page_title: Romania in the Early Middle Ages
section_title: Emergence of new powers (c. 600–c. 895)
hierarchical_section_title: Romania in the Early Middle Ages / After the first migrations / Emergence of new powers (c. 600–c. 895)
caption_attribution_description: English: Ethnic distribution in the territory of present-day Romania and neighboring areas after the Slav Settlement (8th century)
context_page_description: The Early Middle Ages in Romania started with the withdrawal of the Roman troops and administration from Dacia province in the 270s. In the next millennium a series of peoples, most of whom only controlled two or three of the nearly ten historical regions that now form Romania, arrived. During this period, society and culture underwent fundamental changes. Town life came to an end in Dacia with the Roman withdrawal, and in Scythia Minor – the other Roman province in the territory of present-day Romania – 400 years later. Fine vessels made on fast potter's wheels disappeared and hand-made pottery became dominant from the 450s. Burial rites changed more than once from cremation to inhumation and vice versa until inhumation became dominant by the end of the 10th century.
  The East Germanic Goths and Gepids, who lived in sedentary communities, were the first new arrivals. The Goths dominated Moldavia and Wallachia from the 290s, and parts of Transylvania from the 330s. Their power collapsed under attacks by the nomadic Huns in 376. The Huns controlled Eastern and Central Europe from around 400, but their empire disintegrated in 454.
context_section_description: The Lower Danube region experienced a period of stability after the establishment of the Avar Empire. Archaeological sites in Moldavia, Oltenia and Wallachia became characterized by the growing popularity of hand-made vessels with finger impressions and by a decline in detectable cemeteries. Ananias of Shirak, a 7th-century Armenian geographer described the "large country of Dacia" as inhabited by Slavs who formed "twenty-five tribes".
  Villages of sunken huts with stone ovens appeared in Transylvania around 600. Their network was expanding along the rivers Mureş, Olt and Someş. The so-called "Mediaş group" of cremation or mixed cemeteries emerged in this period near salt mines. The Hungarian and the Romanian vocabulary of salt mining was taken from Slavic, suggesting that Slavs were employed in the mines for centuries. Bistriţa ("swift"), Crasna ("nice" or "red"), Sibiu ("dogwood"), and many other rivers and settlements with names of Slavic origin also evidence the presence of Slavs in Transylvania.
  The Turkic-speaking Bulgars arrived in the territories west of the river Dniester around 670. At the Battle of Ongal they defeated the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Emperor Constantine IV in 680 or 681, occupied Dobruja and founded the First Bulgarian Empire. They soon imposed their authority over some of the neighboring tribes. The great variety in burial rites evidences the multi-ethnic character of the Bulgarian Empire. Even the Bulgars were divided in this respect; some of them practiced inhumation and others cremation. Initially, a sharp distinction existed between the Bulgars and their subjects, but the Slavicization of the Bulgars soon began.
  Opreanu writes that the "new cultural synthesis" known as the "Dridu culture" developed in the Lower Danube region around 680. New settlements and large cemeteries show that the region experienced a steady demographic rise in the 8th century. The large, unfortified "Dridu" settlements were characterized by traditional semi-sunken huts, but a few houses with ground-level floors have also been unearthed in Dodeşti, Spinoasa, and other places.
  "Dridu" communities produced and used gray or yellow fine pottery, but hand-made vessels were still predominant. Fine, gray vessels were also unearthed in the 9th-century "Blandiana A" cemeteries in the area of Alba-Iulia, which constitutes a "cultural enclave" in Transylvania. Near these cemeteries, necropolises of graves with west–east orientation form the distinct "Ciumbrud group". Female dress accessories from "Ciumbrud graves" are strikingly similar to those from Christian cemeteries in Bulgaria and Moravia. From an earlier date are the cremation cemeteries of the "Nuşfalau-Someşeni group" in northwestern Transylvania, with their 8th- and 9th-century tumuli, similar to the kurgans of East Slavic territories.
  Contemporaneous authors rarely dwelled on early medieval Southeastern Europe. For instance, the Royal Frankish Annals makes a passing reference to Abodrites living "in Dacia adjacent to the Danube near the Bulgarian border" on the occasion of their envoys' arrival in Aachen in 824. Bulgaria's territory increased under Krum (c. 803–814), who took Adrianople and forced at least 10,000 of the town's inhabitants to settle north of the Lower Danube in 813. The ambitions of his son Omurtag (814–831) in the regions of the rivers Dnieper and Tisa are attested by two columns erected in the memory of Bulgar military leaders who drowned in these rivers during military campaigns. Emperor Arnulf sent envoys, in 894, to the Bulgarians to "ask that they should not sell salt to the Moravians", suggesting a Bulgarian control over either the Transylvanian salt mines or the roads to Moravia.
  In the same year, the nomadic Hungarians – who had arrived in the Lower Danube region from the steppes of Eastern Europe in 837 or 838 – became involved in a conflict between Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire on the latter's behalf.  The Bulgarians incited another nomadic tribe, the Pechenegs, to invade the Hungarians from the east, while the Bulgarians also attacked 
caption: The ethnic distribution in the territory of present-day Romania and neighboring areas in the 8th century, according to Matjaž Klemenčič and Mitja Žagar
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