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Between Old Nobility, Phanariotism, and the First Europeanised Generations

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Article 8 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: Articles 1–7.

I. Crossing at Turnu-Roșu, 12 April 1824

The large carriage with four horses, ordered in Sibiu two weeks earlier and delivered to Câmpulung with a three-day delay, passed through the customs at Turnu-Roșu at eleven o’clock in the morning on 12 April 1824. The weather was cold for late April—the passengers in the front carriage pulled their sheep-leather coats closer to their necks, and the coachman—a tall Moldavian with a black beard, specially brought for this journey from the estate at Golești—had to stop from time to time to warm his hands.

In the rear carriage travelled Constantin Radovici Golescu, better known by his family name, ‘Dinicu’—the name he signed with and used at the Court in Bucharest. Forty-seven years old, with a rounded belly from a life of boyar feasts, but with lively eyes, hands that still knew how to hold the reins on the road, and a head that had begun to go bald at the crown. Beside him sat his eldest son, Ștefan—thirteen years old, with gold-rimmed glasses his father had bought him in Sibiu a week earlier, his eyes tired from reading. Opposite them sat Dinicu’s younger brother, Radu, who was to spend only a short time in Vienna before returning home.

Dinicu Golescu was not, in 1824, the richest or most politically influential Wallachian boyar. The Golescu family—tracing its genealogy, which he himself had studied since his youth, to an old boyar lineage of Argeș attested since the 15th century—owned a large estate at Golești (over 3,000 hectares), a respectable manor house, and several hundred families of serfs on the land. Dinicu himself had, a generation earlier, been mare vornic (great chamberlain) under Ioan Caragea and Alexandru Suțu (the last two Phanariote rulers of Wallachia), then a country commissioner in the armistice commissions with the Turks. He was not a pure intellectual—he was a man of administration and decision. But at forty-seven, he was doing something that, twenty years earlier, he would not have believed possible.

He was travelling. Not to Constantinople, as boyars traditionally did for political negotiations or luxury purchases. Not to some monastery on Mount Athos for a pilgrimage. But through Central and Western Europe: Sibiu, Cluj, Oradea, Buda, Vienna, Trieste, Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, Geneva, Bruges, Brussels, then a slow return. A journey planned for seventeen months, with over forty stops, in which he would see—‘great and wonderful things, which I have seen and will see, and which I deem necessary to show my nation,’ as he would later write in his journal, published two years afterwards.

‘Însemnarea călătoriei mele făcute în anul 1824, 1825, 1826’—printed in Buda in 1826—is among the most important documents in the history of modern Romanian culture. It is the moment when a Wallachian boyar, formed in a Phanariote-Oriental culture, records, step by step, the shock of contact with European modernity. It is the eye of Ienache Cocorascu from Article 3, but stronger and more authoritative—for Golescu was a great boyar, not merely a Moldavian chamberlain.

‘In Sibiu,’ he writes on the second day of the journey, ‘I saw a market where cattle, sheep, and pigs are sold by weight, age, and breed, according to a printed schedule on paper, which every buyer has in advance. I saw a lantern at every street corner, lit by a paid man, with oil. I saw a school for girls, in which the girls learn—do I say this correctly?—they learn to write and to calculate, like the boys. I do not understand how such a thing is possible, but it is so.’

The shock accumulates. In Vienna, Golescu would see the Ringstrasse, the university, the great hospitals, the opera. In Milan, mechanical workshops and the first steam-powered spinning mills. In Verona, an orphanage with a technical school for orphans. In Padua, doctors who performed systematic autopsies for research. And returning—tired, with new glasses bought in Milan—with a conviction that would become the driving force of the rest of his life: that his country had fallen behind ‘by a century and more,’ and that something had to be done.

This is the Romanian boyar of the 1820s. Not the most common type—the most common was the boyar who still wanted to buy an office in the Phanar. But this was the type that would make history. From his generation and the one immediately following—the sons of Golescu, the younger Văcăreștis, the Bibescus, the modern Ghicas—would emerge the first modern Romanian elite, the one that would create the Organic Regulations, organise the revolutions of 1848, and bring about the Union of the Principalities in 1859.

