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Home , Principality, Protectorate, Suzerainty

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344 Chapter 14

Chapter 14 Tributary-Protected Principalities

The juridical nature of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania’s relations to the Ottoman center has been at the crux of Romanian historiography’s engage- ment with the history of the empire. Within this debate, some scholars have claimed that there existed only a de facto relationship, lacking any legal under- pinnings and marred by abuses.1 This assertion goes against a broad spec- trum of juridical, political and administrative sources that prove the existence of a de jure status that the principalities had within the pax ottomanica system. Romanian contributions to this topic have been characterized by a perva- sive obsession with proving that the principalities enjoyed a superior status in comparison to other Balkan countries. To achieve this goal, scholars coined several concepts – sometimes ambiguous and improper for the context – to describe the principalities’ status, such as “submitted states,” “dependent states,” “vassal states,” “autonomous states,” “effective dependence,” “Ottoman domination,” or “autonomy.” The concepts of “vassalage” and “autonomy” deserve a special treatment. A majority of historians and jurists defined the relations between tributary princes and sultans from a European juridical and political point of view, con- sidering them as a vassal–suzerain relationship. In this respect, it is necessary to emphasize two caveats. Firstly, the notions of ‘vassal’ and ‘suzerain’ came to define the relationship between the Porte and the principalities at a late stage, particularly in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European documents, nar- ratives and translations of Ottoman sources.2 In fact, it was only in the nineteenth century that Western scholars introduced the syntagma of “vassal

1 For instance L. P. Marcu, “Idei despre stat si drept în opera lui Dimitrie Cantemir,” Studii și cercetări juridice (Bucharest), 3 (1973), 497. 2 In Western Europe this medieval notion would not be employed in nineteenth-century diplomatic vocabulary, except to define the relations between the Ottoman Empire and the Principality of Bulgaria (1878–1909) and between Great Britain and South Africa. See J. L. Brierly, The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the International Law of Peace, 6th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963, 133–136. Numerous manuscripts from the Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs discuss the “vassal” provinces and countries of the Ottoman Empire: Mémoires et documents divers sur les provinces et sur les pays vassaux de l’Empire ottoman: originaux, copies et imprimés des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles sur la période de 1700 à 1839, AMAE, Mémoires et documents, vol. 13; Mémoires et documents sur la Moldavie et la Valachie: minutes, originaux, copies et imprimés du XIXe siècles sur la période de 1825 à 1855, AMAE, Mémoires et documents, vol. 48.

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Tributary-Protected Principalities 345

states” to describe the political status of the Danubian principalities. This notion was complementary to the notion of suzerainty, defining the relation of dependency between a stronger state and a weaker one.3 According to Ar- thur de Claparède, the secretary of the Swiss embassy in Vienna and a theoreti- cian of diplomatic law, the “nominal vassalage status” applied to the Danubian Principalities was defined by the fact that the state was subject but de facto sovereign, possessing the right to conclude peace and wage war, to negotiate and be represented in foreign countries by legation.4 This notion was subse- quently deployed retroactively to describe power relations in past centuries. In their turn, Romanian historians adopted the terms of “vassalage” and “suzerainty” without regard to chronology or the uniformity of the content.5 How- ever, such concepts are hardly applicable to the Ottoman context. Prior to the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829, no notions equivalent to the Western concept of “suzerainty” can be found in Ottoman documents. It was only after that date that this term was abundantly used in the translation of official Ottoman documents to European languages.6 Within the Ottoman Empire, numerous tributary and non-tributary regions enjoyed various degrees of self-government, depending on their historical,

3 In this respect, Henry Wheaton spoke of “the Principalities of Moldavia, Wallachia and Serbia, under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Porte and the protectorate of Russia.” (H. Wheaton, Commentaire sur les éléments du droit international et sur l’histoire des progrès du droit des gens, vol. 3, Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1873, 36). 4 Arthur de Claparède, Essai sur le droit de représentation diplomatique d’après le droit international moderne, Thèse de doctorat, Geneva: Universițé de Genève, 1875, 113. 5 For instance, some of them came to “Westernize” the political status of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia by adopting the notion of vassalage paradoxically for the period after 1538, a stage in which actually the usual Ottoman habits had begun to massively penetrate the Danubian territories. Moreover, the stages of relationship between the Porte and the two tributary Principalities being defined firstly according to the Ottoman criteria and terms (for instance, tributaries) and then according to the medieval Western ones, i.e. vassals, an ambiguous image was created. See Gh. Zagoriț, “Stabilirea suzeranității turcești în Moldova. Cu argu- mente că prima capitulație atribuită lui Bogdan III a fost facută de Ștefan cel Mare la 1497,” CL, XLVIII/7–8 (1914), 710–728; N. A. Constantinescu, Începuturile și stabilirea suzeranității turcești în Moldova, Bucharest: Institutul de Arte Grafice „Flacăra,” 1914. 6 For instance, in the French translation of the ferman of 24 October 1866 that acknowledged Prince Carol of Hohenzollern and imposed a duty to observe the Ottoman suzerainty over the United Principalities, as the part of the Ottoman Empire, the concept of “suzeraineté” is ubiq- uitous: A respecter dans leur intégrité mes droits de suzeraineté sur les Principautés-Unies qui font partie intégrante de mon Empire, dans les limites fixées par les stipulations des anciennes Conventions et par le Traité de Paris de 1856 (Noradounghian, Actes, III, 258). This ferman was granted after the Grand Vizier Ali paşa’s note of 19 October 1866, addressed to Prince Carol, which included the conditions of his recognition as the hereditary prince of the United Principalities, and after Prince Carol’s affirmative answer of 10 October 1866.