Kingdom of Dacia

A gold-rich kingdom in the Carpathians that Rome conquered, stripped and then abandoned. The Dacians, a Thracian people, were unified under Burebista in the first century BCE into a state powerful enough to worry Caesar, then fragmented after his death. Decebalus rebuilt it in the 80s CE, defeated a Roman army under Domitian and extracted a subsidy and engineers from the empire - an arrangement Rome regarded as intolerable. Trajan invaded twice, in 101 and 105, and the second war ended with the storming of the mountain capital Sarmizegetusa Regia and Decebalus's suicide. The gold and silver seized was enormous, funding Trajan's forum and a hundred and twenty-three days of public games, and the mines of the Apuseni were worked intensively thereafter. The province was held for about a hundred and seventy years and then evacuated under Aurelian around 271, the only substantial territory Rome gave up voluntarily. What happened to the population afterwards is one of the most politically loaded questions in European historiography, because Romanian and Hungarian national claims to Transylvania both depend on the answer. Trajan's Column in Rome, carved with the campaigns in continuous spiral relief, is the principal visual source. Dacian religion centred on Zalmoxis. No Dacian writing survives. Sarmizegetusa Regia's terraces and stone sanctuaries survive in the Orastie mountains. The Dacian draco standard, a wolf-headed windsock, appears repeatedly on Trajan's Column. Roman Dacia's capital was a new city named Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa. Romanian derives from the Latin brought by the province. The Rosia Montana gold works are a World Heritage site.

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