This article is dedicated to that transformation. Who were the Moldo-Wallachian boyars in 1780? How did they live? What did they read? Why did they not become an industrial bourgeoisie on the model of the Prussian Junkers, the English gentry, or the Russian dvorianstvo? And how did they transform, between 1780 and 1859, into a modern political class?

II. Who the Boyars Were: Categories and Origins

First, we must understand that the term ‘boyar’ covered, in 1780, a stratified reality. Not all boyars were the same. The hierarchy—codified in the so-called ‘ceremonies’ of the princely court, then consolidated by Alexandru Ipsilanti’s Pravilniceasca condică (Legal Code) and, later, by the Organic Regulations—comprised between fifteen and twenty ranks, each with its own fiscal privileges, its own place in ceremonies, its own regulated costume.

Boyars of Rank I—or ‘great boyars,’ as they called themselves. The Grand Ban of Craiova, the Grand Chamberlain of the Upper Country, the Grand Chamberlain of the Lower Country, the Grand Logothete, the Grand Treasurer, the Grand Sword-Bearer, the Grand Cup-Bearer, the Grand Master of the Hunt, the Grand Agă, the Grand Gate-Keeper. Ten to twelve men who effectively ruled the country under the prince. Almost all came, with exceptions, from four or five great families—Cantacuzino, Ghica, Filipescu, Cornescu, Rosetti-Roznovanu in Moldavia; Cantacuzino, Ghica, Bălăceanu, Grădișteanu, Filipescu in Wallachia. At this level, boyar families could, through marriages, intermediaries, and money, interact on equal terms with the great Phanariote families. A great Wallachian boyar could send his daughter to a Phanariote family in the Phanar; a great Phanariote could send his son to administer a Moldavian district.

Boyars of Rank II—‘middle boyars.’ Chamberlains, logothetes, treasurers, minor sword-bearers (of the second rank), plus district officials (ispravnici) and urban officials (agi, great merchants with titles). A more numerous class, between 200 and 400 people in each Principality. They had smaller estates, generally 500–2,000 hectares, but could prosper through leasing or trade. From this class would come, in the 1830s–40s, the majority of the intellectuals who shaped modern Romania.

Boyars of Rank III—‘rural boyars’ or ‘lesser nobility.’ Old families with boyar privileges but without great offices. They had small estates (100–500 hectares), sometimes only leased land. They lived at a material level close to the English rural gentry of the 18th century. A numerous class—perhaps 3,000–5,000 families in each Principality.

‘Neamuri’ and ‘Mazili.’ Intermediate categories between boyars and peasants—former boyars who had lost their titles through impoverishment, or răzeși (small freeholders with ancient rights) who had received partial boyar recognitions. Ambiguous status, numerically important (perhaps 15,000–20,000 families per Principality), but economically and politically marginal.

An important observation. Moldo-Wallachian boyar titles were not automatically hereditary. They were tied to offices—whoever held an office was a boyar. When the office was lost (through a change of prince, old age, or falling into disgrace), the family theoretically lost its status. In practice, a system of ‘continuity’ had developed in which the sons of great boyars received, at the appropriate age, some office or other, however modest, to maintain the dynastic link. But the system remained, formally, open—a wealthy merchant, a newly arrived Phanariote, a well-educated son of a minor boyar could rise. By comparison, Western systems—the Prussian Junkers, the pre-1789 French aristocracy—were more generationally closed.

Aggregate figures. It is estimated that, in 1780, boyar families (all ranks) represented, in Wallachia and Moldavia together, approximately 3–4% of the total population. That is, 60,000–80,000 boyar souls out of about 2 million inhabitants. A proportion comparable to the aristocratic percentage in German states, smaller than in Poland (where the nobility was almost 10%), larger than in France (where nobles were below 1%).

III. The Old Boyar: Cantacuzino Stolnicul as Prototype

To understand what the original ‘Romanian boyardom’ was, we must look before Phanariotism—to the last generation of ‘enlightened’ old boyars. And the prototype is Constantin Cantacuzino, known by the nickname ‘Stolnicul’ (after the office he held for fifteen years).

