Romanian origins: a dual-ethnogenesis hypothesis (part II)

I cast yet further infamous ethnic aspersions!

Précis

In part I of this ‘series’, I reviewed at near-interminable length—yet withal incompletely—the continuity and immigrationist theories of (the first) Romanian ethnogenesis, which indisputably occurred in late antiquity. I then attempted to summarise some of the arguments for and against each theory.

Here I elaborate a novel hypothesis, occasioned by my reading of the Romanian historian Neagu Djuvara.

In brief, my argument is that the Romanians of the 13^th century AD experienced a second ethnogenesis. I further asseverate, in a most over-exuberant fashion, that this second ethnogenesis was incomparably more historically consequential than the first—and that it conditions aspects of Romanian life even to-day.

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The second Romanian ethnogenesis: the triumph of the CUMANS?

If you have read part I of this ‘series’ (and I know you have) you understand why I am unable to decide conclusively between the continuity and immigrationist ethnogenesisisis hypotheseseses.¹

Romanian origins: a dual-ethnogenesis hypothesis (part I)

Yet irrespective of whether the Romanians originated in Romania, or must instead look for their homeland south of the Danube, they are unanimously acknowledged to have resided in all present-day Romania since at least the late 13^th century.

Granted such a rare instance of historical consensus, I will herein use this approximate date further to engage in poorly-supported defamatory speculations of the kind for which I have (so far failed to) become famous on the internet. Put shortly, I wish here to propose a second Romanian ethnogenesis, under the leadership of a Cuman aristocracy.

The Romanian (Aromanian by descent) historian Neagu Djuvara was the first forcefully to advocate a central place for the Cumans in Romanian history of the 13^th century and after. However, as a proper scholar, he was cautious and minimal in examining the implications of his theory. As a dilettante without any EXPERT REPUTATION to protect, I am captive to no such compunctions.

Who were the Cumans?

The Cumans were a nomadic, Turkic-speaking people who (like previous waves of Turcoids, Iranoids and Germanoids) came to Romania via the grassy plains north of the Black Sea. They too had an equestrian military culture: in their case a typically Iranoid combination of heavily armoured cavalry and horse-archer technology, including employment of Parthian shot tactics.

IMAGINE SEEING THIS COMING TOWARDS YA: a CUMANIK lancer/horse-archer

From the late 11^th century the Cumans were the second-last great ethnos, after the also Turkic-speaking Pechenegs and preceding only the Mongols, to arrive in Europe from across the great Eurasian Steppe.

The Cumans were a grave threat to the Kingdom of Hungary well into the High Middle Ages. To counter them militarily and demographically, and to develop trade and farming, beginning in the 12^th century the Hungarian monarchs invited Germanoid (‘Saxon’) types to settle in Transylvania—which was then Hungarian territory—mostly in the centre and south, around the headwaters of the great rivers. Some were peasants; others were middle-class merchants (no, not moichants).

These Netherlanders at length came to refer to Transylvania as Siebenbürgen, after the seven walled cities they had founded there.² In the 16^th century they collectively adopted Lutheranism.

TOP 5% HERALDRY: Siebenbürgen coat of arms; note seven towers for seven cities

In 1211 King Andrew II of Hungary (cf. also below) invited the Teutonic Order to lead a further German colonisation of southeastern Transylvania—i.e. the Burzenland, around Kronstadt (now Braşov, Anglo pron. BRAY-SOVE)—as a bulwark against continuing Cuman and Pecheneg depredations from their staging grounds in The Ukraine, Moldavia and Transylvania itself.

The Teutonic knights’ overweening ambition led in 1225 to their expulsion by the Hungarian Crown and their self-removal to Prussia, there later to form the nucleus of the Second German Reich. In the mid-12^th century Magyaroid Szekelys were also settled by Hungarian kings to defend the northeastern frontier of Transylvania from the Cumans.

Thus the Cumans were indirectly responsible for manifold highly consequential changes in the ethnolinguisic profile of the Hungarian kingdom, as well as crucial knock-on effects elsewhere in Europe. This vibrant and diverse mosaic of mostly-peaceful Transylvanian ethnicities was inherited by the Romanian state in 1920 (Treaty of Trianon NEVER FORGET).

