rate in Transylvania is about 18% in 2024.
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