Wallachia

• 1. Introduction

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  Wallachia sits between the Lower Danube and the Southern Carpathians, a region that spent centuries caught between empires and yet managed to survive as a distinct political entity. In 1417, its rulers were forced to accept Ottoman suzerainty for the first time. That arrangement, with its interruptions and negotiations and outright rebellions, lasted until the middle of the 19th century. What made Wallachia endure was not military might alone. It was a principality that absorbed Roman legions, Byzantine missionaries, Mongol raids, Phanariote governors, and Russian occupations, and still emerged as one of the two historical Romanian principalities that laid the foundation for the modern Romanian state. How did a region that called itself simply "Romanian Land" become a political entity recognized across Europe? And what does the story of Vlad III Dracula, the Craiovești boyars, and a legal loophole in 1859 reveal about how nations are actually built?

• 2. A Name From Elsewhere

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  Romanians themselves almost never used the word Wallachia. Their own name for the principality was Țara Românească, meaning Romanian Country or Romanian Land, and that preference tells you something important about the region's relationship with outside observers. The word Wallachia derives from walhaz, a term Germanic peoples and Early Slavs used to describe Romans and other speakers of foreign languages. The same root gave names to Wales and Cornwall in the west, and Wallonia in what is now Belgium. When the term traveled east, it eventually attached itself to Romance-speaking communities who had survived as pastoralists and shepherds, and so walhaz became associated with shepherds generally, an association made by Hellenes, Magyars, and Serbo-Croats alike.

  Slavonic texts of the Early Middle Ages called the region Zemli Ungro-Vlahiskoi, meaning Hungaro-Wallachian Land. That name survived into the modern era in a religious context, referring to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolitan seat of Hungaro-Wallachia. Bulgarian sources called the place Vlashko. Serbian sources called it Vlaška. Ukrainian sources used Voloschyna. German-speaking Transylvanian Saxons wrote Walachei or Walachey. The traditional Hungarian name, Havasalföld, translates literally as Snowy lowlands, while its older form Havaselve means Land beyond the snowy mountains, with snowy mountains referring to the Southern Carpathians. The Ottoman Turkish term was Eflâk Prensliği, or simply Eflâk. Arabic chronicles from the 13th century used the name al-Awalak and called the region's people ulaqut or ulagh. Old Albanian called it Gogënia, a term used to denote non-Albanian speakers. A region with so many names given to it by others was clearly a crossroads that many peoples felt entitled to describe.

• 3. Empires and Foundations

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  In AD 105, during the Second Dacian War, western Oltenia became part of the Roman province of Dacia. Parts of later Wallachia were folded into the province of Moesia Inferior. The Roman limes was built along the Olt River in 119, then moved slightly east during the second century, stretching from the Danube up to Rucăr in the Carpathians. The Roman line fell back to the Olt in 245, and in 271, Roman forces withdrew from the region entirely.

  Goths, Sarmatians, Huns, and Avars followed in successive waves. In 328, the Romans built a bridge between Sucidava and Oescus, near Gigen, signaling continued trade with peoples north of the Danube. Emperor Constantine the Great attacked the Goths north of the Danube in 332. When Attila and the Huns arrived, they destroyed some 170 settlements on both sides of the river. From its establishment in 681 until roughly the Hungarian conquest of Transylvania in the middle of the tenth century, the First Bulgarian Empire controlled Wallachian territory. After Bulgaria fell to Byzantium, the Pechenegs extended their rule across the region through the tenth and eleventh centuries, until the Cumans of southern Ruthenia displaced them around 1091. The Byzantine commander Priscus defeated Slavs, Avars and Gepids on future Wallachian territory in 593. Each of these powers left traces in the land's political vocabulary, legal customs, and population, making Wallachia a layered inheritance rather than a clean founding.

• 4. Basarab and the Battle of Posada

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  Litovoi was the first local Vlach voivode to appear in written evidence, mentioned in the Diploma of the Joannites in 1247. He ruled over the Țara Litua, corresponding to modern northern Oltenia, and by 1272 had extended his authority across more of the northern Wallachian Plain and into Hațeg Country in Transylvania. When he refused to pay tribute to King Ladislaus IV of Hungary, war followed, and Litovoi died in battle before 1280. His brother Bărbat succeeded him and ruled until 1288.