Owing to their Turkic speech and their known presence in east-central Asia, it is assumed that the Cumans must have been to some degree East Asian in appearance. Cuman inhumation burials from Russia indeed show this to have been the case. However, like most Turkic-speaking (and some Iranic-speaking) populations, they evince a mixed Euro-Asiatic phenotype. Sometimes, as in this mural, from a Gothic-era church in modern Slovakia, they are represented as wholly Europoid.

WILL THESE IRANO-TURCO-MONGOL-GERMANO-TOCHARIAN NOMADS EVER LEAVE US IN PEACE: the Cuman steppe confederacy, with western extension into Romania and its eastern limit abutting the Tarim Basin

At any rate the Cumans were indubitably on (modern) Romanian territory well before the early 14^th century. Other non-controversial facts about them include the following.

Baptism

Under mortal threat from the Mongols following their defeat in the Battle of the Kalka River, the Cumans under Khan Bortz were baptised as Catholics by Hungarian priests in the year 1228. The Hungarian Crown was at that date in loose control of all present-day Romania.

The Cuman conversion occurred in either Transylvania or Moldavia (interpretations vary). A Bishopric of Cumania comprehending both historic regions was then inaugurated, only to be sundered by the Mongols in 1241.

Some tens of thousands of Cumans became Catholics in this way. Note that the Romanians are, and probably always have been, adherents of the Eastern Rite (almost all Romanians today are nominally Orthodox).

Hungarian-sanctioned settlement in Transylvania and Great Hungarian Plain (Nagy Alföld)

Following this CUMANIK baptismal event, the Hungarian King Andrew II confirmed Khan Bortz and his newly Catholic followers in their de facto possession of a part of Transylvania, as de jure vassals of the Hungarian monarchy.

Christianisation of the Cumans, and the bringing of them into feudal relationship with the Crown, was presumably calculated to reduce their raids on the eastern reaches of the Hungarian realm, as well as to secure an alliance with them against the execrable Mongol horde glowering menacingly still farther to the east.

Later in the 13^th century the penultimate scions of the Hungarian Árpád dynasty (Béla IV and the half-Cuman Ladislaus IV) allowed the embattled Cumans to settle the depopulated Great Hungarian Plain—further away than Transylvania from the Mongol menace. Once in Nagy Alföld (Anglo pron. approx. NUDGE ALLFIELD) they became truly stalwart confederates of the crown in its strivings against the Mongols.

There was, however, inter-ethnic tension between the newly-arrived Cumans and the Magyars of Nagy Alföld. A rebellion there in the 1280s ended with the expulsion to Wallachia of some of the insubordinate Cumans.

I now turn to recapitulate and then extend upon Neagu Djuvara’s idiosyncratic—but I think mostly true—view of the axial CUMANIK role in Romanian history.

NACMTTGP: Not all Cumans migrated to the Great Plain

Djuvara believes that, in addition to Cumans who went to Wallachia as a result of their ejection from Nagy Alföld, a significant number of them (p = < 0.05) must have remained in Transylvania after their baptism. It is not disputed that there is to this day a generous stock of placenames containing the element Coman- (i.e. Cuman) in both Wallachia and southern Transylvania. ‘Coman’ is also quite often encountered as a surname.

Furthermore, Djuvara remarks that there are references in 14^th century Papal documents to the first two princes of the Basarab princely line (cf. below) in which their status as subjects of Rome is assumed. This implies that the early Basarab princes were Catholics—and therefore probably Cumans, not Vlachs (i.e. not Romanians).

At the monastery of Corbii de Piatra—trans. ‘Crows of Rock’—in the Carpathian valleys of Wallachia, north of the early Romanian capital at Curtea de Argeș (see further below), there is a rock-hewn church with two altars: one Catholic and one Orthodox. Could the former have been for the Cumans and the latter for the Vlachs?

‘ELF & SAFETY ISSUES: the rupestrian church of Corbii de Piatra

Basarab princely dynasty wuz Cuman

In support of his theory of substantial Cuman continuity on Romanian soil, Djuvara points to an additional uncontroversial fact: a large number of Cuman personal names appear in 14^th and 15^th century documents originating in the Hungarian chancellery and signed by Romanian boyars.

One of these is Basarab, the name borne by he who was the progenitor of the House of Basarab, which gave Wallachia and Moldavia alike all their ruling princes (voivodes) until the mid-16^th century—including the high-famed Ștefan cel Mare, Mircea cel Bătrân and Vlad Țepeș.

