Dacia

• 1. Introduction

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  Dacia, the ancient land whose core lay in what is now Transylvania, once stretched from the river Tisza in the west to the Black Sea in the east. Its people, the Dacians, built a kingdom that Julius Caesar himself found threatening enough to plan a military expedition against. When a united Dacia stood at its height under King Burebista in the 1st century BC, it could reportedly send an army of two hundred thousand men into the field. That same kingdom, within a generation, would fracture, regroup, resist Rome for decades, and ultimately fall to Emperor Trajan in AD 106 in one of the ancient world's most consequential conquests. But the Dacians were not simply erased. Their towns, their language, their descendants, and even their name carried forward through centuries of migration, empire, and collapse. How did a tribal confederacy in the Carpathians become formidable enough to halt the Roman Empire? What drove their kings to extremes, from smashing their own wine culture to suicide rather than surrender? And how does a kingdom that fell nearly two thousand years ago still lend its name to Romania's largest car manufacturer today?

• 2. Land and Origins

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  The Carpathian Mountains sat at the geographical heart of Dacia, dividing and defining the territory in equal measure. The kingdom that grew around them covered ground that corresponds today to present-day Romania as well as parts of Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Ukraine. The Dacians themselves are first attested in the writings of ancient Greek historians. Herodotus described the related Getae as "the noblest as well as the most just of all the Thracian tribes," while Thucydides noted they "border on the Scythians and are armed in the same manner, being all mounted archers." These were not peripheral peoples on the edge of the known world. They occupied a territory that pressed against Germanic tribes to the northwest, the Black Sea trading cities to the southeast, and the expanding Roman frontier to the south. The Dacian state most likely arose as a tribal confederacy, bound together less by institutional government than by charismatic leadership in military, political, and religious life. As early as the first half of the 2nd century BC, a king named Oroles had already established a recognized Dacian kingdom. Conflicts with the Bastarnae and with Rome between 112 and 109 BC, and again in 74 BC, drained Dacian resources significantly. A separate ruler named Rubobostes also increased Dacian power in the Carpathian basin during the early 2nd century BC by defeating the Celts who had previously held dominance in the region.

• 3. Burebista's Rise

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  Burebista, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, ruled the Geto-Dacian tribes from 82 BC to 44 BC, and his reign transformed Dacia from a collection of competing principalities into a power Rome could not ignore. His reorganization of the Dacian army was thorough and systematic. He also attempted to reshape Dacian society at its roots, persuading his people to cut down their vineyards and abandon wine entirely as a means of raising moral discipline. The Bastarnae and the Boii were conquered during his reign. Greek cities on the Black Sea coast, including Olbia and Apollonia, came to recognize his authority. In 53 BC, Caesar identified the eastern border of the Hercynian Forest as the boundary of Dacian territory. Burebista transferred the Geto-Dacian capital from Argedava to Sarmizegetusa Regia, a hilltop fortress city in Transylvania that would remain the Dacian seat of power for at least a century and a half. He also suppressed the independent minting of coins by four major tribal groups, replacing local currencies with imported or copied Roman denarii as the monetary standard. Caesar, who found the Dacians formidable enough to consider a military expedition against them, never got the chance to act. His assassination in 44 BC coincided with the murder of Burebista himself. The unified kingdom immediately fractured into four parts, and later five, as Strabo described: "Such divisions, to be sure, are only temporary and vary with the times." One of the successor states was ruled by Cotiso, to whom the Roman emperor Augustus reportedly betrothed his own five-year-old daughter Julia. Strabo later recorded that the Dacians, once capable of fielding two hundred thousand men, had by his time been reduced to as few as forty thousand.

• 4. The Roman Wars

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  From AD 85 to 89, the Dacians under a leader initially named Diurpaneus fought two wars against Rome, and the opening moves went decisively in their favor. In AD 85, Dacian forces crossed the Danube and raided Roman Moesia, killing its governor Gaius Oppius Sabinus in the process. Two years later, the Roman general Cornelius Fuscus led an army against the Dacians and was killed in battle. Following that victory, Diurpaneus adopted the name Decebalus, meaning "strong as ten men." The Romans recovered at the Battle of Tapae in AD 88, but their wider strategic position forced a truce. A new Roman force under Tettius Julianus gained an advantage the same year, yet Emperor Domitian was compelled to seek peace after suffering a separate defeat at the hands of the Marcomanni. The resulting agreement granted Decebalus the status of a client king, and Rome sent him military instructors, craftsmen, and money. Domitian, unable to bring Dacian captives home as trophies, reportedly paraded Italian peasants dressed in Dacian clothing in his triumph. Emperor Trajan had very different ambitions. He wanted to restore Roman finances, capture the famous Treasure of Decebalus, and gain control of Dacia's gold mines in Transylvania. His first campaign, from AD 101-102, culminated in the siege of Sarmizegethusa and the occupation of part of the country. Decebalus agreed to terms, then spent the following years rebuilding his forces. He attacked Roman garrisons again in AD 105, prompting Trajan to march a second time. In the Siege of Sarmizegethusa, the city was razed. Decebalus committed suicide to avoid capture. Trajan marked the conquest with the Column of Trajan in Rome, which still stands today. The Romans built a new settlement called Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetuza about 40 km from the ruins of the old capital to serve as the administrative center of the new Roman province.

