Slavery in Southeastern Europe

Abstract

In Southeastern Europe, slavery was present in various forms from antiquity until the nineteenth century. During the 1800s, slavery as a social reality still existed in the Ottoman Empire (including its European provinces) as well as in the Romanian principalities. Wallachia and Moldavia had slaves and slavery since their founding in the fourteenth century. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the roughly 250000 slaves living in the two countries represented seven percent of the total population. There were three categories of slaves: state slaves, slaves owned by monasteries, and privately owned slaves. The slave population was diverse in numerous ways. In terms of their ethnicity, most slaves were Roma, while some were of Romanian or other origin. As in previous centuries, they played an important role in the country’s economy—primarily by way of the enslaved craftsmen who practiced their crafts itinerantly in villages. This chapter reconstructs the history of slavery, abolitionism, and emancipation in the Romanian principalities between the 1830s and the 1850s, with reference to previous periods and similar processes taking place around the same time in other geographical areas.