A Map of Powers in 1780: The world our great-great-grandparents inhabited
Article 1 of 10 — “The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands”
I. A post road, an October morning
In the autumn of 1786, an imperial official named Franz Josef Sulzer was crossing the customs post at Turnu-Roșu in a carriage that smelled of freshly greased leather and Austrian pipe tobacco. His notes—published a few years earlier in Vienna under the title Geschichte des transalpinischen Daciens—are among the few detailed accounts of what the road between Sibiu and Bucharest looked like at the end of the eighteenth century. Sulzer was no romantic. He was a former officer turned jurist, a man who measured things.
What he measured that morning was an invisible yet palpable boundary at every turn. In Sibiu, he had left behind a city with a public clock, oil lamps lit on some streets, a postal service that ran to a printed timetable. In Câineni, the first stop beyond the mountains, the horses waited for him in a thatched stable, and the toll collector demanded money before departure, 'in case something should happen on the road.' Sulzer noted the smell—dung burning instead of wood, because the wood was sold at the market in Râmnicu. He noted the sound—the ceaseless creaking of an ungreased axle, which no one seemed to notice. He noted the gesture—how, at every inn, the innkeeper bowed three times before touching the glass, then drank his wine with his eyes on the road, as if expecting at any moment someone he could not refuse.
A hundred kilometres, and a technological age, separated the two worlds.
This is the opening scene of our series: not a map, not a table, not an institutional diagram, but a post road in 1786, measured in smells, sounds, and gestures. Because the question we attempt to answer over the next nine articles—why we fell behind and what that means for 2050—cannot be separated from the question of what it meant to live inside that gap. Sulzer, in 1786, sensed it with his nose before he put it on paper. Our great-great-grandparents lived their entire lives within it.
II. 1780 as a baseline
Not every date is equally suited to beginning a story. The choice of 1780 as a reference point—with a broad window stretching from 1770 to 1821—is not arbitrary. It is the year when the world our great-grandparents inhabited entered its final stable phase, before everything was rearranged.
In 1774, just six years earlier, the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca had been signed, by which Russia obtained from the Porte something historians often underestimate: not only the right to protect Orthodox Christians within the Ottoman Empire, but also the right to oversee the Principalities. Three years later, in 1777, Joseph II of Austria annexed Bukovina—a bite taken from an exhausted Moldavia, paid for with money and diplomacy to the Porte in a single winter. And in the west, in an apparently quiet year, 1776, a certain James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton delivered the first two steam engines with separate condensers, signing a contract that would shift the global balance of power more profoundly than any treaty.
1780 is not a moment of rupture. It is a moment of ripening. All the elements are in place: the Porte, defeated but not collapsed, administers its northern frontier through the Phanariotes; the Habsburgs, with Joseph II newly on the throne, count their cadastre and colonise the Banat with Swabians; Catherine the Great's Russia prepares for the second Russo-Turkish War; France, seemingly at its zenith, secretly subsidises the American rebels and edges towards bankruptcy; England loses its thirteen colonies, but gains the steam engine.
The window we will use—1770 to 1821—is the 'long eighteenth century' in its Balkan version. It begins with the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, which brought Rumyantsev's armies to the Danube, and ends with Tudor Vladimirescu marching out with his pandurs on the road to Craiova. Between these two moments lies everything: the apogee of Phanariote rule, the first effects of Selim III's reforms, the early industrialisation of Habsburg Banat, and further west, in the Atlantic world, Manchester's transformation into what contemporaries would call 'Cottonopolis'.
Why does this window matter? Because within it, something occurs that the economist Bogdan Murgescu—whom we will cite often—calls 'the accumulation of gaps'. This is not the moment when the Principalities became backward. They already were. This is the moment when they fell further behind at an accelerating pace. This is the moment when the distance between Sibiu and Bucharest transformed from a boundary into an abyss.
III. What is the Levant?
A word we use rarely, with embarrassment, as if it were something that must be explained before it can be spoken. The Levant.