  Local tradition credits the founding of Wallachia to a legendary figure named Radu Negru, said to have crossed the Carpathians from Transylvania to the Wallachian Plain in 1290 with a large following of Vlachs. Radu Negru is typically connected with Basarab I, who first appears in a Hungarian charter in 1324 as a voivode holding lands south of the Carpathians and paying tribute to Hungary. Throughout the 1320s, Basarab expanded steadily, seizing the Banate of Severin and raiding into Transylvania. He established his residence in Câmpulung as the first ruler of the House of Basarab. When he refused to hand over the lands of Făgăraș, Almaș, and Severin and declined to pay tribute to Charles I of Hungary, Charles invaded. The result was the Battle of Posada in 1330, a decisive defeat for Hungary that consolidated Wallachian independence. Historian Ștefan Ștefănescu argued that Basarab extended his lands eastward far enough to briefly include territory as far as Chillia Nouă in the Bugeac, which Ștefănescu considered the origin of the name Bessarabia.

• 5. Vlad the Impaler and His Enemies

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  Radu II's challenge to the ruling prince inaugurated a pattern of boyar coalitions that would destabilize Wallachia for generations. Into that fractured political landscape came Vlad II Dracul, who held the throne twice between 1436 and 1447 while trying to balance the demands of the Ottoman Sultan against his affiliation with the Order of the Dragon, a brotherhood of independent noblemen committed to repelling Ottoman invasion. As part of the tribute he owed, Vlad II surrendered his sons, Radu cel Frumos and Vlad III Dracula, into Ottoman custody. After his father's assassination in 1447, the Ottomans released Vlad III to rule in 1448.

  Vlad III moved immediately against the boyars who had conspired against his father, executing them upon his return. He restored order to a destabilized principality, but his methods made him a figure both cheered and feared. Impalement was his preferred form of execution for thieves, murderers, and plotters alike. The Transylvanian Saxons, angered by his strengthening of Wallachia's borders because it interfered with their control of trade routes, responded with grotesque poems and propaganda that depicted him as a drinker of blood. Those stories spread west into Germany and beyond. They later inspired the main character in Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. In 1462, Mehmed the Conqueror defeated Vlad III during the Night Attack at Târgoviște, forcing him back into the city and to accept an increased tribute. Conflict with his brother Radu cel Frumos and with Basarab Laiotă cel Bătrân then led to Radu's conquest of Wallachia.

• 6. Ottoman Suzerainty and Its Limits

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  Mircea I, who reigned from 1386 to 1418, initially held the Ottomans back in several engagements, including the Battle of Rovine in 1394, and at one point extended his rule to the Danube Delta, Dobruja, and Silistra around 1400-1404. He took part in the Battle of Nicopolis alongside Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, and eventually accepted a peace treaty with the Ottomans in 1417 after Mehmed I captured Turnu Măgurele and Giurgiu. Those two ports remained Ottoman, with brief interruptions, until 1829.

  For the following ninety years, Ottoman suzerainty went virtually unchallenged. Radu Paisie ceded the port of Brăila to Ottoman administration in 1545. His successor Mircea Ciobanul, who reigned from 1545 to 1554 and again from 1558 to 1559, had no claim to noble heritage, was imposed on the throne by the Ottomans, and accordingly agreed to reduced autonomy, higher taxes, and an armed intervention in Transylvania in support of the pro-Turkish John Zápolya. The Ottoman Empire meanwhile came to rely on Wallachia and Moldavia for the supply and maintenance of its military forces, a dependency that gradually eroded the local army's existence because mercenary troops were more efficient and the costs of maintaining local forces grew prohibitive.

  Michael the Brave broke that pattern dramatically. Ascending to the throne in 1593, he attacked the troops of Murad III north and south of the Danube in alliance with Transylvania's Sigismund Báthory and Moldavia's Aron Vodă. By 1599-1600, he had placed himself under the suzerainty of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, intervened in Transylvania against Poland's Sigismund III Vasa, and briefly extended his authority to Moldavia as well. For a short period, Michael ruled in a personal, if not formal, union most of the territories where Romanians lived. Later generations regarded his break with Ottoman rule as a precursor to modern Romania, a thesis argued with particular intensity by historian Nicolae Bălcescu.

