Christian vassals at the north-western borders of the Ottoman Empire
The different regions of the Ottoman Empire employed different administrative mechanisms. Besides the sancak-vilayet system, regarded as classic, there were vassal states along the frontiers of the empire. Although different from one another, they all had one common strait in that they had their own domestic self-governments. The paper discusses primarily the political relations of Moldva and Wallachia, the two Rumanian voivodates. Rumania today has three great historical regions: Moldva (Boġdan) and Wallachia (Eflak) are mostly populated by Rumanians of Orthodox religion. Transylvania (Erdel), on the other hand, was part of the Hungarian Kingdom throughout the Middle Ages, its political elite consisting of the three political nations of the Seklers, Hungarians and Saxons, its established religions being Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism. Rumanians were present, naturally, in that country, too, but they could play a political role only after being integrated into the above groups. From this it follows that the present paper analyses mostly the relations at the Porte of the two Rumanian voivodates, and Transylvania is mentioned occasionally only, as an example.
I am trying to find out what the relationships were like between the Ottoman Empire and the two Rumanian voivodates. The question has abundant Rumanian literature. Recent studies rely mostly on the diplomatic sources of Turkish archives. It is a question of great importance for Rumanian historiography to find out on what level of subjection the Rumanian states stood. It is possible to ’measure’ this by establishing whether the voivodes of Moldva and Wallachia had so called ‛ahdnâme, letters of contract signed by the Sultan. In so far as it can be shown that the Sultans provided the voivodes with ‛ahdnâmes during the confirmations, the relationships were not only of subjection, but contained a measure of co-ordination. We must remember that the Ottoman Empire, when putting its commercial and peace treaties with the Western world into writing, used the ‛ahdnâme, which is known in western languages as capitulation. In short, if the Rumanian voivodes had ‛ahdnâme (capitulation) at the time of the confirmation, it would mean that their legal relations with the Porte were similar to the Turkish connections of the western states. The eminent Rumanian historian, Ciurescu showed in 1901 that the Sultan’s capitulations published several times in French and regarded from the 18th century for nearly two hundred years as the contract letters of the Rumanian voivodates, were forgeries. We know a peace treaty from the late 15th century, which contains the word ‛ahdnâme as the self-referential term for the document. A comparison of this important document to the texts of contemporary European treaties revealed that whereas the Ottoman capitulations given to western states were contracts between equal parties, this document contains a peace treaty that is about taxpaying and subjection only. While the self-referential name of the document may be identical with the peace and commercial treaties concluded with European monarchs, its content rules out any possibility of its being regarded as their equivalent. However, it can be established – and Rumanian historians have been diligently researching the Ottoman and Bizantine chronicles in that respect – that the confirmations and peace treaties of the voivodes in the 15th century, even if produced to express vassal relationship to the Porte, were formally ‛ahdnâmes indeed.
Unfortunately, no ‛ahdnâme texts have been found since the 16th century. Although the name of this type of document occurs occasionally in connection with the appointments of voivodes in Moldva and Wallachia, it would seem that those documents were not ‛ahdnâmes. The voivodates had a significant degree of internal autonomy from the 16th century to the end of the Ottoman rule, but the voivodes were appointed in a form used in the case of the Turkish officials of the empire. The symbol of investiture was the flag (sancak), the charter of investiture the berât. This, however, was to some extent similar to the capitulation of European countries because the Rumanian voivodes were Christian vassals of the Sultans, and the religious (șeriat) law of the Islamic empire did not apply to them.
Having compared the investiture mechanisms of the voivodes of Moldva and Wallachia to the confirmations of the ruling princes of Transylvania, I have found many similarities. Rumanian historiography does not describe in detail the process of the investiture of the voivodes of Moldva and Wallachia, which differs in the 16th century from that of the Transylvanian only in that in the latter after the confirmation by the Sultan’s letter of order (hükm-i hümâyun) and the presentation of the flag (sancak), the berât, the final letter of investiture was written, and after it was handed over, the Sultan’s ‛ahdnâme was also written, in accordance with the conditions submitted by the Transylvanian envoys. After the flag and the Sultan’s letter of confirmation (nâme-i hümâyun) had been handed over, either both the berât and the ‛ahdnâme were written, or, in some cases, a charter was made at the Ottoman chancery, which contained the characteristics of both document types.
At the end of the paper I print six charters translated from Turkish into Hungarian. Intending to be as thorough as possible, I print, with one exception, all the documents regarded as basic for the issue by Rumanian specialists. These include a commercial and a peace treaty from the 16th century, and two letters of confirmation (berât), as well as two Sultan’s orders from the 16th century, sent, like in the case of Transylvania, to appoint voivodes. As a parallel, I also print a Polish-Turkish peace treaty (‛ahdnâme) from 1577, to exemplify the texts of the Ottoman treaties with European countries.