In the most brutal geographical sense, the Levant is the East—the sun rises there, in the Italian of Genoese sailors who coined the term. But the geographical meaning is impoverished. In the eighteenth century, the Levant was a civilisation. It stretched from Egyptian Alexandria to Sephardic Smyrna, from Armenian Aleppo to Thessaloniki, from Ottoman Constantinople to the Aegean islands where Greek was still spoken after five hundred years of Turkish rule. It was a world where business was conducted in seven languages before lunch, where contracts were signed in Arabic and money counted in Spanish piasters, where Orthodox priest, rabbi, and mullah drank coffee at the same table—not out of friendship, but commercial pragmatism.
At the heart of this world stood a district. It was called Fanar, after the lantern that once marked the entrance to the port—phanarion, meaning lantern, in Greek. It occupied the European shore of the Golden Horn, north of Constantinople's walls. This was the quarter where, after 1453, the surviving Greek aristocracy of the Byzantine Empire settled—the ones who had not fled to Italy and had not converted. Here, for three hundred years, the Mavrocordatos, Ipsilantis, Ghikas, Callimachis, Moruzis, and Suțus built a unique form of power: an aristocracy without lands of their own, who sold their services to the Porte as dragomans (diplomatic interpreters), court physicians, merchants, and later—after 1711 in Moldavia and 1716 in Wallachia—as princes.
Here we must make a distinction that national historiography has long avoided. The Phanariotes were not the Levant's 'representatives' in Bucharest and Iași. They were the Levant. When Constantin Mavrocordatos decreed, in 1746, the abolition of rumânia (serfdom proper), he did so not as an enlightened reformer reading Voltaire—though he did read Voltaire—but as a Levantine boyar who understood that a free peasant paid taxes more reliably than a serf. When Alexandru Ipsilanti introduced, in 1780, a bilingual Greek-Romanian code of laws, the Pravilniceasca condică, he did not do so out of Romanian patriotism, but Levantine pragmatism: good codification makes administration cheaper.
These were educated men. They spoke six languages, some even seven. They owned private libraries containing Descartes and Leibniz. They read the Encyclopédie. They corresponded with German Enlightenment thinkers. But they did not read the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, did not subscribe to Paris's Journal des mines, did not know of James Watt, and if they vaguely heard of 'steam engines', they assumed they were an English curiosity, like racecourses and boxing. Their Enlightenment was literary and legal. It was not technological.
Here is the first key point we must establish—and one of the most crucial for understanding the gap that was to follow. An Enlightenment that does not reach the furnace is an Enlightenment that does not produce industrialisation. In 1780, the Levant was a refined, commercial, polyglot, cosmopolitan civilisation. It was not a civilisation of the machine.
IV. Habsburg Mitteleuropa
Two hundred kilometres northwest of Alexandru Ipsilanti's Bucharest, west of the Carpathians, lay another world. Not a richer world than the Levant—that would be a mistake to assume—but a world that invested differently.
The term Mitteleuropa is a nineteenth-century cultural construct, but the reality it describes was already present in 1780. We are speaking of a space that stretches from Catholic, pragmatic Bohemia, through the industrialists' Moravia, through Austria proper with its imperial Vienna, to the Hungarian plains and Transylvania with its three recognised nations (Saxons, Hungarians, Székelys) plus the unrecognised Romanians. Add the Banat, systematically colonised since 1718, and Bukovina, acquired in 1775. It is a 'world' with its own tempo.
What does 'its own tempo' mean? A concrete example. In the same year that Alexandru Ipsilanti completed his bilingual code in Bucharest—1780—in Reșița, in Habsburg Banat, the metalworks of the Aulic Chamber had been operating for nine years. They had been built in 1771, in response to a directive from the Hofkammer, the imperial treasury. In Oravița, the first blast furnace in present-day Romanian territory had been operating since 1718—six decades before our 'zero moment'. And in the mountains of the Anina district, the first coal in Romanian territory began to be extracted in that same year, 1780, when, under Phanariote rule, coal was the stuff of Oriental tales, not an economic resource.
This asymmetry is embarrassingly simple and embarrassingly defining. The same Romanian ethnicity—for let us not forget, the Banat Swabians were a minority, and the workforce in the mines and furnaces was largely Romanian—two regimes, two technological destinies.