Biography. Born in 1650 in Filipeștii de Târg, into one of the greatest boyar families of Wallachia. Education—Padua, between 1665 and 1669 (a rare occasion for a Romanian boyar educated at an Italian university; he studied philosophy, Latin, theology, mathematics). He returned at nineteen to Bucharest. Political career: stolnic (cup-bearer) in two reigns, then vornic (chamberlain) under his cousin-in-law, Constantin Brâncoveanu (Prince of Wallachia between 1688 and 1714). Tragic end: involved, alongside Brâncoveanu, in clandestine negotiations with Russia; arrested by the Ottomans in 1714 along with the entire Brâncovan family; taken to Constantinople; executed by strangulation, together with his son Ștefan, in 1716.

Library and writing. Cantacuzino Stolnicul had, at Filipești, one of the largest private libraries in the 17th-century Balkans—approximately 3,000 volumes, half of them manuscripts. A partial inventory (preserved at the Romanian Academy) shows: Byzantine chronicles, Roman history (Livy, Tacitus, Cassiodorus), Greek authors (Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch), Western Scholastics (Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus), a few Italian humanists (Petrarch, Poliziano), Descartes in the Amsterdam edition, Grotius (De iure belli ac pacis), and a few geographical atlases.

From this library, Stolnicul wrote the first History of the Romanian Land in Romanian (remaining in manuscript until its later publication in the 19th century). It is the first Romanian historical text that attempts a critical methodology—Stolnicul compares sources, signals contradictions, discusses the authenticity of documents. He does not reach the level of Voltaire as a historian (who was, of course, a later generation)—but he is in a line close to his. A scholarly boyar who, in 1710, was doing historiographical work on a European level.

The lesson of Cantacuzino. The Romanian boyardom before Phanariotism was not, in general, uncultured. There were families with serious cultural traditions (Cantacuzino, Brâncoveanu; in Moldavia, Movilă, later Cantemir). Cantemir in particular—the scholar-voivode, who would write in St. Petersburg Description of Moldavia and System of the Mohammedan Religion—was, in intellectual terms, comparable to the great philosophes of his age. He corresponded with Leibniz. He entered the Berlin Academy.

What differentiated the ‘enlightened’ old boyars from the ‘enlightened’ Phanariotised boyars (such as Alexandru Ipsilanti the Elder)?

First—the orientation. The old enlightened boyars (Cantacuzino Stolnicul, Cantemir, Brâncoveanu) looked culturally towards Italy (Padua, Rome, Venice) and Constantinople simultaneously. The Phanariotised ones (Ipsilanti, later Sturza, Ghica) looked, especially after 1780, towards France. Important difference: Italian culture was conducted in Latin, French culture in French. The boyars of 1710 spoke Latin. The boyars of 1810 spoke French. They were not the same libraries.

Second—the political engagement. The old boyars (Cantacuzino, Brâncoveanu) often ended badly precisely because they refused to submit completely to the Porte. They flirted with Russia, with the Habsburgs, with Poland. Cantacuzino Stolnicul paid with his life for this flirtation. The Phanariotised boyars learned the lesson: whoever opposes the Porte dies; whoever accommodates, survives. Accommodation became a generational strategy. It cost less, but it cost culturally.

And between these two types of boyars—the old ‘European’ and the new ‘accommodated’—a significant part of the history of Romanian culture in the 18th century was played out. Phanariotism imposed, to a large extent, the accommodated type. And when, in the 1820s, the old European type began to revive in figures like Dinicu Golescu, a moment of cultural tension arose that we can only call a ‘rediscovery.’

IV. The Phanariotised Boyar: Adaptation and Its Costs

Phanariotism, as we have shown in previous articles, was not a ‘foreign occupation.’ It was a reconfiguration of the elite. The Phanariotes brought, through marriages, offices, and example, a new cultural type—which overlapped with the autochthonous boyardom and mixed with it.

