Dacia (Denmark)

In medieval Latin, the name Dacia was erroneously used to refer to Denmark. Originally, in classical antiquity, the name applied to the lands of the Dacians, located in southeastern Europe near present-day Romania. During the Middle Ages, the name Dacia was transferred from its classical context to the Kingdom of Denmark, in a process influenced by vague cartography and fantastical origin stories of peoples related to the Goths. The first explicit reference to Denmark as Dacia appears in Dudo of Saint-Quentin's Historia Normannorum (c. 1020). By the late 12th century, Dacia had become the standard designation for Denmark, particularly after its adoption by the papal administration.

The mendicant orders arrived in Scandinavia in the early 13th century and Dacia was chosen as the name for their provinces. The Dominicans were the first to arrive in Scandinavia in 1220, followed by the Franciscans in 1232. In addition to Denmark, the mendicant provinces also encompassed Sweden and Norway, as well as parts of the Eastern Baltic. Consequently, the term Dacia could be used in narrow sense, referring to the Kingdom of Denmark, or in broad sense, referring to whole of Scandinavia. In medieval universities, the suffix de Dacia or the adjective Dacus was used to identify students and scholars from Denmark or Scandinavia.

The mendicant orders were dissolved in Scandinavia after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, and the name Dacia gradually fell out of use.

History of the term

Map of the Roman provinces of the Lower Danube

Classical cartography until 300 CE

Konrad Miller's reconstruction of Dimensuratio's and Divisio's world map

In classical antiquity, Dacia referred to the land north of the Danube, near the Black Sea, in what is now Romania. The Dacian Kingdom, which united the Getae and Dacian tribes, was founded in 82 BCE and lasted until it was conquered by the Roman Emperor Trajan in 106 CE. In the 3rd century CE, Germanic tribes like the Goths began migrating to the area, weakening Roman control. The Romans eventually abandoned the province in the 270s.

Geographical knowledge of the Baltic region during the early Roman Empire was very limited. The northernmost area known to the Romans was the region north of the Black Sea, with no awareness of the Baltic Sea or Scandinavia. This is evident in two late Roman texts, Dimensuratio provinciarum and Divisio orbis terrarum, which reflect earlier geographical understanding from the 1st century BCE. In Konrad Miller's 19th-century reconstruction of a world map based on these texts, Dacia extends north to the sea, but there is no indication of knowledge about the Baltic.

Konrad Miller's reconstruction of Orosius' world map. North is to the left, and Dacia ubi et Gothia borders both the Black Sea and Sarmaticus Oceanus in the north.

Knowledge of the north improved after the Roman Empire's expansion under Augustus and Tiberius, but later Christian authors often ignoted this in favor of other Christian sources. During this time, Dimensuratio was mistakenly attributed to the church father Jerome, giving it and Divisio considerable authority. When the Spanish historian Paulus Orosius (c. 375/385 – c. 420) wrote his Historiae Adversus Paganos, he used Dimensuratio for geography. Orosius refers to the Roman Dacia as "Dacia, where also Gothia lies" (Dacia ubi et Gothia), and locates it between Alania and Germania. One key difference is that Orosius, writing during the Migration Period, describes Dacia as being inhabited by the Goths instead of Getae. Orosius' description of the Baltic region is vague and

Another widely read Spanish writer, Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636), essentially repeats Orosius' geography in his encyclopedic Etymologiae.

11th-century Norman historians

Map of Europe in Liber Floridus (1125). North is to the left. Dacia is located near the vaguely defined Scandinavian peninsula, next to Norvuega and Scandzia.

Explicit connection between Dacia and Denmark occurs for the first time in the early 11th century in Moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum (The Ways and Deeds of the First Norman Dukes) by the Norman historian Dudo of Saint-Quentin. Dudo's history of the Norman dukes was commissioned by Duke Richard I of Normandy, and his work can be seen as an effort to legitimize the dynasty by crafting them a prestigious origin.

Throughout his book, Dudo uses the terms Dani (Danish) and Daci (Dacian) interchangeably, and motivates this identification through a series of etymological and geographical connections. According to him, Rollo, the grandfather of his patron Richard I, originated from Denmark, from where he led a group of Scandinavian warriors to settle in Normandy. The Danes themselves are depicted as originating from Scandza, a northern island that Jordanes mentions as the homeland of the Goths, whom Dudo considers the same people as the Getae or the Daci. This conflation of peoples is also enabled by Dudo's geographic inaccuracies, which are possibly based on Orosius' geography. Dudo further equated the Danes with the Danai, a poetic term for the Greeks, which allowed him to incorporate the mythical Trojan hero Antenor into the Norman origin myth.

