| Many Vlachs (Romanians)
were shepherds in the medieval times, driving their sheep through the mountains
of Southeastern Europe. The Vlachs shepherds reached as far as Southern Poland
and Moravia in the north (by following the Carpathian range), Dinaric
Alps in West and the Pindus mountains in South. In many of those areas, although with time their descendants lost the language, but their legacy can still be found today in the cultural influences: in the customs, folklore and the way of living of the mountain people, as well as in the placenames of Romanian or Aromanian origins that are spread all across the region. Like the language, the cultural links between the Northern Vlachs (Romanians) and Southern Vlachs (Aromanians) were broken by the 10th century. |  |
Romanian culture remained virtually uninfluenced by occupating people such as Hungarians and Slavs and developed itself to what it is today and Aromanian culture developed initially as a pastoral culture, later to be greatly influenced by the Byzantine and Greek culture. The first record of a Balkan Romanic presence in the Byzantine period can be found in the writings of Procopius, in the 5th Century. A Byzantine chronicle of 586 about an incursion against the Avars in the eastern Balkans may contain one of the earliest references to Vlachs. Blachernae, the suburb of Constantinople, was named after a Scythian named Duke Blachernos. In the 10th Century, the Hungarians arrived in the Pannonian plain, and, according to the Gesta Hungarorum written by an anonymous chancellor of King Bela III of Hungary, the plain was inhabited by Slavs, Bulgars, Vlachs and pastores Romanurum (Roman shepherds). However, the chronicle was written around 1146.
Wallachia was situated north of the Danube and south of the Carpathian Mountains. Its neighbors were Bulgaria, after that the Ottoman Empire to the south, Transylvania to the north-west and Moldavia to the north-east. The capital city changed over time, from Câmpulung to Curtea de Arges,then to Târgoviste and finally Bucharest. In the second Dacian war (105 AD) the west of Oltenia became part of the Roman province of Dacia with the rest of Wallachia included in the Moesia Inferior province. The Roman fortification Limes (patrol road with wooden lookout towers and forts at intervals) were initially along the Olt (119 AD) and later in the 2nd century moved slightly east, from the Danube up to Rucar in the Carpathians mountains. The Roman line fell back to the Olt in 245 AD, and in 271 AD the Romans pulled out of the region.Wallachia was under the control of the First Bulgarian State from its formation in 681 until approximately the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin at the end of the 10th century. With the decline and subsequent fall of the First Bulgarian Empire to Byzantium (in the second half of the 10th century up to 1018), Wallachia came under the control of the Pechenegs (a Turkic people) who extended their rule west through the 10th and 11th century, until defeated around 1091, when the Cumans of southern Russia took control of the lands of Moldavia and Wallachia. There are theories about the derivation of the Franciscan name Wallonia. It may have come from the Gaulish vellaunos meaning "valorous".