The mixture. By 1780, Moldo-Wallachian boyar families were, to a large extent, ethno-cultural hybrids. A Ghica born in Bucharest could have an Albanian grandfather (from the original Ghika family in southern Albania), a Greek grandmother (from Constantinople), a Greek wife (from a Phanariote family), and children who spoke Greek with their mother and Romanian with their father. A Rosetti from Moldavia could have Genoese great-grandfathers (the Rosettis came from Liguria in the 17th century), Russian uncles (through political marriages with post-Cossack émigrés), Austrian cousins (through branches in Bucovina, annexed by the Habsburgs). The aristocracy was, in essence, polyglot and transnational.

Languages. A great boyar in 1780 generally spoke: Romanian (the language of servants, work on the estate, the people); modern Greek (the language of the court, diplomacy, communication with the Phanariotes); Turkish (for official relations with the Porte); Italian (the old cultivated language, still in use); French (the new cultivated language, rapidly ascending); rarely German; very rarely Russian. Three or four active languages, five or six passive. A level comparable to the cultivated European aristocracy of the age.

Education. The children of great boyars no longer went, as Cantacuzino Stolnicul had a century earlier, to Padua or Bologna. They went, more often, to Vienna—for studies at the Catholic gymnasiums or the University of Vienna. A few reached Paris—Ipsilanti’s sons, Constantin Ipsilanti, Grigore Ghica. More rarely to Leipzig. They did not generally reach the Protestant German universities (Göttingen, Halle)—which were centres of scientific Enlightenment.

What they studied. Philosophy, law, rhetoric, elementary mathematics, French, Italian, sometimes German. They did not study, with rare exceptions: engineering, experimental chemistry, modern clinical medicine (though some became doctors, they were trained in Padua with an old Galenic curriculum; modern clinical medicine was just emerging in Vienna under Van Swieten). The model was the cultivated generalist, not the technical specialist.

Travel. Every two or three years, a great boyar made a journey to Vienna—officially for business (leases, contracts, purchases), unofficially for high society. In Vienna, the Romanian boyar stayed at a good hotel (Erzherzog Karl, later Sacher), attended balls, bought clocks, furniture, tapestries, books, sometimes a pianoforte, once even a new carriage. He spent, on such a journey, between 5,000 and 15,000 piasters—the income of one or two years from a middle estate.

The consequences. The Phanariotised boyardom of 1780 had thus become a class Europeanised in consumption but not Europeanised in production. It bought what was produced in Vienna, Constantinople, Milan—but did not produce. It travelled for acquisitions—not for technical study. It spoke Western languages—but did not read their technical manuals. In lifestyle, it was a European aristocrat. In economic function, it was a consumer on the periphery of the European industrial system.

This is perhaps the deepest contribution of Phanariotism to what we might call the ‘pathologies of Romanian modernisation.’ It created an elite Europeanised on the surface, which would reproduce, for generations, the Western appearance without the productive substrate. An elite that would buy Louis XV furniture but not build spinning mills. That would speak French but not graduate from the Polytechnic. That would give balls but not invest in laboratories.

A pattern that, with variations, would persist.

V. The Traveller: Ienăchiță Văcărescu and the Generation of Transition

Between the ‘old boyar’ of Cantacuzino Stolnicul and the ‘modern boyar’ of Dinicu Golescu lies a transitional generation. And the best figure to represent it is Ienăchiță Văcărescu (1740–1797).

Biography. Born in Bucharest into an old Wallachian boyar family. Studied at the Princely Academy in Bucharest, then in Constantinople (where he learned classical Greek and modern Turkish), then private lessons in Vienna. Political career: mare spătar (great sword-bearer) under Ipsilanti, then mare vistier (great treasurer), then diplomatic envoy to Vienna (where he negotiated, alongside Ottoman emissaries, the evacuation of Austrian troops from Wallachia after the 1787–92 war). A man of the world—he spoke Romanian, Greek, Turkish, French, Italian, and German. A poet—he is the author of the first Romanian ode in European neoclassical style, as well as the first printed Romanian grammar (Observații sau băgări de seamă asupra regulelor și orânduelilor gramaticei rumânești, published in 1787 in Râmnic).

Correspondence with Vienna. In the 1780s, Ienăchiță corresponded with several Viennese and Italian scholars. There are preserved fragments of his letters to a professor of classical literature at the University of Vienna, with technical discussions on Latin metre. There are also letters to a Venetian merchant who supplied him with Italian books. He was not just a passive buyer—he was an active interlocutor.