Why? Because the Habsburgs did not build furnaces to civilise the Romanians. They built them because the imperial army needed cannons, and cannons needed cast iron, and cast iron needed furnaces, and furnaces needed coal or charcoal, and all of these needed institutions: an Aulic Chamber to issue capital, a cadastre to inventory the forests, a postal service to convey orders, a corps of master craftsmen (brought from Bohemia, Styria, the Rhineland) who knew how to operate the furnaces, a body of mining engineers trained at Selmecbánya—the Mining Academy of Banská Štiavnica, in present-day Slovakia, the first institution of higher technical education on the European continent, founded in 1735.
So not just furnaces, but an entire ecosystem. And for an observer from Iași or Bucharest, Sibiu was indeed another planet—not in terms of wealth (the boyars' Iași was perhaps richer), but because it had an Aulic Chamber that functioned, a cadastre that worked, a postal service that arrived on time, oil lamps on some streets, a public clock.
This Habsburg Mitteleuropa will be the main character of Article 3. For now, it is enough to place it on the map. It is the immediate neighbour. It is the showcase. It is proof that, a hundred kilometres away, life could be different—if the institutions demanded it.
V. The Pontic space
We descend from the mountains to the east. Here, things become more complicated, both geographically and politically.
'The Pontic space' is a term we use for want of a better one. It describes the Black Sea basin understood as a system—not as the top edge of the map of Turkey or the bottom edge of the map of Russia, but as a self-contained space with its own logic. The Rumelian coast with Varna and Burgas. The Anatolian shore with Sinop and Trebizond. The Crimea of the Tatars and Genoese. The Caucasian coast of the Circassians. Bessarabia (which in 1780 meant, note, only the south of present-day Moldova, between the Dniester and the Danube—the Tatar Budjak, not the entire Moldova beyond the Prut). And as the gateway to the entire system, the Danube delta, with Kilia, Ismail, and Reni.
In 1780, the Pontic space was a disputed frontier. Since 1774, Russia had held the right to maritime trade in the Black Sea. Catherine the Great had just signed, in 1783, the annexation of Crimea—a cataclysmic moment for the Ottoman system, for three hundred years Crimea had been the northern antechamber of the empire. When the Tatars fell, the road to Constantinople shortened. In 1787, the second Russo-Turkish War would break out; in 1790, Suvorov would conquer Ismail with an assault that would remain in military tactics textbooks until the twentieth century.
The Principalities stood, geographically, right at the centre of this power play. Bucharest was 200 kilometres from the Danube. Iași was 100. The Turkish fortresses on the Danube—Giurgiu, Brăila, Turnu, Ismail—were in properly Ottoman territory, yet they were supplied with Moldo-Wallachian grain, and the labour on their fortifications was performed by Muntenian and Moldavian peasants forced into corvée. When the Russians descended into the Balkans, they did so through the Principalities. When the Turks responded, they too did so through the Principalities. Over half a century, between 1768 and 1821, the Principalities would not know more than ten consecutive years without foreign troops on their soil.
This is a reality forgotten in school chronologies. When we speak of the 'Phanariote era', we imagine a century of court intrigues in Iași and Bucharest. But military maps show something else: the Principalities were a near-permanent theatre of war. Rumyantsev came in 1770. Potemkin in 1789. Kutuzov in 1811. And between them, the Janissaries retreating, the Cossacks advancing, the Austrians entering through Bukovina.
In 1780, the Pontic space was a frontier that was melting. And the Principalities were the ice on which it melted.
It is no wonder, then, that industrialisation did not take root here. Who would invest in a furnace in a country crossed by troops every five years? Who would build a cloth manufactory in Chiperești, Moldavia, knowing that in fifteen years' time it might be burned down by a Tatar detachment or requisitioned by a Russian commander? Geopolitical instability was not merely a romantic backdrop for period paintings. It was a fixed cost that every investor factored into their calculations before laying down the first coin.
VI. Atlantic Europe
We cross the continent to the west. Here, in 1780, the core of a transformation was forming—one that contemporaries did not yet call the 'Industrial Revolution' (the term would not be coined until the 1830s by the French historian Auguste Blanqui, and later popularised by Arnold Toynbee at the end of the nineteenth century). But the transformation was already underway.
