There is an ongoing scholarly debate among Hungarian and Romanian historians regarding the medieval population of Transylvania. While some Romanian historians claim there was a continuous Romanian majority, Hungarian historians argue that Romanians continuously settled in the Kingdom of Hungary, of which Transylvania was a part.
Demographics and historical research
3rd to 8th century Romanian historian Ioan-Aurel Pop estimates as many as 800,000 people living in Roman Dacia by the 3rd century, and doubts the newly formed province south of the Danube could have absorbed such a large population.Pop, Aurel Ioan. History of Transylvania, p. 7. Romanian historian Marian Țiplic claims that the population of Transylvania during the Roman administration was estimated about 300,000 inhabitants, which number based on the comparison with the European average during the Roman period and the size of Transylvania which is 60,000 km2. Higher estimations are exaggerations, because Transylvania had about 300,000 inhabitants in the beginning of 14th century.
Napoca continued to be inhabited for a period of time after the Roman administration withdrawal. The main evidence comes from two cemeteries to the south and southeast of the town containing brick and mortar or stone sarcophagi, the deceased being buried then according to Roman customs. Villages did spring up on the nearby countryside which displayed continuation in culture from the Roman period, likely populated by settlers that had abandoned the city.Diaconescu, A. “The towns of Roman Dacia: an overview of recent research.” ed. Hanson, W. S. and Haynes, I. P. Roman Dacia: the Making of a Provincial Society. Portsmouth, RI, USA : Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2004. p. 133
Although the monetary finds over the period between 265 and 325 are scarce,Gazdac, Cristian (2002), "Monetary circulation and the abandonment of auxiliary forts in Roman Dacia", in P. Freeman et al., eds. (2002), Limes XVIII. Proceedings of the XVIIIth International Congress on Roman Frontier Studies held in Amman, Jordan (September 2000), BAR Int. Ser. 1084. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 737-756. Porolissum continued to be sporadically inhabited until late the 4th century, the inhabitants even trading with the Roman Empire. According to other studies the modifications from after 271 CE, such as walling of the space between columns in the interior of the forum and the addition of three water basins constructed with crude masonry, show that a thriving community continued to inhabit the site.
After the abandonment of Dacia, the population of Sarmizegetusa Regia reduced drastically. A small community moved inside the amphitheatre, walling the entrances with funerary stones and surviving until the end of the 4th century.
According to Hungarian historiography, Latin-speaking people north of the Danube did not remain. Priscus, 5th-century Eastern Roman diplomat and historian described his journey to Attila, he wrote that the people in the "land of the Huns" understood only Goth (Germanic) and Scythian (Hunnic) language.
According to Victor Friedman, nationalist historians often use one of two different historical interpretations to support present-day territorial or indigenous claims to Transylvania. Hungarian narratives regarding Transylvania assume that the Romans completely withdrew from Dacia, whereas Romanian narratives maintain that Romance continued to be spoken by Romanized Dacians.
Most Romanian historians claim a continuous Romanian presence in Transylvania since the Roman colonization of Dacia in the 2nd century. According to them, the Romans brought settlers from various parts of the Empire, who intermarried with the local Dacian population and gradually Romanized it, creating the Daco-Roman people, the ancestors of the modern Romanians. After the Roman withdrawal from the province between 271 and 275, Transylvania became a gateway for successive invaders, while the Daco-Romans took refuge in the mountains and preserved their Latin heritage. This explanation of the Romanian presence in Transylvania is referred to as the Daco-Roman continuity theory. According to Dennis Deletant, the term theory is justified due to the lack of convincing archaeological and historical evidence supporting it, and the claim remains open to question. Hungarian historians reject the Daco-Roman continuity theory, arguing that when the Romans withdrew from Dacia, its inhabitants left with them, and that by the time the Magyars entered the Carpathian Basin at the end of the 9th century, Transylvania was inhabited only by Slavic tribes. They cite the predominance of Slavic place names and note that the first recorded mention of Vlachs (Romanians), in the documents of the Hungarian chancery appears only in a charter from 1222. According to Dennis Deletant, the other inhabitants of Transylvania remain largely obscure, as the earliest documents concerning the province date only from the 12th century. According to Hungarian historians, the Romanian population in Transylvania is thought to have originated from immigration south of the Carpathians at the end of the 12th century, when Romanian shepherds were granted permission by the Hungarian kings to settle in the region.
9th to 15th century According to Hungarian historiography, the analysis of the Transylvanian river names is confirmed by archaeological finds, showing that the Hungarians who settled in Transylvania during the 10th century encountered Slavs throughout the region, with the exception of a small Turkic group in the southeast, near Küküllő (Rom. Târnava) and Olt (Rom. Olt) rivers. The absence of Romanian-derived river-names confirms that the Romanians arrived after the Slavs, Hungarians, and Germans. The Romanians borrowed river-names from the Slavs, Hungarians and Germans. The ancient Transylvanian river names were adopted into Romanian through the linguistic mediation of the Slavs, Hungarians, or Germans.