What he produced. Poetry—in Romanian, in neoclassical form, with themes of love, meditation, and mild patriotism. Grammar—the one from Râmnic, which became the basis of Romanian grammars in the first half of the 19th century. Translations—some from Italian and French, remaining in manuscript. A historical memorandum addressed to the Court in Vienna on the situation of Wallachia (1787), which is a remarkable diplomatic document.

His limits. Ienăchiță was cultured, but his culture was, time and again, literary-poetic-diplomatic. It was not technical. It was not scientific. It was not economic. He did not write a single page about the furnace in Reșița—though he knew it existed. He showed no interest in agronomy, metallurgy, or mechanics. His culture, like that of Alexandru Ipsilanti, was at the limit of the categories imposed by Phanariotism.

His sons—Alecu, Nicolae, Iancu. All three continued the tradition—cultural and diplomatic, but still without a transition to the technical. Iancu Văcărescu (1792–1863) would be, in the 1830s, one of the great Romanian poets of the era. He would translate Voltaire, write neoclassical odes, compose romances. He would not invest in industry. He would not write about railways. And when Barbu Știrbei, as Prince of Wallachia (1849–56), asked his advisers for lists of modernisation projects, the Văcăreștis would propose schools, printing presses, theatres—not manufactories.

Hypothesis. The cultured Moldo-Wallachian boyar of the period 1780–1830 remains, by cultural formation, incapable of conceiving industry as a project. Not because he is stupid or lazy. But because his library—the one inherited from the Phanariotes, the one consolidated through studies in Paris or Vienna—does not contain the mental categories of industry. It has politics. It has literature. It has law. It does not have metallurgy. And what is not in the library cannot be projected into reality.

This is the limit of the Văcărescu—Grădișteanu—Bălăceanu generations. They did nothing wrong. They did what they knew. But what they knew was not what needed to be done.

VI. The Golescu Awakening: 1826–1830

Dinicu Golescu published Însemnarea călătoriei mele in Buda in 1826. He was the first boyar to write explicitly, in his own name, that his country had fallen behind and that it had to change. The formulation in the preface—famous today, but shocking in 1826—says it all:

‘In such darkness and ignorance did my journey find me, that truly my mind reproaches me for being a man of age and office, and yet not having known these things, but discovering them with my own eyes, like a child who sees the world for the first time.’

A great boyar, a former grand chamberlain, called himself a child before the West.

The cultural shock did not stop at publication. Golescu did two concrete things at his own expense on his estate at Golești:

First—a school. In 1826, he founded at Golești a Romanian school for peasant children and minor boyars. It was not the first Romanian school—but it was the first serious rural school, with teachers brought from Transylvania (who came with modern pedagogical training), with a complete curriculum (reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, gymnastics), with textbooks printed specifically for it. Golescu paid for the building, the teachers’ salaries, the books, the uniforms of the poor children. A private investment in human capital on a scale Wallachia had not seen until then.

Second—a public library. Also at Golești, Dinicu organised an open library—initially for the school’s pupils, then, formally, for any villager who came to read. By 1830, when Dinicu died, the library had over 2,000 volumes—in Romanian, French, Italian, and Greek. A heritage that his sons continued.

His sons. Ștefan, Nicolae, Radu, Alexandru—the children of Dinicu—would become, in the 1830s–40s, protagonists of the first generation of revolutionary boyars. They would be involved in the 1848 revolution in Bucharest. They would go into exile in Paris. They would return in 1857 and actively participate in the Ad-Hoc Divans. They would support the election of Cuza. They would be part of the first political elite of modern united Romania.

The significance. What Dinicu Golescu did between 1824 and 1830 is more important than the sum of the school and the library. It is the moment when a great boyar decided, with his own resources, to do what the state was not doing. To invest in the future. To transform, through his own decision, a class and a country.

He was not alone. Barbu Știrbei, Gheorghe Bibescu, and later Cuza himself were part of a generation of boyars who, unlike their fathers, perceived themselves as responsible for the modernisation of the country. Boyars who understood that without their involvement, the country would remain blocked. Boyars who were beginning, in essence, to transform themselves into citizens.

