page_title: Culture of Romania
section_title: The Middle Ages
hierarchical_section_title: Culture of Romania / Historical Evolution / The Middle Ages
caption_attribution_description: Română: Turla bisericii "Sf. Nicolae" din Densuș cu Muntii Fagăraș în fundal This is a photo of a historic monument in județul Hunedoara, classified with number HD-II-m-A-03307
context_page_description: The culture of Romania is the product of its geography and its distinct historical evolution. It is theorized and speculated that Romanians and the Vlachs are the combination of descendants of Roman colonists and people indigenous to the region who were Romanized.
  The Dacian people, one of the major indigenous peoples of southeast Europe are one of the predecessors of the Proto-Romanians. It is believed that a mixture of Dacians, Romans, Slavs, and Illyrians are the predecessors of the modern Romanians, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, and Istro-Romanians. Modern Romanian culture visibly reflects a tremendous amount of Eastern European influences. In addition, Romanian culture shares several similarities with other ancient cultures such as that of the Armenians.
context_section_description: Until the 14th century, small states (Romanian: voievodate) were spread across the territory of Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia. The medieval principalities Wallachia and Moldavia arose around that time in the area on the southern and eastern sides of the Carpathian Mountains.
  Moldavia and Wallachia were both situated on important commercial routes often crossed by Polish, Saxon, Greek, Armenian, Genovese, and Venetian merchants, connecting them well to the evolving culture of medieval Europe. Grigore Ureche's chronicle, Letopiseţul Ţărîi Moldovei (The Chronicles of the land of Moldavia), covering the period from 1359 to 1594, is a very important source of information about life, events and personalities in Moldavia. It is among the first non-religious Romanian literary texts; due to its size and the information that it contains it is, probably, the most important Romanian document from the 17th century.
  The first printed book, a prayer book in Slavonic, was produced in Wallachia in 1508 and the first book in Romanian, a catechism, was printed in Transylvania, in 1544. At the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, European humanism influenced the works of Miron Costin and Ion Neculce, the Moldavian chroniclers who continued Ureche's work. Constantin Brâncoveanu, prince of Wallachia, was a great patron of the arts and was a local Renaissance figure. During Şerban Cantacuzino's reign the monks at the monastery of Snagov, near Bucharest published in 1688 the first translated and printed Romanian Bible (Biblia de la București – The Bucharest Bible). The first successful attempts at written Romanian-language poetry were made in 1673 when Dosoftei, a Moldavian metropolitan in Iaşi, published a Romanian metrical psalter.
  Dimitrie Cantemir, a Moldavian prince, was an important personality of the medieval period in Moldavia. His interests included philosophy, history, music, linguistics, ethnography and geography, and the most important works containing information about the Romanian regions were Descriptio Moldaviae published in 1769 and Hronicul vechimii a romano-moldo-valahilor (roughly, Chronicle of the durability of Romans-Moldavians-Wallachians), the first critical history of Romania. His works were also known in western Europe, as he authored writings in Latin: Descriptio Moldaviae (commissioned by the Academy of Berlin, the member of which he became in 1714) and Incrementa atque decrementa aulae othomanicae, which was printed in English in 1734–1735 (second edition in 1756), in French (1743) and German (1745); the latter was a major reference work in European science and culture until the 19th century.
caption: 13th century Romanesque Densuș Church
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