More than a decade ago, whilst examining the pre-modern Romanian mindset, I made the following observation 1: whilst the sixteenth century harboured the fatalistic notion of the inexorable nature of Ottoman rule, which had come about because of the sins of all kinds committed by Orthodox Christendom in the defunct Byzantine Empire, the seventeenth century was to reinforce a deep-seated conviction that an understanding with the Ottomans was the only possible path to survival. Neculce put it this way in O samă de cuvinte – attributing to Stephen the Great himself the advice to his son and heir to the throne “to submit the country to the Turks, and not to other nations, for the Turkish nation is wiser and stronger’2 – a sentiment echoed by Cantemir in his allegorical novel Istoria ieroglifică prin glasul Hameleonului – that is, by Scarlat Ruset – speaking of “the painted bowing of the head”3 to appease the enemy, whilst also proclaiming there, in connection with the great hetman Lupu Bogdan, the prince’s brother-in-law, ‘that victories have often been seen to come more favourably when one proceeds against the enemy with obedience and stealth’4, with a conclusion that seems to encapsulate a profession of faith by the Romanian, regardless of social rank, at the height of Ottoman rule, “that the reed, bending with the wind, bends and rises again, whilst the fir tree, resisting it, topples from its roots”5.
To this day, sociologists identify in Romanian behaviour an orientation towards a ‘culture of survival’ – as opposed to a ‘culture of development’ – accompanied by fatalism, pessimism, paternalism, authoritarianism and attempts at adaptation 6, the echo of these words spoken by the allegorical figures imagined by the Brâncoveanu family’s mortal enemy rings out all too familiarly within our national borders and even beyond.
The prince who patronised the Aristotelian education of the Greek ‘iatrophilosophers’ who had studied at the University of Padua, and who founded churches in the dynastic tradition such as Hurezi, where, in the narthex, was painted ‘the great line… of his lineage and family’ and where, in the ‘House of Books’, Byzantine chronicles printed in Greek-Latin editions in the Paris of Louis XIV were kept; the voivode who received the title of ‘Reichsfürst’ from the Habsburgs and who, like Stephen the Great before him, was closely associated with Constantine the Great, the parallels between the son of Papa of Brâncoveni and the son of Constantius Chlorus becoming a theme in the Romanian culture of the time; the lover, in a playful and Baroque spirit, of noble residences at Obilești and Potlogi, at Doicești and Mogoșoaia—which pioneered the first pan-Romanian architectural style, with a modern legacy to match—brought his life to a close, alongside his four sons depicted in the narthex at Hureze, in the dramatic spirit of an era in which Death swarmed through texts and frescoes, bringing the ‘Last Judgement’ and the ‘Apocalypse’7ly into the porticoes of Wallachian and Oltenian dwellings, whether princely, boyar or peasant.
Was the end of the Brâncovenis, as martyrs of Orthodox Christianity, somehow in keeping with the heroic spirit of the time and place? The answer is a categorical ‘no’, and in the name of truth we must not obscure the sad moral realities of Romanian society three centuries ago.
Through ‘The Song of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu’, which over the last two centuries has become a ballad, a folk song, a carol, and even a ‘dance’—a folk drama that has entered the repertoire of some miners in Transylvania— each generation has been able to read and hear—sprinkled with timeless moral parables about the rises and falls of mankind—‘a marvellous tale / Heard throughout the world’, whose lost hero, ‘cried out/ and cursed the emperor:/ “Oh, you pagans and wretches,/ how dare you slay us without justice?/ What have we done to deserve/ to perish without trial?”’8
Brâncoveanu’s end was orchestrated by his executioners, not far from the pavilion of Sultan Ahmed III, like a spectacle designed to instil fear, of the sort that the backstreets of Istanbul never shunned. Thus ended the life of a hero who seemed to have stepped out of a Baroque drama, such as so many were written in the century of Constantin Vodă’s birth. A life that had exemplified so perfectly those concepts of ‘fortuna labilis’ and ‘the wheel of life’, so often evoked in the texts and imagery of Wallachia. It came to a mind-boggling end, leaving behind the memory – alongside the death of Mihai Viteazul – of the most terrible Romanian sacrifice of the ancient era9.
