Romanians said Romanian Land; outsiders said Wallachia
Wallachia, between the Lower Danube’s north bank and the Southern Carpathians’ south face, was one of two principalities that founded modern Romania. It coalesced in the thirteenth century and solidified after Basarab I beat Hungary at Posada in 1330. Locals preferred Țara Românească—“Romanian Land”—while walhaz-derived Wallachia was the Germanic exonym.
In 1859 Wallachia joined Moldavia as the United Principalities, renamed Romania in 1866 and became a kingdom in 1881. Long before that, in the Second Dacian War of AD 105, western Oltenia became part of Roman Dacia, with other districts in Moesia Inferior. The Roman frontier ran along the Olt River from 119, shifted a little east in the second century to reach from the Danube to Rucăr in the Carpathians, fell back to the Olt in 245, and was abandoned in 271.
In Romanian the principality went by several names, among them Muntenia, meaning mountain land, Țara Rumânească, meaning Romanian land, Valahia, and now and then România. The spelling with â became official by the mid-nineteenth century, though the u form lingered in dialects much longer. Early medieval Slavonic texts spoke of the Hungaro-Wallachian Land, a term the Orthodox metropolitan see kept into modern times to distinguish it from Great Vlachia in Greece and Small Wallachia in Serbia.
Neighbours had their own names: Vlashko in Bulgarian, Vlaška in Serbian, Voloschyna in Ukrainian and Walachei among Transylvanian Saxons. Hungarians said Havasalföld, snowy lowlands, from an older form meaning the land beyond the snowy mountains, rendered in royal Latin as Transalpina. Ottoman documents used Eflâk, calling Oltenia Kara-Eflak, Black Wallachia, or Küçük-Eflak, Little Wallachia. Old Albanian used Gogënia for non-Albanian speakers, and thirteenth-century Arabic chronicles recorded al-Awalak, whose inhabitants were the ulaqut.
Behind the common exonym lies Germanic walhaz, a word for Romance-speaking outsiders, whereas the people’s own name stressed their Roman heritage.
Source: Wallachia
