Historical Similarities

Article 5 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: ‘The Map of Powers in 1780’, ‘The Anatomy of Tribute’, ‘Furnaces Across the Mountains’, and ‘What Did Exist in the Principalities’.

I. Nevyansk, the Winter of 1725

The leaning tower of the Demidov factory in Nevyansk, in the central Urals, rose fifty-seven metres above an artificial pond covered in ice as thick as a man’s arm. It was 27 January 1725. In St. Petersburg, three thousand kilometres away as the crow flies, Tsar Peter I of Russia had died five days earlier, at the age of fifty-two, in a modestly furnished room of the Winter Palace, tormented by a urinary infection that German doctors had been unable to stop. The news had reached Nevyansk the day before, brought by a courier who had travelled for twenty-three days with relay horses along the Moscow–Kazan–Perm–Ekaterinburg road.

Nikita Demidov, the patriarch of the family—seventy-two years old, his hands still strong, the eyes of a man who had seen it all—listened to the news in a room lit by a single whale-oil lamp. He did not speak for a long time. His son, Akinfy—forty-seven years old, more brutal than his father, more unscrupulous, but also more calculating—waited for the most important word.

‘What do we do with the Admiralty order?’ he finally asked.

Nikita remained silent a while longer. The order was for two hundred tonnes of rolled iron, which were to be dispatched in the spring by sledge convoy to Nizhny Novgorod, then by barge down the Volga to Astrakhan, and from there by ship to St. Petersburg. From there, it would be shipped on merchant vessels to Amsterdam, where the Dutch Admiralty needed good iron for brigs and frigates. The contract had been signed directly with the late Tsar two years earlier. Half the sum had been paid in advance—funds that had arrived in Nevyansk in sealed sacks, escorted by Cossacks.

‘We send it,’ Nikita said at last. ‘Contracts do not die with men. Contracts die with money.’

Beneath the leaning tower of the factory, in a cellar that would give rise to a legend—it is said that Demidov later drowned falsified accounting ledgers there, and, according to some versions, even a few silent servants who knew too much—the iron furnaces operated at temperatures that Râmnic, Bucharest, and Iași could not have imagined. Through the windows, the snow glittered, and beneath the snow, the ceaseless movement of people continued. Six thousand souls, the entire factory settlement. A hell of iron and ice. And beneath the ice, hundreds of millions of puds of ore that, in the coming decades, would flow to Amsterdam and London.

By 1780—fifty-five years after that January day—peasant Russia, seemingly backward, was exporting more iron to European markets than James Watt’s England.

How? By what mechanism? At what human cost? And, for the Romanian reader: why could serfdom-ridden Russia, with a system far more brutal than that of Moldavia and Wallachia, achieve what the Principalities could not?

This is the subject of the present article. A comparative exercise that does not defend Tsarist Russia—on the contrary, it exposes its brutality—but which forces us to understand that the absence of industrialisation in our lands cannot be explained by ‘human underdevelopment.’ It is explained by geopolitics, by imperial scale, by coherent political will, and by the brutal willingness to use people as a resource convertible into tonnes of iron.

Article 4 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: ‘The Map of Powers in 1780’, ‘The Anatomy of Tribute’, and ‘Furnaces Across the Mountains’.

I. A December Night in Râmnic, 1778

At two o’clock in the morning, the printing press of the Râmnic Bishopric smelled of three things at once: black ink made from resin smoke and linseed oil, dampened paper to better receive the imprint of the type, and beeswax candles—not tallow, because tallow, as it melted slowly, gave off a smoke that clung to the freshly printed pages and stained them.

Deacon Mihail Popovici, engraver and typesetter, wore a leather apron blackened by fifteen years of trade. With a fine bone quill, he placed the final letters of a page that would open the Menaion for the Month of December—the second volume in a series of twelve liturgical books that Bishop Chesarie of Râmnic had envisioned in 1776, immediately after his enthronement. It was an editorial project the likes of which had never been seen in the entire history of Romanian printing. Twelve Menaia, one for each month of the ecclesiastical year, printed in Slavonic-Romanian ecclesiastical font, with red titles, ornate initials—a complete translation from Church Slavonic into Romanian, revised by scholars from Râmnic and the Metropolitanate of Bucharest.

Popovici worked by the light of three candles placed in a brass candelabrum. There were too few—he knew that—but the printing press could not afford more for a single night. Beeswax was expensive; the candelabrum itself had been a gift from Bishop Chesarie two years earlier, when Popovici had finished engraving the copper plates for the Anthologion of 1776.

On the press—a massive wooden device, made by a local carpenter from an oak tree felled twenty years earlier at Cozia—Master Radu Călin turned the threaded screw with a hand crank. Each sheet was pressed between two forms for a moment, then removed, placed to dry on ropes stretched between the ceiling beams. With every press, there came a deep, damp creak of waterlogged wood, like a cart on a frozen road.

That night, in the Râmnic printing press, thirty sheets were printed per hour. In a week, a thousand sheets. In a year, the Râmnic press produced between twelve and fourteen books—a modest rate compared to the great European printing houses. But compared to what was being done in 1650 on the territory of present-day Romania—under the coordination of Metropolitan Varlaam, in the printing press at Trei Ierarhi in Iași—it was a fivefold increase. And compared to 1500, when there was no printing press at all on the territory of present-day Romania, it was nothing short of a civilisation.

