Metamorphoses are typical for all nomads who, leaving their families at home, attack foreign peoples and at the same time make war on one another. In the furious tumult in which the Central Asiatic mounted hordes constantly swarmed, and fought one another for the spoils, it is to be presumed that nearly all such people, like the Scythians and Magyars, at least once sustained the loss of their wives and children. The mounted nomads could, therefore, remain a pure race only where they constantly opposed their own kin, whereas to the south and west they were merged so imperceptibly in the Semitic and Indo-European stock, that no race-boundary is perceivable.
The most diversified was the destiny of those mounted nomads who became romanised in the Balkan peninsula (Roumanians or Vlakhs) but, surprising as it may be outside the steppe region, remain true to this day to their life as horse and sheep nomads wherever this is still at all possible. During the summer they grazed on most of the mountains of the Balkan peninsula, and took up their winter quarters on the sea-coasts among a peasant population speaking a different language. Thence they gradually spread, unnoticed by the chroniclers, along all the mountain ranges, over all the Carpathians of Transylvania, North Hungary, and South Galicia to Moravia; towards the north-west from Montenegro onwards over Herzegovina, Bosnia, Istria, as far as South Styria; towards the south over Albania far into Greece.
In the entire Balkan peninsula there is scarcely a span of earth which they have not grazed. And like the peasantry among which they wintered (and winter) long enough, they became after transitory bilingualism, Greeks, Albanians, Servians, Bulgarians, Ruthenians, Poles, Slovaks, Chekhs, Slovenes, Croatians, seeing that they appeared there not as a compact body, but as a mobile nomad stratum among a strange-tongued and more numerous peasant element, and not till later did they gradually take to agriculture and themselves become settled. In Istria they are still bilingual. On the other hand they maintain themselves in Roumania, East Hungary, Bukovina, Bessarabia for the following reasons: the central portion of this region, the Transylvanian mountain belt, sustained with its rich summer pastures such a number of grazing-camps that the nomads in the favourable winter quarters of the Roumanian plain were finally able to absorb the Slav peasantry, already almost wiped out by the everlasting passage through them of other wild nomad peoples. In Macedonia, too, a remainder of them still exists. Were they not denationalised, the Roumanians today would be by far the most numerous — but also the most scattered — people of South Europe, — not less than twenty million souls.
The Roumanians were not descendants of Roman colonists of Dacia left behind in East Hungary and Transylvania. Their nomadic life is a confutation of this, for the Emperor Trajan (after A.D. 107) transplanted settled colonists from the entire Roman Empire. And after the removal and withdrawal of the Roman colonists (A.D. 271) Dacia, for untold centuries, was the arena of the wildest international struggles known to history, and these could not have been outlived by any nomad people remaining there. To be sure, some express the opinion that the Roumanian nomad herdsmen fled into the Transylvanian mountains at each new invasion (by the Huns, Bulgarians, Avars, Magyars, Patzinaks, Cumans successively) and subsequently always returned.
But the nomad can support himself in the mountains only during the summer, and he must descend to pass the winter. On the other hand, each of these new invading nomad hordes needed these mountains for summer grazing for their own herds. Thus the Roumanians could not have escaped, and their alleged game of hide-and-seek would have been in vain. But south of the Danube also the origin of the Roumanians must not be sought in Roman times, but much later, because nomads are never quickly denationalised. For in the summer they are quite alone on the otherwise uninhabited mountains, having intercourse with one another in their own language, and only in their winter quarters among the foreign-speaking peasantry are they compelled in their dealings with them to resort to the foreign tongue. Thus they remain for centuries bilingual before they are quite denationalised, and this can be proved from original sources precisely in the case of the Roumanians (Vlakhs) in the old kingdom of Servia. Accordingly the romanising of existing there for a long time and of different race, through the influence of which they first became bilingual and then very gradually, after some centuries, forgot their own language. In what district could this have taken place?
