Moldavia

• 1. Introduction

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  Moldavia was once a principality that sat between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester River, and its name may owe itself to a hunting dog. According to a legend recorded in the Descriptio Moldaviae, written between 1714 and 1716 by Dimitrie Cantemir, a voivode named Dragoș was chasing a star-marked aurochs through unfamiliar terrain when his female hound, called Molda, caught up with the animal and was killed by it. The dog's name combined with the Romanian word for water gave a river its name, and a country its identity. Whether that story is true or not, Moldavia endured for five centuries as an independent principality, an Ottoman vassal state, and finally one half of what became modern Romania. What made it last so long? How did a small principality between empires survive the Ottomans, the Hungarians, the Russians, and the Poles? And what does it mean that a state founded in the 14th century now belongs to three separate countries?

• 2. Before the Principality

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  Long before a prince named Bogdan crossed the Carpathians, the land that would become Moldavia was already inhabited by Christians. Archaeological work uncovered the remains of a Christian necropolis at Mihălășeni, in Botoșani county, dating from the 5th century, with a rectangular place of worship measuring eight by seven meters. A Viking named Rodfos was reportedly killed by Vlachs in the area of what would become Moldavia, probably in the 11th century. In 1164, the future Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos was taken prisoner by Vlach shepherds in the same region. The Franciscan friar William of Rubruck, who visited the court of the Great Khan in the 1250s, listed the Vlachs among peoples paying tribute to the Mongols. A community called the Bolohoveni appears in the Hypatian Chronicle in the 13th century, bordered by the principalities of Halych, Volhynia, and Kiev; they disappeared from chronicles after a defeat in 1257 by the troops of Daniel of Galicia. Their ethnic identity remains uncertain, with Romanian scholars suggesting they were Romanians and the chronicle's archaeological evidence pointing toward a Slavic people. A document from 1334 mentions a local boyar named Alexa Moldaowicz in service to Yuriy II of Halych, which means the name "Moldavia" was already in use before the principality existed.

• 3. The Founding of a Principality

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  In 1353, a Vlach leader named Dragoș was sent by the Hungarian king Louis I to establish a defense line against Golden Horde forces on the Siret River. The result was a small polity in the Baia region, vassal to Hungary, and it carried the seed of something larger. Bogdan of Cuhea, another Vlach voivode from Maramureș who had quarreled with the Hungarian king, crossed the Carpathians in 1359 and seized control of Moldavia, breaking it free from Hungarian control. His realm reached north to the Cheremosh River, while Tatar Mongols still occupied the southern portion. The principality moved its seat first to Siret, then under Petru II Mușat to Suceava, and finally under Alexandru Lăpușneanu to Iași in 1565. The region around Suceava, roughly corresponding to future Bukovina, became known as Țara de Sus, the Upper Land, while the territory on both sides of the Prut river formed Țara de Jos, the Lower Land. On coins minted by Peter I and Stephen I with German legends, the country appeared under the name Molderlang or Molderlant. The principality's original name, Bogdania, honored Bogdan I himself, and Ottoman references would continue to call it Boğdan or Boğdan Iflak, meaning Bogdan's Wallachia, long after that founding figure was gone. Bogdan's successor Lațcu accepted conversion to Latin Catholicism around 1370, even founding a Latin diocese at Siret, though this left no lasting religious mark on the principality.

• 4. Stephen the Great

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  Stephen the Great came to the throne in 1457 after reaching an agreement with Casimir IV of Poland, and his reign is remembered as the principality's most glorious period. He blocked a Hungarian intervention at the Battle of Baia, invaded Wallachia in 1471, and won a major victory against Ottoman reprisals at the Battle of Vaslui in 1475. Polish ambitions led him to attack Galicia and resist a Polish invasion at the Battle of the Cosmin Forest in 1497. Stephen's military thinking was reflected in how he organized the army. All farmers and villagers were required to bear arms; according to the Polish chronicler Jan Długosz, anyone found without a weapon was sentenced to death. Stephen promoted men from the free peasantry called răzeși into infantry and light cavalry, reducing his reliance on the boyar class. The Small Host numbered around 10,000 to 12,000 men, while the Large Host could reach up to 40,000, recruited from all free peasants older than 14 and strong enough to carry a sword or use a bow. At the Battle of Vaslui, Stephen summoned the Large Host and also recruited mercenary troops. In 1489, his fiefs in Transylvania expanded to include Cetatea de Baltă and Ciceu. Yet even Stephen could not hold everything: in 1484 he surrendered the two main fortresses in the Budjak, Chilia and Cetatea Albă, to the Ottomans, and in 1498 accepted Ottoman suzerainty by agreeing to continue paying tribute to Sultan Bayezid II.