This Râmnic printing press—which we will use as a guiding thread for this article—was not an isolated case. It was a symptom. A symptom of a pre-industrial Romanian world that nevertheless had its own density. It was not industrial England. Nor was it Habsburg Banat. But neither was it an intellectual graveyard, as some 19th-century historians tried to describe it.

This article is dedicated to that density. What existed in the Principalities in 1780? Not what did not exist—we have already spoken about that. But what did exist, concretely, in the houses, markets, workshops, printing presses, hospitals, and academies of the Moldo-Wallachian world at the end of the 18th century.

This is an inventory. It is, at the same time, a form of respect.

Article 3 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: ‘The Map of Powers in 1780’ and ‘The Anatomy of Tribute’.

I. The First Pour, Oravița, the Winter of 1719

Master Johann Schrenk stood before a stone wall radiating heat like a bread oven at white-hot intensity. It was 3 February 1719. Overnight, snow had fallen. The men working on the furnace’s upper platform—four Saxons from Selmecbánya, two Swabians from the Rhineland, a taciturn Slovak with calloused hands—had shed their thick coats. In the minus-six-degree cold outside, they stood in shirts stained with soot and sweat. In front of the furnace, it was summer. A summer that smelled of sulphur, of burning charcoal, of molten iron—a sweet, intoxicating scent that men learned to breathe without fainting only after a few months.

Schrenk glanced at the red-sand hourglass in his hand. Twelve minutes until the pour. This was the second attempt in three days. The first had failed—part of the iron had solidified in the runner, the mould had cracked, and nearly a full day’s labour had been lost. The men had looked at him in silence. The master, at forty-two, had long since learned that a worker’s silence cut deeper than any insult.

Below him, in the furnace’s firebox, a small, red-haired man—a Wallach from the Târnava Valley, hired for his muscles, not his skill—supervised the bellows, powered by a waterwheel mounted on the Oravița River. The blast had to be constant. A single interruption, and the temperature would drop; the iron ore, hauled here by horse from the northern mountains, would not melt into liquid pig iron but turn instead into a slaggy paste that would destroy the furnace’s refractory lining.

When Schrenk lowered his hand—the agreed signal—the Benedictine monk brought in specially to bless the first successful pour (if it were to be successful) began the prayer. This was no mere formality. Saxon masters had a reputation for pragmatism, not superstition. But the monk was there for Sebastian Hentzler, the inspector sent by the Aulic Council in Vienna, who recorded everything in a leather-bound ledger.

The clay runner, cracked with heat, opened. A sudden orange light burst forth, casting the men’s shadows against the workshop walls. The stream of molten iron flowed—heavy, sluggish, like hot tar—into the sand moulds. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty. Schrenk counted silently in German, his lips moving slightly.

Fifty-eight seconds later, the runner emptied. Lying in the sand moulds, red as embers, were the first industrially cast iron pieces on the territory of what is now Romania. They were not works of art. They were six cannon barrels, commissioned by the imperial arsenal in Timișoara for the Danubian garrisons.

That same day, 160 kilometres away as the crow flies, in Bucharest, Nicolae Mavrocordat, the first Phanariote ruler of Wallachia, began his second reign. He was busy negotiating with the Porte for a new level of mucarer—the tribute paid to the Ottomans. They were pouring money into sacks. Not iron into moulds.

160 kilometres. Two worlds.

The Anatomy of Tribute: How the Principalities’ Wealth Was Drained Toward Constantinople and the Phanar

Article 2 of 10 — “The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands”

Previous article: “The Map of Powers in 1780.”

I. A September Night in Iași, 1795

In the treasury house of Iași, a few hundred paces from the princely court of Alexandru Callimachi, a single tallow candle flickered. It was past midnight. A senior clerk of the vistiernic — the high treasurer — was counting the coins for the third time.

This was not carelessness. It was procedure.

Sacks of money — Turkish piasters, Venetian ducats, Maria Theresa thalers, a few smuggled Polish louis d’or — had to be counted in three separate sessions, by three different men, at different hours of the night. After each count, the total was recorded on a slip of paper, sealed in an envelope with wax, and the seal placed in a walnut-wood box. The next morning, when the vistiernic sat down for the final reckoning, the three envelopes were opened in his presence, along with that of a gramatic (a junior clerk) and a representative of the Metropolitan Church. If the three figures matched, the money was released. If they did not, the process began anew.

This was the haraci — the tribute. The word comes from Arabic, via Turkish: harāc, the tax levied on non-Muslims. On that September night in 1795, the sum in question was one that contemporary observers could only greet with a bitter smile: sixty-five thousand piasters. In a good year, this was half the Moldavian treasury’s annual cash income. In a bad year, it was more.

A weary clerk counted the coins for the third time by the light of a guttering candle. In three days, a Turkish escort would arrive to take them away. Two weeks later, the sacks would be unloaded in the courtyard of the Imperial Divan in Constantinople, before the officers of the Grand Vizier. And after that, the peasants of Moldavia would be summoned for the autumn tax — four, five, sometimes six levies in the same year — to replace in the treasury exactly what had just crossed the Danube.

This is the image that opens our story. A clerk counting coins at midnight. A sack of money bound for Constantinople. A procedure triple-checked, lest a single piaster be missing when the Porte’s eyes fell upon it.

In the first article, I called tribute the “institutional infrastructure” of the Principalities. Here, we dissect it. Not as metaphor. As extractive mathematics.