I once wrote 10 that in our world of 1700, where one favoured by fortune could pen, in a letter, the words ‘I need nothing else but a shred of life without terror’, whilst a princely chronicler lamented rhetorically over so many Ottoman grievances (‘A barbaric and pagan inhumanity, to the extent that you torment your own subjects!’), Saint Constantin Brâncoveanu’s attempt to establish, with commensurate ambition, a political stability long out of reach, during a reign spanning more than a quarter of a century, as well as the proclamation of cultural aspirations that demanded more favourable times, remains an almost heroic gesture in our history.
The proud, immensely wealthy ‘beye of gold’ crowned, through his martyr’s death, a turbulent reign undermined by the uncertainties he had foreseen, just as, through his patronage of the arts, he earned the glory of a prince of culture, and just as, through his acts as protector of those of the same faith as himself throughout the East, he gained the fame of a successor to the basileis of old. We also observed on that occasion that the parallels between Romanian civilisation and Europe—which can be particularly highlighted in several key areas of court life—must by no means obscure the distances, still at times vast, between the mentalities of the Lower Danube and those of the Atlantic. Here and there, there is an unexpected detail whose glimmer can become a harsh but necessary light: in the very year of 1688, when Brâncoveanu began his reign in Wallachia, amidst so much uncertainty in the East, on the other side of the continent, in England—the land of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of the ‘social contract’ between the people and the crown, of the end of the Stuart reign, the symbol of Western certainty—which to this day bears the name of Edward Lloyd, the founder of modern insurance—was mentioned for the very first time… 11.
Through his martyr’s death, he crowned a reign that had been turbulent and undermined by uncertainties which he had foreseen, just as, through his patronage of the arts, he earned the glory of a prince of culture, and just as, through his acts as protector of those who shared his faith throughout the East, he gained the fame of a successor to the basileis of old.
We find, moreover, an echo of this fundamental uncertainty even in the official chronicle of Brâncoveanu’s reign, written by Radu Logofăt Greceanu. For the landmark year 1711, he noted: ‘I believe that no age will have brought upon the lands matters more fickle, more unfounded and more shrouded in mystery than in this year, as this time has brought upon the Ottoman Empire, for one day it cried out for peace, and the next it stirred up strife; one day it clothed its envoys in caftans, and the next it imprisoned and reviled them”12).
Amidst this Romanian fickleness, the opportunism of the boyars flourished, peppered at every turn with betrayals and fuelled by a transactional mentality shaped by the yoke of the Turks, about which I have written more than once 13.
The cultured and well-travelled Cantacuzinos betrayed their nephew Constantin Brâncoveanu – the roots of the enmity lay in the conflict between the voivode’s sons and the offspring of the steward Constantin – but they also betrayed the Turks – as if they were of the same stock as the country – for the benefit of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs 14, as a chronicler of this ‘Danubian Solomon’15, did not hesitate to record regarding the steward Constantin, his son and future ruler Ștefan, and the spătar Mihai: ‘That they were not content to serve but one master, namely the Turkish sultan, from whom they received favour and honour, but went about meddling in affairs with the Germans and the Muscovites and other nations’…“that they might forever be the rulers of our country and our land, for they had received letters of appointment from the counts, the grofs, and from both Christian monarchs”16
Recent research in the Ottoman archives has revealed that the Imperial Divan in Istanbul had appointed Ștefan Cantacuzino as ruler of Wallachia, in place of his first cousin, Saint Constantin Brâncoveanu, whilst the latter was still ruling from his seat in Bucharest 17.
Even a chronicler who was no friend of Brâncoveanu, such as the vornic Radu Popescu, knew that the Cantacuzino boyars “were the bane of his (Brâncoveanu’s, ed.) life, and that of his sons and his household18, after exposing the turpitude of the steward Constantin, the ringleader of the intrigues, who is said to have declared to the Turks that he had poisoned his own brother, Voivode Șerban Cantacuzino, because, it is said, he was not loyal to the Sublime Porte19.
