The Vlachs - People Formed Around a Dynasty

Abstract

Serbian kings were co-heirs to the Arpad dynasty, Stefan Dragutin and his son, Stefan Vladislav, son of the eldest daughter of the last significant Arpad king. His Angevin adversaries, descendants of a younger sister of Dragutin’s wife, had the support of the papacy. In the Hungarian regions where Dragutin and Vladislav’s supporters had estates, Serbian Vlachs were colonized. In the Krasso region, where even today the population is bilingual in Serb and Vlach and has a mixed identity, in which Serb and Vlach are interchangeable, the same, and which onomastically preserve all the main family names that Vlach nobility in counties colonized later from this region, such as Maramoros or Hunyad has (this is the Crisov land mentioned in the Roman and Vlachata medieval narrative, the first land settled by the Serb Vlachs under Dragutin in Hungary from which they later spread). In the Hunyad County, where the wedding of Dragutin’s son, Vladislav, and Laszlo Kán’s daughter took place, the first Vlachs from Serbia came as reinforcement of the political enterprise of the Nemanjic dynasty as a successor of the Arpad line, despite a papal ex-communication. Afterwards, in the areas of Miklos Pok (Maramaros, Ugocsa, Bereg), another ally of Dragutin, influenced by Andrew of Halics, another wave of Serbian Vlach colonists came, the ancestors of Maramaros nobility. In the acts of the Catholic Church in Câmpulung Muscel, a note about Negru Vodă’s wife is preserved. She is called Katalin, the daughter of the Hungarian King. This implies the identity between the semi-legendary XVIIth century figure of Negru Vodă and Dragutin. Negru Vodă probably is a translation of Maurovlach, black Vlach. Heraldry common to Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, and Moldavia, the Ethiopic heads, supports the identity between Hungarian Wallachia, and Nemanjic Serbia, and the origin of its dynasty from the Nemanjic. This genealogic identity is preserved in the painted family tree of Curtea de Argeş, where Neagoe Basarab implies the symbolism of the 12 tribes of Israel to suggest the political unity of Serbian Vlachs in the ottoman regions and the colonized north.