Stephen the Great the „Dacian” of 1500

Abstract

In 1874, Constantin Esarcu published the first Romanian selection of medieval documents from the archives and libraries of Venice. Among them was an entry from Marino Sanudo il Giovanne's Diarii (unpublished at that time): ([...] Item in questi zorni hessendo venuto a Venecia un orator del Dacho, zoe Stefano Carabodam, fo in Collegio per il Principe fatto cavaliere e vestito d’oro [...] (March 28, 1502). Esarcu's "Dacian" reading was endorsed by the influent scholar and politician Tullo Massarani (1876), but not by the editors of the modern scientific edition of Sanudo's Diarii (1880), who changed Dacho into olacho. Nevertheless, in 1894, in the peculiar eighth volume of the "national Romanian collection of charters" (i.e. Eudoxiu de Hurmuzaki, Documente privitoare la istoria românilor), Esarcu's original reading was upheld: dacho. Yet it was the Italian reading in the published Diarii of Marino Sanudo that became common knowledge: olacho.