Wallachia

Wallachia was a Romanian principality on the plain between the Southern Carpathians and the lower Danube, one of the two states whose union in 1859 created modern Romania. It took shape in the early fourteenth century under Basarab I, spent most of its history as a tributary of the Ottoman Empire while keeping its own princes, and is remembered abroad above all for Vlad III, the Impaler. Romanians called it Țara Românească, the Romanian Land; Wallachia is an outsiders' name.

The region passed through many hands: part of it lay in Roman Dacia until the Romans withdrew in 271, and later the First Bulgarian Empire, the Pechenegs and the Cumans held sway. From the tenth century onward, written sources mention small local polities led by knyazes and voivodes. One of these rulers, Litovoi, appears in a document of 1247; he was killed in a war with Hungary that broke out in 1277.

Romanian tradition credits the founding to a legendary Radu Negru, who is said to have crossed the mountains from Transylvania in 1290. The first secure figure is Basarab I, recorded in 1324 as a voivode paying tribute to Hungary. He extended his rule on both sides of the Olt river, refused tribute to Charles I of Hungary and defeated the invading Hungarian army at Posada in 1330, opening a period of independence. Its institutions were modelled partly on those of the Second Bulgarian Empire, down to Slavonic terms for land and lordship.

As the Ottomans spread through the Balkans, Mircea the Elder, who reigned from 1386 to 1418, defeated them at Rovine in 1394 and took part in the Battle of Nicopolis. In 1417 he accepted peace terms that made Wallachia an Ottoman tributary for the first time. The fifteenth century was dominated by feuds between rival branches of the ruling house and by shifting loyalties between the sultan and the Hungarian crown.

Vlad III, son of Vlad II Dracul, was held hostage by the Ottomans as a youth and first took the throne in 1448. He crushed boyars he blamed for his father's death, punished crime with impalement and fiercely resisted the sultan. In 1462 Mehmed II invaded; after the Night Attack at Târgoviște Vlad was forced to fall back, and his brother Radu took over the country. Pamphlets spread by Transylvanian Saxon merchants, whose trade he had hindered, painted him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, and these stories later fed into Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. He is remembered both as a national hero and as a tyrant.

Michael the Brave, prince from 1593, broke with the Ottomans and in 1599–1600 took Transylvania and then Moldavia, briefly ruling most lands where Romanians lived. Later generations saw this as a forerunner of a united Romania. Ottoman control tightened afterwards; the capital moved from Târgoviște to Bucharest, and from 1715 the sultans appointed princes from the Greek Phanariot families of Constantinople. Wallachia became a battlefield in wars between the Ottomans, the Habsburgs and Russia, and Oltenia was under Austrian rule from 1718 to 1739.

Throughout these centuries slavery was part of the social order. Most slaves were Roma, whose presence in Wallachia is first recorded in 1385, and they were owned by the prince, by monasteries and by boyars. Reformers attacked it in the 1840s, and a law of February 1856 freed all remaining slaves.

After a rising led by Tudor Vladimirescu in 1821, the sultan ended Phanariot rule. Under the Treaty of Adrianople of 1829 Wallachia and neighbouring Moldavia came under Russian military government while leaving Ottoman suzerainty in place, and a revolution in 1848 was put down by Ottoman and Russian troops. In 1859 both principalities elected Alexandru Ioan Cuza as prince, uniting them in practice; the union took the name Romania in the 1860s and became secure after Carol I came to the throne in 1866.

Our 1400 map shows the Principality of Wallachia north of the Danube, in the reign of Mircea the Elder, with the Kingdom of Hungary beyond the Carpathians.