Coloniştii germani, fondarea oraşelor din ţările române şi metamorfozele istoriografiei româneşti din secolul XX
German Settlers, the Emergence of Towns in the Romanian Principalities and the Metamorphoses of Romanian Historiography in the 20th Century

Summary/Abstract: The present study seeks to analyze how Romanian historiography has approached the relationship between German settlers and the emergence of Medieval towns. For Transylvanian towns, historians have highlighted the decisive part played by colonists arriving from Central and Western Europe in the creation of urban centres. Research has been supported by a large number of sources, both varied and relevant. However, the Romanian Principalities display historical and historiographic differences in this respect, for several reasons. Historically, unlike Transylvania, the two Principalities had developed political institutions following a Byzantine model, while towns borrowed institutional features from Hungary and Poland. The particulars of the urbanization process have thwarted the efforts of Romanian historians, especially since the available sources are not at all clarifying in this respect. Conflicting information in sources on towns south and east of the Carpathian Mountains have determined scholars to rally under two major lines of interpretation when considering the emergence and the organization of urban centers: 1. towns created as predominantly commercial centers thanks to the contribution of social elements of foreign origin; 2. towns arising as the medieval Romanian society reached a new stage in its development, the “division of labour”, namely the separation of crafts and agriculture. The latter perspective sees towns as manufacturing, rather than trade centers. Advocates of the former point of view (N. Iorga, Gh. I. Brătianu, P. P. Panaitescu) were particularly vocal during the interwar period, when the vast majority of scholars claimed that towns in the Romanian medieval Principalities were simply the result of economic and political influences from Central Europe. It was assumed that the vector for these influences were foreign colonists, who settled south and east of the Carpathian Mountains. After the Second World War, Marxist interpretations were introduced to the debate under the new political circumstances of the Soviet occupation and the dawn of a political regime approved and controlled by the Soviet Union. As a consequence, Romanian historians were expected to draw their inspiration from Soviet historians, whose fundamental thesis was that the Middle Ages were an age fraught with feudal dissolution and intense class struggle. The idea that medieval towns had a foreign origin was apparently unacceptable to the ever-growing nationalist bias of the Romanian Communists. Therefore, some historians embraced the new thesis of a specifically Romanian social evolution (Petre P. Panaitescu, Nicolae Grigoraş, Ştefan Olteanu, Constantin C. Giurescu, Constantin Şerban, Mircea D. Matei and others). We will attempt to explain the reasons behind a radical change of perspective for some historians (P.P. Panaitescu, C.C. Giurescu), as well as their relationship with those governing Romanian historiography in the '50s and '60s.

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