We call it Atlantic Europe rather than 'Great Britain' because the emphasis falls in the wrong place if we look only at the British Isles. What made industrialisation possible was not just the genius of Watt, Arkwright, or Cartwright. It was an entire civilisational complex: Atlantic markets with cotton from Louisiana and sugar from Barbados, Dutch commercial capital that still financed half of British enterprises in the eighteenth century, coal mining in Wales and northern France, the banking systems of Amsterdam and London, the Protestant ideology of disciplined labour, the fiscal state that could raise taxes to build a navy. And across the Ocean, the thirteen colonies that had just declared independence in 1776, but which would remain, for a century, both England's main rival and its principal customer.
In 1780, this Atlantic world was producing things that would have seemed miracles in Ipsilanti's Bucharest. A Watt & Boulton steam engine, commercialised since 1775, did the work of twenty horses. Arkwright's Cromford Mill, opened in 1771, used water power to spin cotton with a speed and consistency impossible for any hand weaver. In 1784, Edmund Cartwright would patent the power loom. In 1789, the first steam-powered power loom would go into operation. By 1812, London would have its first gas street lighting—on Pall Mall.
What did these dates mean for someone living in Moldavia or Wallachia? They meant that in 1780, the technological distance between Bucharest and Manchester was not a matter of decades. It was a matter of an entire age. Cottonopolis was being born before the eyes of an English generation; seventy years later, it would become the monstrously fascinating 'Coketown' of Dickens's Hard Times. Over the same period, Bucharest would build Assan's Mill in 1853—the first steam engine on Romanian territory—which would be hailed as a marvel, as a break with the past.
France, here, is an interesting case. It had the same ingredients as England—colonies, capital, scientists—but it also had a revolution. And between 1789 and 1815, France did not industrialise. It fought. Napoleon would rebuild his armies ten times over, but he would not rebuild his industrial base. When England opened, in 1830, the first steam-powered railway between Liverpool and Manchester, France would be thirty years behind in railway construction. This French delay will become relevant to our narrative later, in Article 5, when we discuss models of late industrialisation.
For now, we note only this: in 1780, Atlantic Europe was the paradigm. Not because it was 'better' in a moral sense—the Atlantic slave trade that fed Manchester's cotton mills was a moral horror written in the blood of millions. But because it was the place where, for the first time in human history, the conditions for self-sustaining economic growth through technology were established. It was the moment when humanity, in energetic terms, left the agricultural paradigm behind. It was the moment when machines that made machines appeared.
VII. What technology means in an honest comparison
Here we must slow down. The word 'technology' is used so broadly that it means everything and nothing. For our series, we need a precise framework. Otherwise, the comparison between the Principalities and the rest of the world will remain anecdotal—'we had water mills, they had steam engines'—and, worse, moralising.
We borrow our framework from serious economic historians—Braudel, Mokyr, Allen, Murgescu—and translate it into eight categories that we will examine step by step in Articles 4 to 8:
Energy. What power source does a society use to produce, transport, process? Water? Wind? Animal muscle? Coal? Steam? In 1780, the Principalities remained in the pre-industrial paradigm—water, wind, animal traction. England was entering the steam paradigm. The difference was not one of degree. It was one of kind.
Metallurgy. Who produces iron, how, and at what cost? Iron is the backbone of any industrialisation—you cannot build ploughs, cannons, rails, or machines without it. By 1780, Russia exported some 3.8 million poods of iron to the European market. Sweden did the same. England, using Henry Cort's new methods (the puddling process, patented in 1783–84), produced cast iron and wrought iron on an industrial scale. In the Principalities, iron was imported from the Banat or Transylvania, or worked artisanally—weapons, agricultural tools, horseshoes. There was not a single furnace.
Printing and the circulation of knowledge. How many books are printed, in what languages, who reads them, how do scientific and technical ideas circulate? By 1780, France had completed its Encyclopédie three years earlier. England had had the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions for over a century. Russia had the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. The Principalities had printing presses—in Iași, Bucharest, Râmnic, Neamț—but they used wooden presses. New presses would be commissioned by Metropolitan Iacob Stamati in 1799, still made of wood. All presses in the Romanian space would remain wooden until the mid-nineteenth century. The cylinder press—invented by Friedrich Koenig in London in 1810 and adopted by The Times in 1814—would reach Bucharest with a delay of about fifty years.
