Five centuries of slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia

The first known document mentioning Roma in what is now Romania, from 1385, confirms a gift of forty families of ațigani by the prince of Wallachia to the monastery of Tismana. By then Roma were already unfree. How they became slaves is unclear: some historians think they arrived as prisoners of the Tatars, others that they fell into debt bondage, or that their skills as smiths and craftsmen made the princes eager to tie them to the land.^•

Slaves of princes, monasteries and boyars

For almost five centuries, in Wallachia and Moldavia, the word țigan meant, in law, a slave. There were three kinds of owners: the prince (the state), the Orthodox monasteries and the boyars, the landowning nobility. Slaves of the state were often allowed to travel and work as smiths, goldwashers, bear-trainers and musicians, paying an annual tax; monastic and boyar slaves were more often household servants, cooks, coachmen and field labourers, with no rights at all.^•

Roma slaves could be sold, given as dowries, exchanged for animals or used to pay debts. Families were split up at sales, and owners could beat them and decide whom they married; law codes of the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries forbade marriage between free people and slaves, and children of such unions became slaves. Advertisements for auctions of Roma families appeared in Bucharest newspapers as late as the 1850s.^•

Abolition

From the 1830s, young Romanian liberals educated in Paris, such as Mihail Kogălniceanu, began to attack slavery as a shame on the nation. In the 1840s both principalities freed the slaves owned by the state and the church. The revolutionaries of 1848 proclaimed full emancipation, but the revolution was crushed. Finally, Moldavia abolished slavery in December 1855 and Wallachia on 20 February 1856, as the two principalities moved towards union as Romania. Around 250,000 people were freed, by the most common estimate.^•

Freedom came with nothing. Owners were compensated by the state; former slaves received no land and no money, and most stayed poor, dependent and on the edge of villages. Many left: in the decades after abolition, groups such as the Kalderash (coppersmiths) and Lovara (horse-dealers) spread across Europe and to the Americas, which is why their dialects, called Vlax Romani, are full of Romanian words.^•

Memory

For more than a century Romanian history books barely mentioned Romani slavery, and many Romanians still do not know it existed. Romani activists and historians such as Viorel Achim and Ian Hancock have worked to change this, and Romania now marks 20 February as the day of Romani emancipation. For Roma, the word robie (slavery) names a wound that is as foundational as the Holocaust.^•

Why it matters today