Even after the extinction of the direct Basarab line, down to the Phanariot supremacy beginning in the early 18th century, voivodes of both Wallachia and Moldavia continued to claim legitimating descent from Romania’s founding princely dynasty.

DOESN’T EVEN LOOK THAT OLD: Cuman-Vlach Voivode Mircea the Elder, ruler of Wallachia 1397-1418, from Curtea de Argeș

Basarab established his initial Wallachian seat in the sub-Carpathian town of Câmpulung—trans. ‘Longfield’—a burgh that had been founded by Germanoid merchants invited in by the Hungarian kings. But the earlier Basarab capital, dating from the ‘Dismounting’ of 1290 (cf. below), was probably founded by Basarab’s father, the semi-mythical Radu Neagru, at Curtea de Argeș. The argeș element is derived from the Cuman language.

Cuman military technology 

Djuvara maintains that Romanian military tactics of the 14th and 15th centuries, heavily dependent as they were on highly mobile cavalry archers in conflicts with the Ottoman Turks, were adopted from the Cumans. A goodly distance below I discuss the import of this probable technological genealogy.

Black Cumans and huwhite Cumans

Djuvara upholds the tradition that in 1290 Radu Neagru led the Dismounting of the Vlachs. While a large contingent of Vlachs remained in the Carpathian uplands, many joined Radu Neagru in a folk-movement from Transylvania to the Wallachian plains, thereby reuniting the Vlachs of Transylvania with their brothers in the Danubian lowlands and founding an independent Wallachia free of direct Hungarian or Bulgarian control. I first referred to this event 1¼ hours and 7,629 words ago.

It’s broadly accepted that Radu Neagru was the father of the Basarab who founded the dynasty of that name. Djuvara argues that Radu Neagru’s birth name was Cuman: Toq-tämir—'tempered iron’—rendered in Latin as Thocomerius. I venture no disputation of this claim.

But now comes a vital point on which I humbly dare to disagree with Djuvara. He interprets the name Radu Neagru as an epithet referring to the warlord’s supposedly dark complexion (neagra in Romanian = black). Consistent with this thesis, Djuvara believes that the appellations ‘Black Cumans’, for those inhabiting Transylvania/Wallachia, and ‘White Cumans’, for those inhabiting the Ukraine, are founded on a general difference between the two groups in skin/hair tone.

My suggestion is that the ‘black’ element in Radu Neagru’s name had nothing to do with his colouring. More likely, it was an artifact of his people’s identity as Cumans inhabiting a particular location.

Cardinal directions

It seems to me that Djuvara overlooks the fact that Turks, Mongols, Chinese and East Slavs (among others) refer by colour to the cardinal directions (north, south, east and west). As you can see in the table below, the particular colours and directions vary by ethnos.

But the denotative function of these colours must also depend on the relative locations at particular times of the ethnic groups in question—both those doing the naming and those they name. For instance: once ‘western’ peoples, referred to as ‘White’ by Turkic speakers, can become ‘eastern’ peoples, referred to as ‘Blue’, as the Turkic speakers change their primary staging grounds or become sedentary.

CONFUSING: these orientals should really get their story straight

You see what I mean? A group of Kalmyks might have named another tribe of sedentary Turkic speakers ‘Red Turks’ in one century, because the Turks in question at that stage lived to the west of them, and ‘White Turks’ in the next century, because by then the Kalmyks had shifted to the Turkic speakers’ opposite flank. The Turkic speakers might have done likewise but in mirror-image.

This is why I suggest that the schema in the table above above are contingent not only on ethnos but also on location and time.

To nail it down to the case of the Cumans: perhaps the East Slavs of Russia/Ukraine (where the Cumans for some time had their staging grounds) referred to the Transylvanian/Wallachian Cumans as ‘Black’, because those two regions are to the south of The Ukraine. Correspondingly, the East Slavs might have spoken of the Ukrainian Cumans as ‘White’, because in the Slavic ken they inhabited lands near the East Slavs themselves, to the north of the Cumans they called ‘Black’.

Maybe the Cumans themselves then adopted this colour-direction naming scheme as an endonym—and perhaps through them the Vlachs did the same, as an exonym for the Cumans who lived among them. Something like zis (but not necessarily *ZIS*) is what I am driving at.