Transport. How do people, goods, and information move? In 1780, the Principalities had dirt roads, a few 'imperial roads' between major cities that turned into mud canals in the rain, wooden bridges that had to be rebuilt after every flood. The postal service operated through toll collectors, but without a printed timetable—it took as long as it took. The Habsburgs had had a scheduled postal service since 1748 (the Reform of the Kaiserliche Reichspost). England had mail coaches with timetables and fines for delays from 1784.
Urbanism and infrastructure. Drinking water, sanitation, lighting, city planning. Here, Phanariote Bucharest had, paradoxically, one notable achievement—water pipes. Alexandru Ipsilanti brought water into the city through ceramic pipes, a system that would expand into the nineteenth century. But these were pipes, not pressurised metal conduits. And beyond this exception, Bucharest was a city without a plan, with irregular streets, lit by torches and lanterns at the boyars' gates, with poor sanitation.
Armaments. Who makes gunpowder, cannons, muskets? In 1780, England had the Woolwich Arsenal. Russia had Tula, with foundries, forges, workshops producing thousands of weapons a year. The Porte had Tophane in Constantinople. The Principalities had nothing. Imported weapons, captured in wars, artisan-made. A Damascus pistol cost as much as a year's income for a middle-ranking boyar—and it was a status symbol, not a technology.
Agriculture. What techniques, what crops, what yields? In 1780, in England, Charles 'Turnip' Townshend and Thomas Coke of Norfolk introduced the four-field rotation, Jethro Tull's seed drill, mineral fertilisers. Wheat yields doubled in two generations. In France, the Physiocrats theorised agricultural reform. In the Principalities, there were wooden ploughs with iron shares, biennial rotation, no potatoes until the nineteenth century, a peasant population dependent on a single harvest each year. It was a Russian-peasant agriculture, not a British-improved one.
Technical education. Who trains the engineers, mechanics, chemists? By 1780, the Habsburgs had the Mining Academy of Selmecbánya, founded in 1735. France would open the École Polytechnique in 1794. England had the Royal Society as an informal network of scholars, plus the Scottish universities—Glasgow, Edinburgh—which produced chemists and engineers. The Principalities had the princely academies—in Bucharest, in Iași—but these trained dragomans and logothetes, men for administration and diplomacy. Not mining engineers.
These eight categories—which we will examine in detail in the following articles—are our framework. Without it, the discussion remains moralising: 'we were more backward, the guilt belongs to the Phanariotes/Russians/Turks/boyars/peasants'. With it, the discussion becomes precise: exactly where we fell behind, why, by how much, and what the real alternatives were.
VIII. Honest comparison versus moralising comparison
There is a Romanian tradition of writing about the Phanariote era with cold fury. Nicolae Iorga, in A History of the Romanians Through Travellers' Eyes and A History of Romanian Literature in the Eighteenth Century, accused the Phanariotes of nearly every possible sin: economic extraction, institutional corruption, cultural sterilisation, servility to the Porte. Iorga wrote from a national perspective that only crystallised in the twentieth century—a perspective legitimate for his time, but misleading when projected backwards. The Phanariotes did not relate to the 'Romanian people' as a national entity, because that entity was not conceived as such in 1780. They related to a fiscal 'peasantry', to clientelistic boyars, to the Porte as sovereign, to other Phanariotes as family rivals or allies.
Neagu Djuvara, in Between East and West: The Romanian Lands at the Dawn of the Modern Era, nuanced the picture. He showed a Phanariote century that was not monolithic: it had reformers (Constantin Mavrocordatos, Alexandru Ipsilanti), it had villains (a few Suțus), it had tragic-enlightened figures (Alexandru Moruzi). It had a refined culture. At the same time, it had an extractive economy. Djuvara was the first to write in Romanian about the Phanariote world as a Levantine civilisation, rather than a 'foreign occupation'.
Bogdan Murgescu, in Romania and Europe: The Accumulation of Economic Gaps (1500–2010), went a step further: he quantified. He calculated estimated GDPs, compared production figures, showed with data that the gap between the Principalities and the European average grew in the eighteenth century, not just in the nineteenth. He restored solid ground to the discussion—figures that could be verified, hypotheses that could be tested.
