Roma Enslavement in the Principalities
Legal slavery of Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia until the 1850s
Wallachia and Moldavia kept Roma in hereditary slavery for centuries under princes, monasteries, and private owners. Abolition in the mid-nineteenth century ended the legal status without ending exclusion.
Damage
Roma slavery in the Principalities lasted centuries until mid-nineteenth-century abolition.
Lives lost
Generational bondage harm; mortality poorly quantified in surviving records
Record Points
- Roma slaves could be sold, gifted, and inherited as property across boyar and ecclesiastical estates.
- State, church, and private owners maintained separate categories of bondage with written deeds.
- Abolition decrees in the 1840s-1850s freed people into landlessness and stigma rather than equality.
- Romanian national historiography long minimized slavery as a footnote to Ottoman or "oriental" influence.
- Contemporary Roma exclusion sits on top of that unfinished emancipation.
Perpetrator(s)
Victims
Roma