According to a prominent view in Romanian historiography, the uninterrupted presence of a Romanized population in Transylvania is proven by archaeological evidence, including artefacts bearing Christian symbolism, hoards of bronze Roman coins and Roman-style pottery. According to Ioan-Aurel Pop, the apparent absence of Romanian-derived names was caused by a gradual mistranslation of notaries who did not know Romanian, leading to Romanian being written in corrupt but easily identifiable forms, such as , or .
The interpretation of Kapreuar/Caprewar and Chernyswara as merely corrupted written forms of pre-existing Romanian names is not unproblematic. In the case of Caprewar, the earliest known form from 1337 contains the element -war, which corresponds naturally to the medieval Hungarian word vár (“castle”). Moreover, a possibly related earlier record from 1256 mentions the name Nagkechkes (“Great Goat-place/Great Kecskés”), leaving open the possibility that the later form developed from an earlier Hungarian toponym. Since more than eighty years separate the two attestations, the intermediate development of the name is unknown. A hypothetical sequence such as Nagykecskés → Kecskevár → Kaprevár/Caprewar cannot be demonstrated, but neither can it be excluded solely on the basis of the surviving forms. This possibility is also noteworthy from a linguistic perspective: Romanian capră means “goat” and derives from Latin capra, while Latin also had caper for a male goat. The capr-/capre- element of Caprewar could therefore have been associated with the same lexical field as Hungarian kecske (“goat”), while the Hungarian -vár element was retained. The later Romanian Căprioara/Kapriora, first attested in this form much later, may therefore reflect Romanian adaptation or re-borrowing rather than necessarily preserving an original Romanian name.
A similar difficulty concerns Chernyswara, Cernișoara. Its earliest attested form contains -wara, again readily interpretable as Hungarian vár/vára, while the first element Chernys-/Cerniș- is compatible with the Proto-Slavic root čьrnъ (“black”), reflected in modern Slavic forms such as Serbian/Croatian crn, Bulgarian черен (cheren), Russian чёрный (chyorny), and Polish czarny. The later Romanian form Cernișoara may therefore be explained in more than one way: either as an earlier Romanian name adapted by Hungarian speakers, or as a Romanian adaptation of an earlier Slavic-Hungarian compound. Because Hungarian -vár regularly developed into Romanian forms in -oara in other place-names, the direction of borrowing cannot simply be assumed from the modern Romanian forms. Consequently, Caprewar and Chernyswara should be treated as disputed etymological cases rather than as straightforward evidence that medieval notaries merely corrupted pre-existing Romanian place-names.
Also, the preservation of river names from Antiquity until today suggests those names were uninterruptedly transmitted from the Dacians to the Romans, and then to the Daco-Romans. Some rivers names, such the development of Criș from ancient Crisius would be in line with the phonetical evolution of Romanian. Although Transylvanian toponyms transmitted from Antiquity are scarce, they are relevant due to their geographical importance (Carpathians, Danube) with large rivers and mountains generally keeping their ancient toponyms, and smaller ones gradually losing their original names as a consequence of the Hungarian rule over Transylvania which would prioritize their naming conventions. The invariable adoption of the Slavic names by the Romanians for settlements bearing parallel Hungarian, German and Slavic names shows that the Romanians lived side by side with the Slavs for a long enough time, before the arrival of the Hungarians. The research of Transylvanian toponyms is a complex endeavour that could cause certain errors as the Hungarian and German toponyms are easier to distinguish while a Romanian toponym may as well be dismissed as a Latin or Slavic toponym due to Romanian being a Latin-based language with Slavic influences, being impossible to differentiate between toponyms made by the people speaking a certain language and toponyms created by another people such as the Romanians with foreign elements adopted from the Slavs. Another issue is that the recorded documents were written in Slavic and Hungarian during the Middle Ages, which have a tendency to slavicize or magyarize names, leading to Slavic or Hungarian names that are not genuine.
According to Hungarian historiography, the presence of Slavs is confirmed by archaeology, but no distinctive trace of Romanians had been found in Transylvania at the time of the Hungarian conquest.
The occurrence of Early Slavs in the region (by some historians as early as the second half of the 6th century) followed two general directions: one from the south, along the Olt river valley, and one from the north-west (upper Tisza) along the Crasna river valley. No evidence has been found to sustain a movement along the Mureș valley as well during this time. A third direction of entry was noted after the second half of the 7th century from the north-east. Historian Tudor Sălăgean views the presence of Slavs as questionable as the sudden disappearance of the Transylvanian Slavs cannot be explained, it is more likely that a considerable percentage were Romanians with their Slavic influences.
According to Florin Curta, no indication of a migration in the 10th century from the south to the north of the Danube have been found. Many sites excavated from the 10th century in the region of Romania show signs of being built in the previous 100 or 200 years, while in those that were started in the 10th century the ceramic is no different than what was previously used in the region, and most of the animal bones discovered were from horned cattle and pigs, not sheep or goats which are usually associated with transhumant herding.