And this transformation—from Phanariotised consumer boyar to modernising citizen boyar—is the key to the entire Romanian history of the 19th century.

VII. Why Did They Not Become Industrialists? Comparison with Junkers, Gentry, Dvorianstvo

Here is a question that interests me personally. Why did the Moldo-Wallachian boyars, who had capital, who had land, who had European contacts, who sometimes had university education, not become an industrial class—like the Prussian Junkers (agricultural industrialists, but also factory owners in Silesia), the English gentry (mine owners in Yorkshire, spinning mills in Lancashire), or the Russian dvorianstvo (textile factory owners on the Volga, with ‘attached’ serfs)?

Cause 1: The absence of a legal framework for property. The Romanian boyar was not, in the strict sense, the owner of the land he exploited. He was the domn stăpân (princely master) of the estate, with complex rights, but which did not equate to modern Western property. He could not sell the estate to just anyone (it was subject to pre-emptive rights of relatives). He could not mortgage without complications. He could not, upon death, leave it to a single heir (inheritance was divided among children, by custom). This legal structure prevented long-term investment.

Cause 2: The absence of a capital market. There were no commercial banks until 1856 (the National Bank of Moldavia—a short experiment under Ghika-Comăneșteanu—then the National Bank of Romania in 1880). There were no limited-liability joint-stock companies until 1859. A boyar who wanted to open a factory could not, in essence, raise capital from multiple investors. He had to use exclusively his own. And his own, at 20–30,000 piasters a year, was not enough for a modern factory.

Cause 3: The fragmentation of inheritance. We have mentioned it. A great boyar with five children leaves the estate divided into five parts. Each son receives a fragment. The fragment is not enough for large investments. And reunification through marriages or purchases from brothers is slow and rarely complete. By comparison, in England, the primogeniture system (the eldest son inherits everything, the others receive an annuity) allowed the concentration of family capital over generations. In our case, the opposite—systematic dispersion.

Cause 4: Reduced internal demand. An industrialist must sell what he produces. To whom would a boyar who opened a spinning mill in Ploiești sell? The peasant still made his textiles at home. The boyars bought textiles from Constantinople or Vienna. The solvable internal market for factory textiles did not exist in sufficient quantities to support a profitable spinning mill.

Cause 5: The competition of speculative trade. A boyar who had liquid capital could choose between: (a) industrial investment—5–8% annual profit, high risk, 15–20 year horizon; (b) speculative grain trade with Constantinople—20–30% profit per transaction, medium risk, a few months’ horizon. The rational choice for a man managing his wealth was (b). And (b) was systematically chosen for a century. Boyars preferred to speculate with grain rather than invest in manufacture.

Cause 6: The culture of ostentatious consumption. This is the least material cause, but perhaps the most important. The Phanariotised boyardom, as we said, had become a class of European consumers. Social prestige was displayed through carriages from Vienna, silks from Constantinople, tapestries from Milan, books from Paris. It was not displayed through factories or furnaces. A boyar who invested 30,000 piasters in a spinning mill, instead of spending it on a New Year’s ball, would have been, in the perception of his class, a laughingstock—a ‘peasant boyar,’ as it would have been said. The culture itself pushed capital towards consumption, not investment.

Five material causes plus one cultural. All mutually reinforcing. All targets of the transformations after 1859.

VIII. The Transformation: 1821, 1848, 1859

We will not provide here a full chronicle of Romanian modernisation, which will be the theme of Article 9. But it is worth indicating how the boyardom transformed, in three generations, into a modern political class.

First stage—1821. Tudor Vladimirescu’s uprising. It was not, as has sometimes been said, a simple ‘anti-boyar revolution’—Tudor himself was a minor boyar from Cloșani. But it was a moment of rupture that removed the Phanariote regime from equilibrium. After it, the Porte admitted (through the Organic Regulations—1831 in Wallachia, 1832 in Moldavia, drafted by the Russo-Ottoman commission under the presidency of Pavel Kiselev) that the Phanariote regime had to be replaced with native princes. The autochthonous boyardom gradually regained political control.