This series attempts to continue the Djuvara-Murgescu tradition. We are not defending the Phanariotes—they did what they did, and in Article 2 we will see exactly how much they drained from the Principalities in their 110 years of rule. But we place them in a comparative context. What could they do? What could they not do? Which alternatives were real, and which were merely the fantasies of posterity?
And here, an important point. Honest comparison requires us to accept that the Principalities were not the only ones left behind. Most of the world, in 1780, lagged behind Atlantic Europe. Russia was a serf economy, with notable metallurgical exceptions. Spain was a post-imperial economy, unable to manage its colonies. The rest of the Balkans—Ottoman Bulgaria, Ottoman Serbia, Ottoman Greece—were, if we must compare, even more backward than the Principalities, which at least had a form of fiscal and administrative autonomy. The German states, with the exception of Prussia, were a mosaic of agrarian duchies. Italy, once the vanguard of the Renaissance, was in a long economic stagnation.
So the gap is not a specifically Romanian disgrace. It is a global problem, and the Principalities are one of many cases of societies that did not participate in the first Industrial Revolution. What is specific, however—and we will argue this throughout the series—is the precise form of the mechanisms that blocked modernisation. The tribute. Phanariotism as a political system. Geopolitical instability. Clientelistic boyardom. The absence of a technical elite. The weak articulation of local commercial networks compared to the Levantine-Ottoman ones that extracted value from the Principalities.
These mechanisms have a name, in retrospect. It is not 'fate', not 'bad luck', not 'bad neighbourhood'. It is institutional structure. And institutional structure can be analysed, compared, and—most importantly for our series—reflected in the mirror of the present.
IX. What we will do in the next nine articles
It is time to announce the series roadmap.
Article 2 will dissect the anatomy of tribute. How much did the Principalities pay to the Porte and the Phanariotes? How do we know? How did it compare to the tribute paid by other vassal states—Ragusa, the Bulgarian principalities, Transylvania before 1699? We will use the figures: 24,000 ducats under Michael the Brave, 155,000 and more under the Phanariotes; the price of leasing the throne; the 'hidden' tribute of the kilo (supplying Istanbul with grain, sheep, butter). We will show how this system drained precisely the resources that, in England or Russia, would have gone towards furnaces.
Article 3 will cross the mountains. We will visit Oravița in 1718, Reșița in 1771, Anina in 1790, Govăjdia in 1806. We will see who built the furnaces, with what capital, with what craftsmen, with what logic. We will ask the hardest question: why the Banat and not Muntenia, when the people were the same and the distance was only a hundred kilometres?
Article 4 will stay in the Principalities and make a detailed inventory of what existed there—Dinu Golescu's water mill, the workshops of Câmpina, the Metropolitan's printing press, the inns, the post roads. We will see a world that was not static, but moved at a pre-industrial pace.
Article 5 will descend to the Volga and the Urals. How did Peter the Great industrialise peasant Russia? What does 'factory serfdom' mean? Why could Russia have industrial metallurgy against a backdrop of generalised personal servitude, while the Principalities had neither serfdom nor metallurgy?
Article 6 will analyse Constantinople—not as a hostile power, but as the civilisational centre of the world in which the Principalities lived. Who was Selim III and why did his reforms fail? What was the Nizam-ı Cedid? Who were the Janissaries and why did they kill him? How did all this relate to Iași and Bucharest?
Article 7—and here the series changes tone—will descend to the level of the peasant's table. What did people eat? When did mamaliga replace millet porridge? Where did the Mangalitsa pig come from? What did a Moldavian household look like in 1780? This is the most anthropological article in the entire series, and almost certainly the most read.
Article 8 will be about the elite. Who were the boyars? What did they read? What did they buy in Vienna and from Leipzig? How did they compare to the Prussian Junkers, the French nobles, the Russian nobility? Why did they not become an industrial bourgeoisie?
Article 9 will bring us to 1821. What happens when Tudor Vladimirescu marches out with his pandurs? How do the Phanariotes respond? What begins afterwards—the Organic Regulations, the 1848 generation, Cuza, Carol I, the Polytechnic, the CFR, the interwar industrialists? We will trace a long arc, from 1821 to 1989, to see what Romanian 'compressed' modernisation looked like.
