Roma enslavement in Wallachia and Moldavia

Ownership and the staged abolition laws

Roma enslavement was a legal institution in Wallachia and Moldavia from the fourteenth century into the nineteenth. Conditions differed by occupation and owner: some enslaved people travelled to practise crafts, while others worked in households or on estates. Those differences did not remove their legal status as property. State institutions, monasteries and private owners all held enslaved people.^[1][2]

Ownership was divided among the state, Orthodox monasteries, and private owners. This structure matters because abolition proceeded by category. The same scholarly source traces a legislative process: state slaves were freed in Wallachia in 1843 and Moldavia in 1844; monastery slaves in Moldavia in 1844 and Wallachia in 1847; privately owned slaves in Moldavia in December 1855 and Wallachia in February 1856.^[1] The 1848 Wallachian revolutionary government briefly decreed freedom for private slaves, but its defeat reversed that measure.

It is therefore inaccurate to say that Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza issued the final emancipation decrees. Cuza became ruler of the united principalities in 1859, after legal slavery had been abolished in each principality. The final laws were enacted under Grigore Alexandru Ghica in Moldavia and Barbu Ştirbei in Wallachia, as RomArchive’s historical overview also records.^[2] Owners of privately held slaves received compensation under the final laws; freedom for the enslaved did not automatically provide land, capital, housing, or equal citizenship.

Freedom without material support

Legal emancipation did not automatically provide the means to live independently. Some freed people became agricultural labourers, others continued practising crafts, and some retained itinerant occupations. RomArchive describes the persistence of exclusion and discrimination after slavery.^[2] The distinction between abolishing ownership and securing economic independence helps explain why the final decrees were decisive without ending the inequalities surrounding Roma life.

Families transferred between owners

A surviving 1385 Wallachian document makes the ownership structure concrete. RomArchive describes a ruler confirming the donation of 40 Roma families between monasteries.^[2] The unit was families, and the transaction was a transfer between owners. That document establishes enslavement by this date; it does not date the first arrival of every Roma community or the exact origin of the institution.

The surviving evidence describes people transferred through sale, inheritance and donation. In this setting a religious institution could be an owner and a royal court could enforce ownership. The system was maintained through ordinary legal and economic practices, which helps explain why abolition required changes to institutions as well as declarations of humanitarian principle.

Mobility, rights and later organizing

Movement and craft work should not be confused with freedom. Someone permitted to travel for earnings could still owe service or payments to an owner and remain legally transferable. Occupational categories help describe daily life, but the decisive question is whether a person could control their labour and family life without another person’s ownership claim.

Later Roma organizing addressed problems emancipation had left unresolved. RomArchive records demands in 1919 for equal rights, representation and land, and organizations formed in the 1930s.^[2] These were later political initiatives, not immediate effects of the 1856 decree. Their chronology makes visible a long struggle to turn legal freedom into resources and public recognition.