Alternatively, it may be that the Black/White Cuman distinction was originally just a Cuman endonym describing super-/sub-ordinate political relations between the Cumans of The Ukraine, on the one hand, and those of Transylvania/Wallachia on the other. Colour as shorthand for intra-tribal primacy is known to have obtained among the Turkic-speaking but majority Europoid (((Khazars))), for example.

The blond ones

I sketchily propose the above counter-theory because I think it unlikely that the Cumans were seen in their time as being especially dark, even against the background of Eastern European populations. The Poles and East Slavs, not known for lacking blonds, knew the Cumans as Polovtsy—from a Slavic root having the sense of ‘straw-coloured’/‘blond’. Even Adam of Bremen, a north German monk, spoke of the Cumans as ‘the blond ones’. The Chinese described the Kipchaks they encountered—who were closely related to the Cumans—in similar terms. How can the apparent fairness of (some) Cumans be reconciled with their geographically East Asian origins?   

An highly questionable hypothesis

Put simply, I propose that the Cumans—or at least their elite—were composed in part of people who had long inhabited the Tarim Basin, now in China’s Xingiang Uyghur Autonomous (ha!) Region. Recall the map above of the CUMANIK realm: its eastern border is around the shores of Lake Balkhash—relatively close to the Tarim Basin.

Could it have been that the Cuman aristocracy was made up of TOCHARIK mans from Tarim Basin? YEEEEEESSSSS MAYB!

Tocharians

EXPERTS these days are almost mystically desirous not to be seen to connect ethnic groups to languages (huh?). All the same, we are justified in identifying the Tarim Basin mummies (from as early as the early 2^nd millennium BC) with the speakers of the Indo-European language Tocharian who must have migrated there, probably from the Pontic Steppes via a sojourn in southern Siberia, where they are belived to have formed the Afanasievo culture. The Tocharian language (two variants: Tocharian A and B) is, however, attested only from the 4^th century until the 12^th century AD.

Self-depictions of the Tarim Basin people, and representations of them by Buddhist foreigners (the Tocharians themselves became Buddhists), consistently show blond- and red-haired people, sometimes with blue or green eyes. They universally evince an unmistakeably Europoid phenotype. The first three paintings below are among the Kizil Cave group, from around 500-600 AD.

c. 500 AD: noble Tocharian ephebe combs flaxen hair—Aryan sign of VITALITY

c. 500 AD: noble Tocharian family

c. 600 AD: aristocratic Tocharian sword-bearers

CHINEE: depiction of green-eyed/red-haired Irishman (heheh I mean Tocharian Buddhist monk)

3,800-year-old mummies from the Tarim Basin show similar features.

FULLY GREENED-OUT HIPPY CHICK: Princess of Xiaohe (early 2^nd millennium BC)

NOT THAT HOT: Loulan Beauty (early 2^nd millennium BC)

UGLY BASTARDS: various Tocharian mummies and their reconstructions

This, I CONTEND, is the stock from which the Basarab dynasty, and the Cuman-descended Romanian nobility in general, was drawn. I assert that the Cumans came to Romania, possibly as a result of being driven out of the Tarim Basin by Chinese incursions under the Tang Dynasty five hundred years before, in a back-migration from Tocharia to Eastern Europe. Their dominant class belonged to a RACIALLY ARYAN, formerly Indo-European speaking people—possiblyprobably Tocharian in origin.

The fact that the Cumans spoke a Turkic language by the time they arrived in Europe does not in itself invalidate this assertion, and neither does the discovery of East Asian phenotypes in Cuman-associated grave contexts on the Steppe.

It was common for nomadic steppe peoples such as the Cumans to accumulate and to jettison genetically and linguistically heterogeneous elements. Long-distance migrations across the Steppe were often undertaken by numerically massive hordes of mixed ethnolinguistic background. Dominant clans within these confederations usually spoke various languages. They would adopt the languages of confederate folk in the course of their long migrations west, often over hundreds of years, from their homelands in East Asia.

Examples abound of Europoids speaking Turkic languages. An elite subgroup among the Turkic-speaking Yenisei Kirghiz, as well as the ruling Ashina tribe of the Göktürks (6^th century AD), are described in contemporary Chinese accounts as being red/blond of hair and blue/green of eyes. The Ashina are thought to have encompassed a significant Tocharian element. In fact, the very name Ashina has been reconstructed as being of Tocharian or East Iranian origin. The Eurasian steppe is an enormous and extremely mixed human genotypic zone, and the Romanian lowlands are near its western limit.