For nomads outside the salt-steppe the seacoast offers — precisely on account of the salt, and the mild winter — the most suitable winter quarters, and, as a matter of fact, from the earliest times certain shores of the Adriatic, the Ionian, Aegean, and Marmora, were crowded with Vlakhian catuns, and are partly so at the present time. Among all these sea districts, however, only Dalmatia had remained so long Romanic as to be able entirely to romanise a nomad people. From this district the expansion of the Roumanians had its beginning, so that the name Daco-Roumanians is nothing but a fiction.
The Spanish and Italian nomad shepherds too can have had no other origin. Alans took part in Radagaisus's invasion of Italy in 405, and, having advanced to Gaul, founded in 411 a kingdom in Lusitania which was destroyed by the Visigoths. The remainder advanced into Africa with the Vandals in 429. Traces of the Alans remained for a long time in Gaul. Sarmatian and Bulgarian hordes accompanied Alboin to Italy in 568, and twelve places in northern Italy are still called Bolgaro, Bolgheri, etc. A horde of Altaian Bulgars fled to Italy later, and received from the Lombard Grimoald (662-672) extensive and hitherto barren settlements in the mountains of Abruzzi and their neighbourhood. In the time of Paulus Diaconus ( 7 97) they also spoke Latin, but their mother tongue was still intact, for only on their winter pastures in Apulia and Campania, in contact with Latin peasants in whose fields they encamped, were they compelled to speak Latin. The old Roman sheep-rearing pursued by slaves has no connexion with nomadism.
Therefore neither the non-Mongol appearance, nor the Semitic, Indo-European, or Finno-Ugrian language of any historical mounted nomad people can be held as a serious argument for their Semitic, Indo-European, or Finno-Ugrian origin. Everything speaks for one single place of origin for the mounted nomads, and that is in the Turanian-Mongol steppes and deserts. These alone, by their enormous extent, their unparalleled severity of climate, their uselessness in summer, their salt vegetation nourishing countless herds, and above all by their indivisible economic connexion with the distant grass-abounding north — these alone give rise to a people with the ineradicable habits of mounted nomads. The Indo-European vocabulary reveals no trace of a former mounted nomadism; there is no ground for speaking of Indo-European, Semitic, Finno-Ugrian nomads, but only of nomads who have remained Altaic or of indo-europeanised, semiticised, ugrianised nomads. The Scythians became Iranian, the Magyars Ugrian, the Avars and Bulgarians Slavic, and so on.
The identical origin of all the mounted nomads of historic and modern times is also demonstrated by the identity of their entire mode of life, even in its details and most trivial particulars, their customs, and their habits. One nomad people is the counterfeit of the other, and after more than two thousand years no change, no differentiation, no progress is to be observed among them. Accordingly we can always supplement our not always precise information about individual historical hordes, and the consequences of their appearance, by comparisons with the better known hordes. We are best informed about the Mongols of the thirteenth century, and that by Rogerius Canon of Varad, Thomas Archdeacon of Spalato, Piano Carpini, Rubruquis, Marco Polo and others, whose accounts are therefore indispensable for a correct estimation of all earlier nomadic invaders of Europe.
This is the role of nomadism in the history of the world: countries too distant from its basis it could only ravage transitorily, with robbery, murder, fire, and slavery, but the stamp which it left upon the peoples which it directly dominated or adjoined remains uneffaceable. The Orient, the cradle and chief nursery of civilisation, it delivered over to barbarism; it completely paralysed the greater part of Europe, and it transformed and radically corrupted the race, spirit, and character of countless millions for incalculable ages to come. That which is called the inferiority of the East European is its work, and had Germany or France possessed steppes like Hungary, where the nomads could also have maintained themselves and thence completed their work of destruction, in all probability the light of West European civilisation would long ago have been extinguished, the entire Old World would have been barbarised, and at the head of civilisation today would be stagnant China.
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