• 5. Ottoman Overlordship and Crisis

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  Bogdan III the One-Eyed confirmed Ottoman overlordship in a form that quickly shifted from nominal to controlling. Moldavia stopped issuing its own coinage around 1520 under Prince Ștefăniță, facing rapid depletion of funds and rising demands from the Ottoman court known as the Porte. The economic strain became endemic during the 1650s and 1660s, when princes resorted to counterfeit coins, including copies of Swedish riksdalers such as those issued by Eustratie Dabija. Taxes multiplied: the văcărit, a tax on head of cattle, was first introduced by Iancu Sasul in the 1580s. Trade monopolies, lifted only in 1829 after the Treaty of Adrianople, tied much of the country's resources to the Ottoman economy. A significant influx of Greek and Levantine financiers competed with high boyars for court appointments as the manor system weakened and salarization was absent, meaning that those in office could determine their own income. The feudal military forces were eventually disbanded, leaving only mercenaries such as the seimeni. Ioan Vodă's revolt against the Ottomans ended in his execution in 1574. One usurper, Ioan Iacob Heraclid, was a Protestant Greek who encouraged the Renaissance and attempted to introduce Lutheranism to Moldavia. Despite all this, the principality remained a productive agricultural economy, supplying the Ottoman Empire with grain and cattle; Moldavia was especially noted as an under-populated country of pastures where cattle trade was particularly relevant.

• 6. Slavery in Moldavia

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  Slavery, known in Moldavia as robie, was part of the social order from before the principality's founding until its abolition in stages during the 1840s and 1850s. Most enslaved people were of Roma ethnicity, while a smaller group were of Tatar background, likely prisoners taken in wars with the Nogai and Crimean Tatars. The institution's first documentary record in Moldavia is a 1470 act in which Prince Stephen the Great freed Oană, a Tatar slave who had fled to Jagiellon Poland. Historian Nicolae Iorga connected the Roma people's arrival to the 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe and saw their enslavement as a legacy of that era. Enslaved Roma were traditionally divided into three categories: those owned by the hospodars were called țigani domnești; those owned by monasteries were țigani mănăstirești; and those held by landowners were țigani boierești. Abolition came through a combination of Enlightenment ideas and activist pressure. In 1844, Prince Mihail Sturdza proposed a law freeing slaves owned by the church and state. In December 1855, a bill drafted by Mihail Kogălniceanu and Petre Mavrogheni was adopted by the Divan following a proposal by Prince Grigore Alexandru Ghica; the law gave all slaves the status of taxpayers and citizens. The abolitionist movement in Moldavia was influenced partly by the struggle against Black slavery in the United States. A translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin by Theodor Codrescu was published in Iași in 1853, making it the first American novel to appear in Romanian; Mihail Kogălniceanu contributed a foreword that included a study on slavery.

• 7. Union with Wallachia

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  By the mid-19th century, a movement called Partida Națională was campaigning across both principalities for a single Romanian state under a foreign dynasty. The Crimean War ended Russian domination over Moldavia and Wallachia, and the 1856 Treaty of Paris placed both under the tutelage of major European powers including the United Kingdom, the Austrian Empire, the French Empire, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, and Prussia, alongside the Ottoman Empire and Russia. In September 1857, after a Moldavian official named Nicolae Vogoride had perpetrated fraud in elections, the powers permitted both states to convene special assemblies called ad hoc divans, and the results showed overwhelming support for union. The resulting Paris Convention allowed only a limited union: separate governments and separate thrones, with just two bodies in common, a Court of Cassation and a Central Commission residing in Focșani. Crucially, the Convention failed to state that the two thrones could not be held by the same person. Partida Națională exploited this gap by introducing the candidacy of Alexandru Ioan Cuza in both countries. On the 17th of January, 1859 (the 5th of January by the Old Style calendar), Cuza was elected prince of Moldavia in Iași. He was then elected in Wallachia on February 5 (January 24 by the Old Style), a date considered the day of unification through personal union. The United Principalities were formally proclaimed in 1862, with Cuza as Domnitor. All remaining legal matters were settled after Carol of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen replaced Cuza in April 1866, and an independent Kingdom of Romania was proclaimed in 1881.