Genes of the Basarabs (and the modern Romanians)

Now let us for once try to be circumspect by stating that it is not necessarily true that the Cumans of Romania were universally of an East Asian phenotype.

ok

What do genetic studies conducted in Romania have to say about The Cuman Question?

It just so happens that a recent Y-chromosome analysis of Romanians with the surname Basarab detected no East Asian signal whatsoever. The authors quite rightly state that some of the individuals sampled probably share the surname of but not Y-haplogroup descent from the Cumano-Romanian princely clan.

As I said in this poast, the Romanian aristocracy was largely extirpated under communism. Although the authors do not really acknowledge it, this FACT would have made representative sampling of ‘Basarabs’ rather difficult.

Nonetheless, the core finding is this: contemporary Romanian mans of the name Basarab do not evidence an East Asian Y-haplogroup. Rather, they cluster indistinctly with other Romanians.

How do the Romanians in general shake out, genetically speaking? In the male line, they form a fairly homogeneous bundle with other Balkan populations. All Balkanoids are genetically more Early European Farmer-inflected than peoples to their north and west, who are more ARYAN in composition. Even Romanians in Transylvania are more ARYAN than their countrymen elsewhere.

Interestingly, in the Romanian female line, there is a non-trivial East Asian signal, of about five per cent. I will not try to make sense of this fact except to observe that Yellow Fever was probably as common an affliction among the ancient Chads of the Eurasian Steppe (including the ARYAN Cumans) as it is among modern internet Nazis.

But the main point here is that the Romanians overall, with no detectable East Asian element in the male line, are now difficult to separate genetically from other southeast Europeans.

There is also nothing distinctively Roman (i.e. Italian) about the Romanians; genetically, they are no closer to Italians than are other Balkanoids. This is not surprising if you remember what I said in first part of this megapoast about the overwhelmingly EastMed/Illyrian/Thracian/Semitic make-up of the colonists of Roman Dacia.

As an aside I remark here, with due apologies to touchy Romanian nationalists, that a noticeable proportion of Romanians do have a somewhat MONGOLIK cast of countenance. This might be the result of genetic introgression from e.g. the Tatars who inhabit the Dobrugean Black Sea coast—or something else idk.

Between Empire and Dismounting: the ancient lifeways of the Vlachs

Regardless of whether one accepts the continuity theory of Romanian origins, or one of the immigrationist theories (consult part 1 to read of each in exhausting but not exhaustive detail), it should be clear by now that almost nothing is known for certain about the Vlachs between the end of Dacia Traiana and the inception of the Cumans.

It’s inferred that upland Vlachs in Transylvania were shepherds who also practiced forms of gardening and other small-scale crop-raising. According to Djuvara³, the Vlachs of the lower country must have lived in large glades in forested areas, raising cattle, pigs and chickens and growing crops such as onions, millet and cabbage. All Vlach settlements were hidden, as best they could be, from the attention of Slavoid, Germanoid, Iranoid and Turcoid incomers from the east.

The impression is of poor, small, isolated communities without a great deal of external contact or prospects for further development. It’s thought that collections of Vlach villages must have been ruled by ‘judges’ (singular in Romanian: jude—*I know what you’re thinking but it’s from a different root and you’re wrong*). Village headmen were Moși (Anglo pron. MOSH, meaning ‘Elders’, from Latin root in e.g. Mos Maiorum).

Overall the Vlachs’ existence presents as a fearful, static, dreary and terminally backward. There must have been many young men chafing at its strictures, longing for adventure and expansion.

What, then, could have given the Transylvanian Vlachs the impetus to expand into the plains of Wallachia, as they did with the ‘Dismounting’ of 1290? As I said, there can have been but scant potential in their existence. There must have been nearly complete harmony between the objectively cyclical lifeways of these isolated rustics, dominated as they were by the changing of the seasons, and their subjective metaphysic of unchanging circular time. The perennialist/traditionalist right adores this total accord of nature and consciousness as a lost ideal to be revived. To me it seems…a bit fatalistic and dull.