Article 10, finally, will close the arc. Three scenarios for 2050. Re-Phanariotisation—continuing as the West's digital back office, Bucharest as a contemporary Fanar. The internal Habsburg model—the west progresses, the rest stagnates, with Cluj/Timișoara as the new Reșițes and Moldova as the new Bessarabias. The post-1821 compressed model—a generation of coherent political will, with South Korea and Estonia as precedents. The reader will be left with an open question: which path are we on today, if we are honest with ourselves?
X. Instead of a conclusion: three questions and a promise
We opened this article with Franz Josef Sulzer crossing the customs post at Turnu-Roșu on an October morning in 1786. We close it with three questions that we leave you, dear reader, to ponder until the next article.
First question. Is the comparison between the Principalities and England legitimate when the development gap, as we have seen, is an entire age? Or should we only compare like with like—the Principalities with Bulgaria, with Greece, with the Ottoman spaces in the Balkans? Our answer is that we cannot afford the luxury of comparing only with our neighbours. Because the future is not a neighbour. The future is the paradigm. And in 1780, the paradigm was England. Just as in 2026, it is San Francisco, Shenzhen, and Bangalore. We compare ourselves to the paradigm to understand our distance from it. Not to suffer. To know.
Second question. What do we gain by using 'Levant' instead of 'Ottoman Empire'? We have already answered partially: 'Ottoman Empire' is a political category, which leads us to believe that the Phanariotes were merely Ottoman functionaries. 'The Levant' is a civilisational category, which shows us that the Phanariotes were part of a larger world—a commercial, cosmopolitan, multilingual world with its own brilliance and its own limits. A world that did not produce industrialisation, but neither did it collapse when the empire fell. It continues today, in certain forms—in the Fanar district of Constantinople, in Alexandria, in what remains of Aleppo, in Thessaloniki from which the Sephardic Jews have disappeared, but from which something remains.
Third question. How does precise geographical terminology protect us from nationalist anachronisms? Simply—it prevents us from speaking of 'Romanians' who were 'oppressed' by 'Turks' in 1780. It forces us to speak of Muntenian and Moldavian peasants with anchored regional identities, of boyars with complex obligations to the Porte and the Phanariotes, of Phanariotes who were Greeks from Constantinople but also Albanians, Romanians, and Armenians by blood, of Ottomans who were Turks, Arabs, and Albanians, of Habsburgs who were Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, and Croats, of Russians who were Russians, but also Tatars, Ukrainians, Mordvins. It forces us towards a map that is less neat, but more true.
And our promise to you, dear reader, is this. In the next nine articles, we will methodically traverse these territories. We will descend from introductory generality to concrete particularity. We will use figures. We will cite sources. We will build an argument that, by the end of the series, will give you a tool for thought—not a forced conclusion, but a tool. A way of reading the present through the past. A way of seeing structures where you see events.
We do not promise you consolation. Honest comparisons do not console. Nor do we promise you a miracle recipe for 2050—no such thing exists, and anyone who sells you one is lying. What we do promise is what Franz Josef Sulzer allowed himself to do in 1786, and what we can still allow ourselves: to measure the world we live in with care. To note the smells, the sounds, the gestures. To understand, a hundred kilometres from our own doorstep, what other worlds were possible—and perhaps still are.
Selected Bibliography
- Bogdan Murgescu, Romania and Europe: The Accumulation of Economic Gaps (1500–2010), Polirom, 2010. Available in full at archive.org.
- Neagu Djuvara, Between East and West: The Romanian Lands at the Dawn of the Modern Era, Humanitas, multiple editions. Available at archive.org.
- Viorel Panaite, War, Peace, and Trade in Islam: The Romanian Lands and the Ottoman Law of Peoples, Polirom, Polirom edition.
- Historia.ro, The Phanariote Century and the Romanian Lands dossier: historia.ro.
- Wikipedia RO, Phanariote Era: ro.wikipedia.org.
- Wikipedia RO, Ottoman Domination over the Romanian Lands: ro.wikipedia.org.
- Franz Josef Sulzer, Geschichte des transalpinischen Daciens, Vienna, 1781–82 — for travel excerpts.
Next in the series: 'The Anatomy of Tribute: How the Principalities' Wealth Was Drained to the Porte and the Phanariotes' — the extractive mathematics of Phanariotism, real figures, comparisons with other Balkan tributaries. Coming in two weeks.