The
origin of the Romanians has been for centuries subject to scholarly debate, often driven by political bias. Two basic theories can be differentiated; one theory posits Daco-Romanian continuity and the other is an immigrationist theory, but interim views also exist. Scholars of the first school argue that the Romanians are mainly descended from the
Daco-Romans, a people emerging through the cohabitation of the native
Dacians and the
Latin-speaking Roman colonists in the
Roman province of
Dacia north of the river
Danube. Accordingly, they suggest that a significant part of the territory of modern Romania has continuously been inhabited by the Romanians' ancestors. Followers of the opposite view argue that the Romanians' ethnogenesis commenced in
Moesia and other provinces south of the Danube. Consequently, they propose a northward migration of the Romanians across the river.
Gottfried Schramm,
[25] Herbert J. Izzo
[26] and other scholars who support the immigrationist theory propose that the Romanians descended from the Romanized inhabitants of the provinces to the south of the Danube, which were under Roman rule for more than 500 years.
[27] Following the collapse of the empire's frontiers around 620, some of this population moved south to regions where Latin had not been widely spoken.
[28] Others took refuge in the
Balkan Mountains where they adopted an itinerant form of sheep- and goat-breeding.
[25] Their mobile lifestyle contributed to their spread in the mountainous zones.
[25][29]
The Romanians' ancestors came into close contact with sedentary Slavic-speaking communities in the 10th century at the latest.
[30] They adopted Old Church Slavonic liturgy in the
First Bulgarian Empire, and preserved it along with their Orthodox Christian faith even after their northward migration across the Danube began.
[31] They were first employed as border guards along the southeastern frontiers of the
Kingdom of Hungary and later settled in other sparsely inhabited regions as well.
[32] Although
sheep-breeding remained their principal economic activity for centuries,
[33] their permanent settlements are also documented from the 1330s.
[34]