• 7. Phanariotes, Occupations, and Abolition

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  Constantin Brâncoveanu, who reigned from 1688 to 1714, presided over notable late Renaissance cultural achievements while secretly negotiating an anti-Ottoman coalition during the Great Turkish War. When Sultan Ahmed III learned of those negotiations, Brâncoveanu lost both throne and life. His successor Ștefan Cantacuzino opened the country to the armies of Prince Eugene of Savoy, then was himself deposed and executed in 1716. Immediately after, the Ottomans abandoned the nominal elective system for choosing princes and began appointing rulers from the Phanariotes of Constantinople. Nicholas Mavrocordatos brought Phanariote rule to Wallachia in 1715.

  The Phanariote era turned Wallachia into a battleground. Oltenia was ceded to Charles VI of Austria under the Treaty of Passarowitz, organized as the Banat of Craiova, then returned to Wallachia in 1739 under the Treaty of Belgrade. Prince Constantine Mavrocordatos, who oversaw that border change, also abolished serfdom effectively in 1746, halting the exodus of peasants into Transylvania. Russia occupied Wallachia during the Fifth Russo-Turkish War in 1768. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 gave Russia the right to intervene on behalf of Eastern Orthodox Ottoman subjects, gradually increasing internal stability while also opening the door to further Russian presence.

  Slavery ran alongside all of this as a parallel institution. The first document attesting the presence of Roma people in Wallachia dates to 1385. Roma slaves were divided into three categories: those belonging to the hospodars, those belonging to Orthodox monasteries, and those belonging to the boyar landowners. The law from February 1856 finally emancipated all slaves to the status of taxpayers, completing an abolition process that had begun with incremental legislation in March 1843 and accelerated through the Wallachian Revolution of 1848, when the Provisional Government included emancipation among its central demands.

• 8. Union and the End of Wallachia

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  Tudor Vladimirescu entered Bucharest on the 21st of March 1821 at the head of a Pandur uprising in Oltenia. His alliance with Greek revolutionaries in the Filiki Eteria quickly frayed after he sought a separate agreement with the Ottomans. Eteria's leader Alexander Ypsilantis had him executed, then suffered his own defeats at Bucharest and Drăgășani before retreating into Austrian custody. Sultan Mahmud II occupied the principalities and ended Phanariote rule; the first prince considered a local one after 1715 was Grigore IV Ghica.

  The 1829 Treaty of Adrianople placed Wallachia under Russian military oversight, returned to it the ownership of Brăila, Giurgiu, and Turnu Măgurele, and permitted Moldavia and Wallachia to trade freely beyond the Ottoman Empire. Russian general Pavel Kiselyov oversaw a period of significant change that included the reestablishment of a Wallachian Army in 1831 and major urban works in Bucharest. The Wallachian Revolution of 1848, inspired by European rebellions of that year, was organized by the clandestine movement Frăția, founded in 1843. The Islaz Proclamation of the 9th of June called for political freedoms, independence, land reform, and a national guard. On the 11th and the 12th of June, the movement deposed Prince Bibescu and established a Provisional Government. Ottoman troops entered Bucharest on the 13th of September to suppress it.

  The final step came through a legal ambiguity. The agreement establishing the Ad hoc Divans of 1859 specified two thrones but did not prevent one person from winning elections in both Bucharest and Iași. Alexander John Cuza won in Moldavia on the 5th of January. Wallachia's divan initially returned anti-unionists, but after mass protests in Bucharest its members changed their allegiance. Cuza was voted prince of Wallachia on the 5th of February, uniting both principalities under one ruler. Carol I's ascension in 1866, at a moment when Austria was occupied with the Austro-Prussian War, made the union irreversible. The region that had called itself simply Romanian Land for six centuries became, in 1859, the nucleus of a country that adopted the name Romania in 1862.