Wandering equestrian folk, on the other hand, are bearers of a forward-moving way of life and a concomitantly linear metaphysic through which ever-lasting fame can be achieved. So it was with the Cumans. They brought to the Vlachs this re-vivifying new metaphysic. It was a gift that contained the potential for release from the drab fatalism of the sedentary agriculturalist’s cyclical lifeways and thought-world, more *controlled by* than ‘in harmony with’ nature. Thus I claim that with the second ethnogenesis of the Vlachs, resulting from Cuman overlordship, came also a palingenesis.

In material terms, the Cumans bestowed on the Vlachs a new military-technological suite: heavy cavalry combined with archery from horseback. The Vlachs cannot have much developed horse-riding for war in their secluded forests and mountain valleys; the terrain would not have allowed for it.

The following, as I suppose, is how the ‘Dismounting’ achieved success. Ze blendingk of hardy Vlach infantry with Cuman cavalry, along with an infusion of the steppe-dweller’s love for the expansive exercise of freedom, impelled the upland Transylvanian Vlachs—led by its new aristocracy of CUMANIK ‘blond ones’— into the open plains, overflowing with renewed strength and will-to-conquest. This, I am utterly convinced until THE SCIENCE tells me otherwise, is how the Romanians took possession of Wallachia.

Then in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Cumano-Vlachs held Wallachia in the face of elsewhere invincible Ottoman Turkish expansion (they held the line in Moldavia too). It was by dint of Cuman military technology, principally the harassing deployment of cavalry archers, that the Romanians were able to prosecute with such success their early wars against the Ottoman Turks.

I mean to imply no detraction from the warlike accomplishments of Wallachia and Moldavia in the 15^th and 16^th centuries when I opine that it is largely thanks to the Cumans—from whom the Romanian aristocracy was then still overwhelmingly composed—that we’re not all speaking Tüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüürkiş now (well not yet anyway). The second Romanian ethnogenesis saved Europe…for a time.

If all this is true, why aren’t the Romanians speaking (Cuman) Tüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüürkiş now?

You no doubt know that conquerors, once settled and no matter how few in number, do not normally adopt the language of their subjects. The Magyars, for example, did not take up the Slavic dialect(s) of the people over whom they came to rule but instead made them twist their proud Slavonic tongues to learn the ridiculously complicated Hungarian language. There are exceptions, however, to the law of elite linguistic dominance: for instance, the Anglo-Norman conquerors of eastern Ireland took up Gaelic language and customs in a most flamboyant manner.

If you have read more than one of my poasts, it might be becoming clear to you by now that Romania never follows the laws of history. Accordingly, I suggest that the Romanians rejected the Cuman language owing to their extraordinary obstinacy. On a personal level this stubbornness causes them again and again bloody-mindedly to violate Anglo standards of reason and good sense. On the grand scale of the ethnos as a whole it leads to non-compliance with supposed historical laws. Romanian obduracy is both a great virtue and a great vice. I return to this theme in future poasts.

I sum up

This poast is intended as the DUBIOUS AND HIGHLY SUPPOSITIONAL COMPLETION of the Djuvara thesis on Cuman involvement in Romanian history. My argument in short is that blond, horse-riding Cumans came across the steppe to Europe from somewhere around Tocharia to lead the Vlachs out of the primitive non-potentiality of their forest and mountain refugia, where they had until then dwelt hidden from history.

After the conversion of the Cumans by Hungarian prelates, their enfeoffment in Transylvania by Hungarian kings and their self-imposition on the local Vlachs as a new and militarily forceful ruling class, the renewed Vlach nation—previously ruled by a timid gerontocracy—emerged blinking from its dark forests and wolf-haunted upland valleys, into the light of history. This was the second Romanian ethnogenesis, following the first ethnogenesis under the Roman imperium (it matters scarcely at all to history where the first ethnogenesis occurred).

There was no mostly-peaceful High Middle Ages in the Romanian Lands—no manorial system, no at-will inheritance practice—which could generate, as these things did in the West, an individualistic and enterprising commercial middle class. All Romanian enterprise, from the 13th century until their eventual exhaustion by the Ottomans in the 17^th century, was directed to the collective activity of war, just as it is now directed towards low-key internecine social warfare: petty scamming and driving really really fast.

The unambiguous arrival of the Romanians into history, with their ‘Dismounting’ of 1290, can perhaps best be understood as the final, belated ripple of the Völkerwanderung tide: a people of composite origins and identity, imbued with a new vigour and conquering new territory in the wake of the tumult and dislocation of the post-imperium centuries.