This grim moral picture is completed by another contemporary chronicler when he writes: ‘And the Cantacuzines, that is to say the Șăitănești, who by their very nature were restless and discontented with all the previous rulers, had shown themselves to be deceitful and malicious, and had even begun to deceive Prince Costandin, from whom they had benefited greatly, regarding his uncles, Costandin the steward and Mihai the chamberlain, as parents, and his cousins Ștefan the chamberlain and Radu the commissioner as brothers and loyal allies’20”.
It is true that the boyars of 1700 had illustrious predecessors in treachery in the Wallachian region, since Suleiman the Magnificent had rewarded, Radu Paisie, almost two centuries earlier, for his loyal service in the campaign at Buda (1541), whilst this illegitimate son of Radu the Great was conducting secret negotiations with Ferdinand of Habsburg (1543)21.
At the same time, the hope of personal salvation – and, why not, that of the country – led, even in the very century of the establishment of Ottoman rule, to a series of betrayals and acts of opportunism: Ion Golâe, the Grand Logothete of Moldavia, urged Ion Voivode ‘the Terrible’ to submit to the Turks or flee 22; Alexandru II Mircea had it recorded in the wall chronicle at Bucovăț, near Craiova, his satisfaction that ‘my faithful emperor’ – that is, the Sultan – had killed the Romanian voivode just mentioned, replacing him with Petru Șchiopul, the very brother of the ruler of Bucharest 23; finally, Ieremia Movilă wished ‘to hand over to the Turks’ Mihai Viteazul 24, against whom he had brought armies from Poland, where the Moldavian prince was granted indigenate, that is to say, Polish noble citizenship.
These ‘fine’ habits continued into the Brâncoveanu era, when we learn that the Wallachian boyars, ‘like a pack of insolent dogs’, complained about Nicolae Mavrocordat, the first Phanariot prince, to ‘Ștaimvil’25 – that is, to Stephan, Count of Steinville, the Austrian governor of Oltenia.
Knowing all or part of this, the historian of national psychology Dumitru Drăghicescu did not hesitate to write, over a century ago: ‘Cases such as these—of sell-outs, betrayals, intrigues and divisions perpetrated by the boyars—fill the entire wretched history of our nation’26.
All these were moral lapses that were part and parcel of the necessary compromises and the skilful exploitation of every opportunity that saved the Romanian nation and its statehood. The 1700s best reflect this aspect of the Romanian mindset in the necessarily duplicitous attitude of Constantin Brâncoveanu towards the great neighbouring powers, as described by a contemporary chronicler: ‘Constantin Voivode, regarding these events that had taken place, had two calculations: one being that he had urged the Tsar to march against the Turks; should the Turks be defeated, the Muscovites’ victory would be seen in a favourable light, as it was through his urging that victory over the Christian enemies had been achieved. His other calculation was that he was constantly writing to the Turks, urging them to advance without fear, telling them that their armies were few in number and starving; and he devised other such schemes so that he might not miss out on the spoils, whether one side or the other were to prevail. But the poor man fell foul of both sides: for the Muscovites recognised him as a cunning and deceitful Christian, whilst the Turks branded him a traitor to the emperor…’27
That concern for the safety of Wallachia prevailed here is shown by the episode in the summer of 1711 when Brâncoveanu ‘was staying at Urlați, near Cricov’, in a camp from which he was watching ‘what the Muscovite and Turkish armies would do’ 28, an episode clearly recounted by Radu Greceanu, who speaks of the Wallachian prince’s concern ‘how he might, in such a dreadful time as that, keep the whole country safe and secure from danger on both sides, that is, from both the Turks and the Muscovites’29.
