The Age of Migrations and the Aurelian Withdrawal (3rd–10th Centuries)

After the Roman administration withdrew from Dacia, Romanian territory became a corridor for migrating peoples. The first to arrive were the Goths, who in the 3rd–4th centuries dominated the north-Pontic region and left traces in the Sântana de Mureș–Cernyakhov culture. In 376, under pressure from the Huns, many Goths crossed the Danube into the Roman Empire. The Huns, led by Attila, dominated the Pannonian Plain in the first half of the 5th century. After Attila’s death in 453, his empire fell apart, and the Gepids settled in Transylvania.

The 6th century brought the Avars, a people of Turkic horsemen, who founded a khaganate in Pannonia after 567 and dominated a large part of the Carpathian area. In the same period the Slavs began to move into the region. Byzantine sources, including the chronicler Jordanes (Getica, 551) and Procopius of Caesarea, mention them north of the Danube. The Slavs settled gradually, mixed with the Romance-speaking natives and influenced Romanian vocabulary, phonology and place names: words such as a iubi (“to love”), a trăi (“to live”), dragoste (“love”), zare (“horizon”), slavă (“glory”), rană (“wound”), or place names such as Zlatna, Vidra or Bistrița.

In the 7th century, some of the Slavs migrated south of the Danube, and in 681 Khan Asparuh founded a Bulgarian state on the lower Danube, recognized by Byzantium. Under these conditions the Romanian population north of the river lived in a network of village settlements. The Dridu culture of the 8th–10th centuries belongs to a Romance-speaking population that absorbed Slavic elements, and distinctive pottery, farming tools and some fortifications have been found within it. The Bulgarians ruled for a time over territories in the south of Wallachia, and Slavic Christianity penetrated through the Church of Ohrid.

Internally, the Romanian communities were organized into village communities, led by judges (juzi) or knezes (cnezi), with a system of customary law called “the law of the land” or “jus valachicum.” These communities included families who worked the land in common and faced foreign domination. In the 9th century Byzantium tried to restore its influence on the Danube, and in the 10th century the Pechenegs, a Turkic people, arrived and controlled the steppes northeast of the Danube between 900 and 1100. The Russian chronicle of Nestor and the work of the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus mention these events.

The period was, therefore, one of great turmoil, but not of the disappearance of the local population. The Romanians survived by adaptation: they lived in small villages, preserved popular Latin, used forests and mountains as refuges, and practised farming and herding. Early medieval Romanian society emerged from this evolution. In the 10th century, local political formations – knezates and voivodeships – were beginning to take shape in regions such as the Banat, Crișana, Transylvania and Oltenia, preparing the ground for the medieval Romanian states.