The Romanian (re-)conquest of Wallachia in 1290, and of Moldavia about 70 years later, was the final Medieval reshuffling of the European ethnic deck. At its conclusion, all the European peoples occupied, with at least some degree of sovereignty, the broad geographical situations they maintained until the upheavals of the 20^th century (cf. Stalin’s relocations of entire ethny, as well as mass murders, expulsions and resettlements of Armenians—European? They look huwhite to me—Greeks and Sudeten/Polish Germans).

It make here a final historical observation. The ‘high’ Völkerwanderung had featured Latinoids—alike in Italy, Gaul and Iberia—being acted upon. But, in the Romanian Lands of the late 13^th to the early 17^th century, Latinoids (albeit under Cuman leadership) were at last an agentive force. Something of the sense of agitation and movement inherited from these relatively recent times has endured in the Romanian character, though so far to no grand world-historical effect.

wat means for Romania NOW?

The attenuated bloodline of the CUMANIK boyar caste responsible for the second Romanian ethnogenesis is long gone. In Anglodom the peasantry were elevated during the Middle Ages to form a thick mass middle-class loam. In Romania, by contrast, a downwardly-mobile aristocracy underwent gradual social recession throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, eventually to become a thin middle-class superstrate. They were soon after conclusively wiped out by communism, and the Romanian nation was culturally decapitated.

The ‘thinness’ of the boyar-derived native Romanian middle class made their total effacement easy and final. With them went any prospect for the development of mass middle-class standards of taste.

What remained after the decapitation of Romanian KULTUR was—not to put too fine a point on the matter—the naïve form-follows-function-with-extra-pink-paint aesthetic of the peasant: a reversion to the levelling sclerotic nomos of the pre-Cuman Moși. Among the great crimes of communism in Romania was not its destruction of hierarchy in general, which is not a value in itself, but rather its *particular* destruction of established hierarchies of taste. Communist brutalism and heroic proletarian art could never have functioned as a lasting substitute.

LATE ARISTOCRATIC TASTE: Mogoșoaia Palace, built 1702 in the Brâncovenesc style

BOURGEOIS BOYARS: Villa Mitrovici, built in Neo-Brâncovenesc style, c. 1905

ACKSHUALLY ALL TASTE IS SUBJECTIVE: Gypsy palace, built 2015? Financial Times article says the “gaudy, joyful palaces of the Roma” “are a reaction to centuries of stigma and oppression” DO YOU FEEL *JOY*, RACIST?

Johann Kurtz’s Yellow light Nationalism draws upon a living but rapidly declining tradition of North Sea middle-class taste (in which, incidentally, I fully share). It does not in any clear sense represent the salvaged aesthetics of a lost Western aristocracy. However, since the extermination in Romania of the boyars, there have been no standards of taste—either middle-class or aristocratic—in which even a moderately discerning Anglo (such as me) can willingly partake. Romanians do not use yellow lights.

As I said here: now divested irrecoverably of the boyars who had formed its aristocracy and then its middle class, Romania’s (genetically) mass peasant society is susceptible to emulating indiscriminately the tastes and behaviours of the Big Man—and at the local level, especially in rural districts, the Big Man in Romania is often a Gypsy.

In next poast I talk zis.

1. If you havent yet read part I (or even if you have; I have revised it for factuality and cogency in the last few days), I urge you to do so NOW, in order that I may get my reader-count up a

…ahaha

…what I mean, of course, is that you should (re-)read it so that you have the background required to properly comprehend the present communication.

2. The seven ‘Saxon’ burghs are/were: Bistrița (Bistritz); Brașov (Kronstadt); Cluj-Napoca (Klausenburg); Mediaș (Mediasch); Sebeș (Mühlbach); Sibiu (Hermannstadt); and Sighișoara (Schässburg). I don’t mean to do the work of the Romanian tourism board here, but I would say that of the seven only four (Kronstadt, Mediasch, Hermannstadt and Schässburg) are still certainly worth visiting. Klausenburg is the very centre of the POZZ in Romania and has an air of self-satisfied over-confidence, like all provicial cities whose inhbitants pride themselves on their ‘progressiveness’. All the same, it is partially saved by its more-mixed-than-usual Hungarian/Romanian population (no ‘Saxons’ left—pity) and some quite interesting ‘Saxon’ churches of Gothic vintage.

3. A Brief Illustrated History of Romanians, p. 32