The ‘Conquering’ Soldier-Merchants of the Balkans: Colonization, State Interventionism and Separatist Claims in the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (18th-19th Cen... by Aysel Yıldız

“…This article studies the questions of self-rule and state intervention in the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, and the socio-economic life of a late frontier society against the backdrop of the eighteenth-century wave of internal colonization by Ottoman Muslims, mostly of Janissary background. It aims at revealing complex relations between agents on three levels: local (voivodes, boyars, commoners), the regional (Janissaries and other soldiery) and the imperial; while also examining the influx of Muslims into the Principalities and its consequences as an interplay between various claims of trading rights, provisionist policies implemented by the imperial centre and the autonomous desires of the native nobility. …”
Get full text