William of Jumièges, in his Gesta Normannorum Ducum, expanded on Dudo’s origin story by adding a stopover in Dacia, or Danamarca, during the Normans' migration from Scandza, thus linking the Norman dukes more explicitly to the Danes. Written for William the Conqueror after 1066, the text also traces the origins of the Goths to the biblical figure Magog, using sources like Jerome and Isidore of Seville.

Medieval Danish historians

The term Dacia was later adopted by the Danes themselves. Sven Aggesen: Brevis historia regum Dacie 1188

Institutionalization by the Church

The term was institutionalized in ...

A unified Scandinavian church province existed for a brief time after 1104, when an archbishop was assigned to the diocese of Lund. This province was divided into three when Norway got its own archbishop of Nidaros in 1152, and Sweden its own archbishop of Uppsala in 1164. The Swedish archbishop remained for a long time nominally subordinate to the Archbishop of Lund. Despite the division into three archbishoprics, the Church still treated Scandinavia in many ways as a single province. The first known reference to Dacia in church administration is from 1192, when Cardinal Cencius refers to Denmark as Dacia in Liber Censuum. In the following centuries, it could also be used to refer to all three provinces.

When the mendicant orders like the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites established their provinces in the Scandinavian region, they all chose Dacia as the name of the province. The first Dominicans (Blackfriars) arrived in 1220, followed by the Franciscans (Friars Minor, Greyfriars) in 1232, and the Carmelites (Whitefriars) in 1410. The Augustinian Hermits also attempted to establish themselves in Scandinavia in the 14th century, but were unsuccessful. A Northern province, provincia Daciae, was also organized in the Order of Knights Hospitallers in the late middle ages.

In total, 96 mendicant convents were founded across the three Scandinavian kingdoms. The Dominican province of Dacia consisted of 35 convents (31 male and 4 female); the Franciscan province of Dacia had 52 convents (48 male and 4 female); and the Carmelite province of Dacia had 9 convents (all male). These mendicant convents were dissolved after the Protestant Reformation in 1520–30s.

Reformation and the abandonment of the term

Front page of Christiern Pedersen's Saxo version, Paris 1514.

King Christian III on Norwegian silver coin (Gimsøydaleren) from 1546

Personal names

In medieval universities, personal names were often supplemented with place names to better identify individuals. The name suffix de Dacia or the adjective Dacus was used to indicate individuals from Scandinavia, particularly Denmark. Some notable examples include:

• Augustus de Dacia (d. 1285), prior of the Dominican province of Dacia
• Boetius of Dacia, 13th-century Danish philosopher
• Jacobus de Dacia (c. 1484 – 1566), Danish-born Franciscan friar, missionary to Mexico
• Johannes de Dacia, Danish 13th-century scholar, author of Summa Grammatica
• Martin of Dacia (c. 1240 – 1304), Danish scholar and theologian
• Nicolaus (Drukken) de Dacia, Danish scholar at the University in Paris around the years 1340–1345
• Petrus de Dacia (c. 1235 – 1289), friar of the Dominican Order and the first Swedish author whose works have been preserved
• Petrus Philomena de Dacia, 13th-century Danish mathematician and astronomer

References

Bibliography

• Gallén, Jarl (1957). "Dacia". Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder fra vikingtid til reformasjonstid. 2 : Blik-data. Oslo: Utg. Gyldendal. col. 608-610.
• Jakobsen, Johnny Grandjean Gøgsig (2012). "Why Dacia?". www.jggj.dk. Retrieved 2024-09-15.
• Aherne, C. M. (2003). "Dacia". In Marthaler, Berard L. New Catholic Encyclopedia. 4:Com-Dyn (2nd ed.). Gale. ISBN 0-7876-4004-2.
• Hemmingsen, Lars (2000). "Middelaldergeografien og Historia Norwegie". In Lars Boje, Inger; Mortensen; Skovgaard-Petersen, Karen. Olavslegenden og den latinske historieskrivning i 1100-tallets Norge (in norsk). København: Museum Tusculanum Press. ISBN 978-87-7289-616-8. OCLC 45896639. Search this book on
• Rix, Robert (2019). The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination. Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture. ISBN 978-0-367-87113-0. Search this book on
• Leake, Jane Acomb (1967). The Geats of Beowulf: A Study in the Geographical Mythology of the Middle Ages. University of Wisconsin Press. Search this book on
• Mureșan, Dan Ioan (2020). "Rex Dacie / regina Dacie. O istorie conectată de la Marea Baltică la Marea Neagră la amurgul Evului Mediu (I)" [Rex Dacie / regina Dacie. A connected history from the Baltic to the Black Sea at the waning of the Middle Ages (I)]. Archiva Moldaviae. 12: 15–8.

This article "Dacia (Denmark)" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Dacia (Denmark). Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

---