[...]
What Armbruster has done is to collect--more thoroughly than anyone else so far--all the available evidence of the Roman (Latin) origin of the Romanians from the tenth to the eighteenth century. He submits the following controversial thesis: the Romanian people have always been conscious of their Roman origins; the scholarly cultivation of the Romanians' Latin roots simply built on the autochthonous national consciousness of the masses. The fact is that we have no "empirical" evidence either to prove or disprove Armbruster's thesis: no Romanian source that directly confirms it or contradicts it; no minutes of any conference of medieval sociologists who had polled the population for evidence of "origin consciousness," nor anyone around from even the eighteenth century whom we could question. The arguments of the book are practically impossible to summarize: one page will do as well as a thousand. For, while the author keeps repeating that the sources underscore the Romanians' Roman origin, his comments on the individual sources repeatedly raise considerations which prompt the reader to take another critical look at the evidence adduced in support of the book's leitmotif.
[...]
In his treatment of Anonymus, Armbruster
shows the usual tendency toward simplification. He identifies the Blachii
of Transylvania with the pastores Romanorum living west of the Danube (p.
39). He makes no more than a vague allusion to the interpretation which
would equate these "shepherds of the Romans" with the late descendants
of the Western Romans remaining in these parts, emphasizing rather that
"King Béla's scribe demonstrated the continuity of the Romans in
the Pannonian Danube region, and the fact that it was the Magyars who finally
drove the Romanians out of Pannonia"
(p. 39). What Anonymus actually wrote was
that they "fled" when they heard that the Magyars were coming; "drive out,"
however, is much more in the epic mode and occurs likewise in Dezsõ
Pais's Hungarian translation of the Gesta Hungarorum. Likewise worth noting
is an anachronistic aside of Anonymus's, made in connection with tenth-century
Pannonia having been the pascua Romanorum: "And the Romans are still grazing
in Hungary off the fat of the land." Aimed at the knights and sycophants
that the King of Hungary had gathered around him from every corner of the
Holy Roman Empire, this jibe illustrates how the early medieval chronicles
often reflect the author's own times.
[...]