Second stage—1830–1848. The period of the Organic Regulations. The ‘great’ boyardom—Ghica, Sturza, Știrbei, Bibescu—began to administer the country directly, with legislation that, although a conservative framework, introduced some modernisations: a simplified fiscal code, an embryonic commercial code, a state school system (planned but slowly implemented), public hospitals, imperial roads.

Third stage—1848. The revolutions in Iași and Bucharest. Here, the generation of Dinicu Golescu’s sons—Nicolae, Ștefan, Alexandru Golescu, plus Cezar Bolliac, Nicolae Bălcescu, Ion Ghica, Ion Câmpineanu, C.A. Rosetti—took a political step that broke with boyar tradition. They demanded: the enfranchisement of peasants, legal equality, universal civil rights, free elections. The Islaz Proclamation (9 June 1848) is the first modern Romanian constitutional document.

The revolution was suppressed in three or four months by Ottoman and Russian troops. Its leaders went into exile in Paris, London, Constantinople. But their programme remained. And in 1859, when Cuza would be elected prince of both Principalities, they would return as reforming elites.

Fourth stage—1859–1866. The reign of Cuza. The agrarian reform of 1864 (the enfranchisement of over 400,000 peasant families). The secularisation of monastic estates (1863)—which brought the Romanian state about a quarter of the agricultural land. The Civil Code (1864). The Penal Code (1864). The Law of Public Instruction (1864). A package of reforms in six years that would definitively break with the Phanariote structure.

The consequence for the boyardom. The great boyardom lost, in the decade 1864–70, a considerable part of its material base. The compensations for the lands given to peasants were insufficient. Many families went into economic decline. Others managed to recycle themselves—they became bankers, industrialists, modern politicians. The Bibescu family built the mechanical factories in Călărași. The Ghica family entered bank boards of directors. Boyar Ionescu, in Iași, opened one of the first breweries.

Not all families succeeded in the transition. But a significant part did. And by 1900, Romania’s economic elite—Kalinderu, Bragadiru, Assan, Aslan, Chrissoveloni—was a mix of old boyar families recycled and new rich (merchants, industrialists who had come from nothing).

The transformation is not complete. It continues, with cycles and ruptures, to this day. But it began with Dinicu Golescu at the customs of Turnu-Roșu, on 12 April 1824.

IX. The Legacy: Boyardom in Contemporary Romanian Sociology

A final theme before closing the article. What legacy does the boyardom leave in Romanian sociology up to 2026?

Observation 1. Romania had, unlike many other Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary, Czechia), an industrial bourgeoisie that was extremely recent and extremely fragile. When the communists took power in 1948, the Romanian industrial bourgeoisie was, in general, two generations old—that of Malaxa, Auschnitt, Blank, plus a few descendants of old boyar families recycled. The nationalisation of June 1948 destroyed this class in a few weeks. It did not have time to transmit itself generationally.

Observation 2. What remained, instead, is a cultural pattern. The ‘boyar’ as a social imaginary—the cultivated man, polyglot, spendthrift, who does not produce but consumes, who has connections but not enterprises, who is ‘European’ through holidays and furniture but not through institutions—has survived under communism as a phantom, under post-communism as an aspiration. It is the imaginary of the contemporary Romanian ‘cultural elite.’ It is the imaginary of some political elites. It is, in refined forms, the imaginary of some post-1989 entrepreneurial elites—who prefer buying firms in London to investing in local production.

Observation 3. It is not a moral judgement. It is a structural observation. The ‘boyardom’ as a pattern has survived because there was no strong institutional alternative to replace it. The classic industrial bourgeoisie was cut off by communism. The working class was destroyed by post-1989 deindustrialisation. What remains, to a large extent, is the boyar imaginary—in modern forms, but recognisable.

Observation 4. The sign of Romania’s serious modernisation would perhaps be the appearance of a generation of entrepreneurs who identify not as modern boyars, but as industrialists. Who invest in local production. Who make a global champion of their own product. Who prefer a furnace (metaphorically—a data centre, a battery factory, a biotech lab) to a house in London. There are signs. They are few. They are fragile. But they exist.

