Within Albanian territory the village of Frasheri is the most important Rumanian settlement. Its name has passed to the Frasherist group of western Rumanians. Around Berat, a strong contingent occupies about 40 villages and can muster ten thousand men. In the Vardar valley various settlements aggregating 14,000 individuals, all farmers, are distributed near Guevgueli as well as in localities north and south of this town. Many of these peasants are Mohammedans and speak a dialect of their own. A Rumanian settlement is also found in the Jumaya Pass south of Sofia and along the old Turco-Bulgarian frontier. The nomadic character of these isolated adherents of a Latin language is shown in many of their villages, which are occupied during part of the year only. As an example the villages in the vicinity of Frasheri, the ancient “Little Wallachia,” are inhabited during winter alone. Many Frasherists can be met along the Albanian coast between Kimara and the bay of Valona, as well as along the eastern coast of Corfu and in villages of the Moskopolis and Koritza districts. As a rule they are peddlers and confine their commercial nomadism to profitable routes just as pastoral nomads, who are their kinsmen, seesaw back and forth between the mountain districts nearest their plains. The three areas of Romance language in the Balkans attest, by implication, the powerful influence attained by Rome in the peninsula prior to the rise of the Slavic flood. The presence of the Slavs began to be felt about the seventh century and two hundred years later the Balkan peninsula had become heavily Slavicized. Before that period, however, every nook and corner of the land area between the Adriatic and the Black and Ægean seas must have been under effective Roman jurisdiction. Lanes of travel from the coasts of Albania to the famous Thracian rendezvous were frequented by Roman traders and colonists with increasing regularity in the early centuries of the Christian era. The growing estrangement of Byzantium from the west, Slavic inroads and later Turkish advances all but destroyed the social unity which must have characterized the Balkan region in Roman times. Of this unity, the Rumanian and Albanian languages alone have survived along different coasts. Both languages are knit together structurally as well as by outward harmony.