• 5. Cities and Language

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  Ptolemy's Geographia, written a few decades after the conquest, listed 43 town names in Dacia. Of those, arguably 33 were of Dacian origin, and most carried the suffix "dava," meaning settlement or village. Towns such as Acidava, Buridava, Cumidava, and Ziridava followed this pattern, as did Setidava, Singidava, and at least two dozen others within the Dacian heartland. Further afield, the same suffix appeared in towns listed by Ptolemy in Lower Moesia and in the districts around present-day Nish and Sofia in Upper Moesia. Ptolemy also recorded two Dacian place names with the "dava" ending in the Upper Vistula river basin in what is now southern Poland: Susudava and Setidava. These northern outposts appear to reflect the extent of Burebista's earlier expansion. Scholars associate this Dacian-speaking northern group, possibly the Costoboci and the Lipita culture, with the specific language pattern identified by Gudmund Schutte. That northern Dacian presence in the Vistula basin appears to have lasted until around AD 170-180, when the migration of the Vandal Hasdingi displaced them. Nine of the Dacian town names in Ptolemy's list appear to have been Latinised. One notable example is the variant spelling of the capital itself, rendered in sources as Zarmisegethusa regia or Zermizirga, without the "dava" suffix.

• 6. After the Conquest

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  Roman Dacia did not represent the full extent of the former kingdom. A substantial territory remained outside Roman Imperial authority, and within it lived groups referred to as "Free Dacians." The conquest also destabilized the wider region, acting as a catalyst for new alliances among Germanic and Celtic tribes against Rome. Many Dacians who did fall under Roman rule became Romanised over time, a process that historians trace into the eventual emergence of the Romanian people. In AD 183, war broke out in the province of Dacia, and two future rivals for the throne of Emperor Commodus, Clodius Albinus and Pescennius Niger, both distinguished themselves in the fighting there. The emperor Decius, who ruled from AD 249 to 251, had to undertake a military campaign to recover Roman Dacia from the Carpo-Dacians. Gothic pressure on the province mounted across the following decades. In AD 268-269, the emperor Claudius II won a decisive victory over the Goths at Naissus, and the surviving Goths retreated through Thrace rather than through Dacia, suggesting the province was still firmly Roman at that moment. Emperor Aurelian withdrew Roman troops from Dacia during his reign, between AD 271 and 275, and resettled Roman citizens from the province into the interior of Moesia, according to the historian Eutropius. The Carpi, described as Free Dacians, proved resilient even in the withdrawal period, sustaining five battles against Roman forces in eight years between AD 301 and 308. Constantine the Great, who in 336 took the title Dacicus maximus, still found Dacians to fight against, demonstrating that the people had not vanished even three centuries after Trajan's conquest.

• 7. Constantine's Frontier

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  In 328, the emperor Constantine the Great inaugurated a bridge across the Danube at Sucidava, the site now known as Corabia in Romania, in a deliberate attempt to reclaim the province that Aurelian had surrendered. The ambition was real enough to back with engineering on a grand scale. The new frontier that Constantine established in the region ran along an earthen wall nearly 700 km in length, known today as the Brazda lui Novac line, supported by fortified camps at Hinova, Rusidava, and Pietroasele. In the late winter of 332, Constantine joined the Sarmatians in a campaign against the Goths. The combination of weather and famine was devastating for the Gothic side: reportedly, nearly one hundred thousand died before they submitted. Constantine claimed the subjugated territory as the new province of Gothia and took the title Gothicus Maximus. Two years later, in 334, Sarmatian commoners overthrew their own leaders and Constantine launched a further campaign against the tribe, resettling Sarmatian exiles as farmers in Illyrian and Roman districts and conscripting the rest into the army. The province of Scythia Minor, covering the territory between the Lower Danube and the Black Sea in what is now Dobrogea in Romania, remained a fully integrated part of the Roman Empire throughout all of these upheavals. It had been organized as a separate province around AD 293. The Huns destroyed the towns of Drobeta and Sucidava in the 440s, though Emperor Justinian I, who ruled from 527 to 565, later restored the fortifications. The Romans abandoned Sucidava in 596 or 597. Tomis, the last town in Scythia Minor to hold out, fell to invaders in 704.

• 8. The Kingdom's Long Afterlife

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  After Roman withdrawal in 275, Dacia became contested ground for a succession of peoples. The Victohali, Taifals, and Thervingians were recorded as inhabiting the region around 350. Gepids disputed Transylvania with the Taifals and Tervingians, while the Taifals eventually became federati of Rome and received the right to settle in Oltenia. In 376 the Huns swept through and held the region until the death of Attila in 453. The Gepid king Ardaric then used it as a power base until 566, when the Lombards destroyed the Gepid kingdom. The Lombards themselves soon moved on, and the Avars dominated the region for roughly 230 years until Charlemagne destroyed their kingdom in 791. Slavic peoples arrived alongside these events. Through all of it, the name Dacia persisted in Roman provincial administration, in historical writing, and eventually in the cultural memory of the region that became Romania. Today, Romania's largest company by revenue is a car manufacturer named Dacia, S.C. Automobile Dacia S.A., which sells its vehicles mainly in Europe and North Africa. The name that Burebista carried to the shores of the Black Sea and that Decebalus defended to his death is now stamped on cars crossing modern highways, a connection stretching back more than two thousand years to the hillfort capital of Sarmizegetusa Regia.