And when Dinicu Golescu wrote, in 1826, that he, a great boyar with an office, felt ‘like a child who sees the world for the first time,’ he essentially formulated the modernising condition of any peripheral elite. You have to feel like a child before the paradigm to begin to learn. You have to admit that what you have learned so far is insufficient. Ultimately, you have to move from boyar to citizen—to understand that the world does not change through acquisitions, but through institutions.

X. Conclusion: Forty-Seven Years and a Customs Post

Constantin ‘Dinicu’ Radovici Golescu passed through the customs at Turnu-Roșu at eleven o’clock in the morning on 12 April 1824. The weather was cold for late April. In the rear carriage, with his thirteen-year-old son and younger brother, he prepared for a seventeen-month journey through modern Occident. He did not yet know what he would see. He did not know he would write a book. He did not know he would found a school. He did not know his sons would make a revolution.

He did not even know that, by crossing that customs with open eyes, he was doing something historic. But he was.

Conclusion in Three Questions.

First: Were the Moldo-Wallachian boyars ‘responsible’ for the industrial gap? Yes, to the extent that they were the economic-political elite and did not open factories. No, to the extent that the institutional framework in which they operated did not allow it. Both answers are simultaneously true. We have described the six causes (legal, financial, cultural) that made industrial investment irrational or impossible for the individual boyar.

Second: Could they have done differently? Within their margins, yes. Dinicu Golescu showed that it was possible—with his own money, his own years, his own decision. Barbu Știrbei showed, as prince, that it was possible. Cuza, later, at the state level. So it was not structurally impossible. It was difficult—and required a cultural change in which most of their class was not ready to engage.

Third—for the contemporary reader. Who are the ‘boyars’ of today? Who is the cultural-consumer class that reproduces, generation after generation, the surface Europeanism without the productive substrate? And who are the ‘Golescus’—those who, at forty-seven, cross a symbolic customs and decide that something must be done, with their own money and their own years? They are in us. They are around us. We see them, if we know how to see them. We are them, if we choose to be.

The large carriage with four horses passed through the customs at Turnu-Roșu at eleven o’clock in the morning on 12 April 1824. The coachman blew on his hands. Son Ștefan took off his gold-rimmed glasses, bought in Sibiu, and cleaned them of the morning mist. Dinicu looked ahead, towards Sibiu—towards the world he did not yet know, but which, by the end of the journey, he would know as much as one can know in seventeen months of travel by carriage.

A customs post. Two years. A book. A school. Two revolutionary sons. A country that begins to change.

Little, for universal history. Enormous, for us.

Selected Bibliography

  • Constantin ‘Dinicu’ Golescu, Însemnarea călătoriei mele făcute în anul 1824, 1825, 1826, Buda, 1826; modern editions. Full text available at wikisource.

  • Constantin Cantacuzino Stolnicul, Istoria Țării Rumânești (History of the Romanian Land), modern critical edition (Editura Academiei).

  • Neagu Djuvara, Între Orient și Occident (Between Orient and Occident): archive.org.

  • Neagu Djuvara, O scurtă istorie a românilor povestită celor tineri (A Short History of the Romanians Told to the Young), Humanitas, multiple editions.

  • Nicolae Iorga, Istoria românilor prin călători (History of the Romanians Through Travellers), multiple editions—for contemporary descriptions of the boyardom.

  • Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa. Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500–2010) (Romania and Europe: The Accumulation of Economic Gaps, 1500–2010), Polirom, 2010, chapter on elites: archive.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, Golescu Family: ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, Ienăchiță Văcărescu: ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, Constantin Cantacuzino Stolnicul: ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Sorin Antohi, Civitas imaginalis: istorie și utopie în cultura română (Imaginary City: History and Utopia in Romanian Culture), Polirom, 1999—on the cultural imaginary of the elites.

*The next article in the series: ‘1821, 1848, 1859, 1918: Romania’s Compressed Modernisation’—how, in the long arc from Tudor Vladimirescu to the Great Union, the leap from the Phanariote world to the modern state occurred. Cuza, Carol I, the Polytechnic, the CFR, interwar industrialists. A 5,000-word synthesis of a century-long transformation. Coming in two weeks.*