Romania · Where the sources disagree
When was Paristrion made a province, and who lived in it?
Two historians dated the same Byzantine province eighty years apart. Behind that argument sits a stranger one, about whether three names in a princess's memoir are the first Romanian states.
The short answer
The date is genuinely open — 971 or the mid-1000s — and lead seals could settle it. Who lived there cannot be settled, and probably should not be asked the way it has been.
In 971 the Byzantine emperor John Tzimiskes came north, beat the Rus prince Svyatoslav at Dorostolon on the Danube, and took back a stretch of country the empire had not governed for three hundred years. At some point after that, Constantinople organised it as a province: Paristrion, "the land along the Istros" — the Danube. It covered roughly modern Dobruja and the Bulgarian bank.
This holding records it from 971 to 1185. Almost every part of that sentence has been argued about.
Three problems, only one of them about dates
When did the province actually start? Nicolae Bănescu said immediately after 971. Vasil Zlatarski said the middle of the eleventh century. Eighty years apart, and neither has been dislodged.
Was it continuous? No. Byzantine control lapsed between 976 and 1001 while the Bulgarian tsar Samuel took the region back, and again during a huge revolt from 1074 to 1091, when the empire lost the area altogether until Alexios I crushed the Pechenegs in 1091. The holding runs 971 to 1185 because that is the outer frame of the imperial claim. Inside it are at least two long gaps.
Who lived there? This is the one that produced a century of bad temper.
The dating argument
The evidence is administrative rather than narrative — seals, the titles officials gave themselves, and the point at which the name Paristrion (or Paradounabon) starts appearing on them.
Bănescu's case: a reconquered frontier gets an administration straight away, because that is what you reconquer a frontier for, and you can see Byzantine officials at Dorostolon — modern Silistra — from the 970s.
Zlatarski's case: the name is not attested until much later, and a province first named in the eleventh century should be dated to the eleventh century rather than pushed back to fit a battle eighty years earlier.
Both are arguments about the shape of the evidence rather than appeals to a document that decides it, which is why the disagreement has been stable for a hundred years.
The argument that actually mattered
Anna Komnene was a Byzantine princess who wrote a long biography of her father, the emperor Alexios I. Describing the revolt of the 1070s and 1080s, she names the chiefs of the semi-independent Danube towns: Tatos (or Tatuš), Satzas and Sesthlav. She also mentions a "Scythian tribe" crossing the Danube from the north into Paristrion between 1082 and 1085.
Nicolae Iorga read those three names as Romanian, and in 1920 published the reading under a title that tells you what was at stake: "The first Romanian state crystallisations". On his account these were Romanian principalities, self-ruling under Pecheneg overlordship, and the beginning of Romanian political life. Bănescu backed him.
There was a problem, and Iorga created it himself. This put the cradle of Romanian statehood around Durostorum and in Dobruja — that is, south of the Danube — and flatly contradicted his own earlier argument that it lay in the Carpathians.
Petăr Mutafchiev demolished the construction: the personal names are handled arbitrarily, peoples described in the sources under other names are being converted into Vlachs without warrant, and the account of their relations with the Pechenegs contradicts itself. He said Pechenegs. Zlatarski, arguing with everybody, said Uz.
The most thorough treatment came from outside both national interests. The Hungarian medievalist Matthias Gyóni went through every source on the question in 1943–44 and concluded three things: the "Scythian tribe" were most probably Pechenegs; Tatos and Satzas were Pechenegs ruling a very mixed population; and — the part that does the real work — the whole idea of local autonomies or embryonic states should be dropped, because these places were the administrative centres of a Byzantine province. A garrison town with a governor is not a principality.
Who was actually there
Michael Attaleiates, a Byzantine official who saw them, used one word: mixobarbaroi — mixed barbarians.
That is less an insult than a description of what the empire had built. Constantinople settled Pechenegs, Uz, Alans and Rus along the frontier as limitanei, border troops paid to hold a line, on top of whatever Bulgarian, Slavic and Romance population was already living there. They rebelled when the pay stopped. They cooperated with the peoples across the river.
Petre Diaconu's phrase for the same population is "un mélange valaco-bulgaro-petchénègue" — a Vlach-Bulgarian-Pecheneg mixture. Ivan Bozhilov attacked it precisely because it made room for Vlachs; his own position is that there were no Vlachs in the region because the sources do not name any.
That is the whole shape of the thing: an eleventh-century frontier population that nobody at the time described in national terms, being sorted into national categories nine hundred years later by scholars who each needed a different answer.
What would settle it
The date is answerable. Byzantine officials sealed documents with lead, and lead seals survive in quantity. Each one carries the officeholder's title and the province he served. A published, chronologically arranged corpus of seals from Dorostolon, Preslav and the Dobrujan sites would establish when an administration naming this province actually existed — which is exactly what Bănescu and Zlatarski were each guessing at. Offices leave seals.
The ethnic question is not answerable, and arguably should not be asked in the form it has been. The sources do not record ethnicity for this population because the categories the disputants wanted did not organise anything the empire cared about. Reading three personal names for a national origin is a method that produces an answer regardless of the truth, which is the definition of a bad method.
What could be established is what this frontier society was actually like — diet, origins, material culture — from cemetery excavation and isotope analysis at the Danube forts. The likely result is a mixed frontier population, which is what Attaleiates said in one word.
Sources
- Paristrion — the province, its extent and the dating dispute.
- Nicolae Bănescu, "La domination byzantine sur les régions du Bas-Danube", Bulletin de la Section historique de l'Académie roumaine 13 (1927), 10–22; La Roumanité de la Dobroudja à travers les siècles (Bucharest, 1928).
- Vasil Zlatarski, "Kakăv narod se razbira u Ana Komnena pod izraza 'genos ti skytikon'", Izvestiya na Istoricheskoto druzhestvo 11–12 (1932), 71–82.
- Nicolae Iorga, "Les premières cristallisations d'état des roumains", Académie roumaine, Bulletin de la Section historique 5–8, no. 1 (1920), 33–46.
- Petăr Mutafchiev, Bălgari i rumăni v istoriyata na dunavskite zemi, 199–222.
- Matthias Gyóni, "Zur Frage der Rumänischen Staatsbildungen im XI. Jahrhundert in Paristrion", Archivum Europae Centro-Orientalis 9–10 (Budapest, 1943–44), 83–188.
- Michael Attaleiates, History; Anna Komnene, Alexiad.
- Petre Diaconu, Les Petchénègues au Bas-Danube (Bucharest, 1970), 104.
- Roumen Daskalov, "Feud over the Middle Ages: Bulgarian-Romanian Historiographical Debates".