In examining the era of Brâncoveanu, we are, in fact, led to analyse the position of the Romanian elites towards Ottoman rule, particularly from the seventeenth century onwards, when the diversity of viewpoints—reflecting the diversity of the boyar factions under the nobiliary regime— allows us to discern at least one element of political unity present throughout: the need for submission to the Sublime Porte, in order to preserve privileges, principalities and, implicitly, Romanian statehood, unique in South-Eastern Europe.
Whether we are referring to the chronicle of the logothete Radu Greceanu 30 or that of the vornic Radu Popescu 31, or to the Cantacuzino Chronicle 32 or the so-called ‘anonymous chronicle’33, the texts speak of the manner in which, from the establishment of Ottoman suzerainty in the 16th century, when ‘not even the country had been subjugated’34 the rulers and the boyars came to realise that the only way to survive was to make a pact with the enemy through submission: ‘These lords, Neagoe of Wallachia and Bogdan Voivode of Moldavia’ – we are in the context of the first decades after 1500 – ‘paid tribute to the Turks, for they knew that there was no other way for them to find peace’35; and when a certain Radu of Afumați was waging war against the Ottomans—as extensively recorded on his tombstone in the narthex of the monastery church at Curtea de Argeș—the boyars opposed the prince’s wars, “for they could not keep fighting forever, being few in number and their land small, whilst the emperor had conquered and subjugated so many lands and possessed a vast multitude of people. They all wanted the prince to go to the Sublime Porte, to bow his head before the emperor, and so they did’36).
Historical developments would mean that in the following century, when the intrepid Mihnea III was planning to kill the Turks and Tatars in the country, the boyars would betray him to the infidels, only to find themselves, in turn, betrayed by Prince37, whose warlike intentions they had thwarted with words found in the Cantacuzino Chronicle: ‘We shall thwart the serpent, and it will swallow us whole. For we are a small country, devoid of people, powerless and without aid from any quarter. But the Turks are strong, great, and conquer the whole world, from the East to the West’38
A little later, regarding the reign of Radu Leon, “the Turks, seeing that the rulers of our country were disloyal to the empire, ordered that it should become customary, in the third year, the prince should go to the Sublime Porte to kiss the emperor’s hand’39; and a peak of political duplicity was reached during the reign of the first crowned Cantacuzino of Wallachia: “After this, Șărban Vodă, seeing that the Germans (the Habsburgs, n.n.) were prospering, defeating the Turks and capturing their fortresses, and their lands, he and his brothers and relatives decided to send envoys to Beci (Vienna, ed.) to the Emperor, bearing letters concerning the whole country, to pay homage to the Emperor and to request troops to aid them against the Turks, so as to free their country from the Turks and align it with the Emperor, whom the Turks were deceiving (like a cunning man) with their letters, writing to them that he intended to send envoys to the Germans to urge and implore them to bring about peace between the emperors, so that there might be no more bloodshed and other such matters, with which he lulled the Turks into complacency40
This account, which shows no sympathy for Șerban Vodă – which is entirely natural on the part of the son of Hrizea of Popești, the treasurer, a victim of Cantacuzino – is given substance by a passage from the Cantacuzino Chronicle, which testifies that the son of the mattress-maker Constantin feared “lest, during his reign, the country should fall into some hardship or bondage, whether at the hands of the Turks or the Germans, but that he might fight them with many wiles of every kind…”41.
Requests for the title of prince at the Sublime Porte (“for they begged for that from the emperor”42) date back to the era of Radu the Great and the Craiovești family, who swore an oath before Mehmet Pasha 43, whilst the Turks gradually became fully aware of the Romanian divisions, which they sought to arbitrate (I shall recall here the recent remark by a distinguished Turkologist who observed that the divisions amongst the Wallachian and Moldavian boyars were notorious, whilst the Transylvanian nobility showed solidarity in the face of Turkish suzerainty 44).
‘So, realising the extent of the madness the Romanians were engaging in, he immediately ordered the Turks and Tatars to come into the country to subjugate and plunder it’45; as recounted in the Cantacuzino Chronicle regarding the conflicts of the era of Constantin Șerban and Gheorghe Ghica; the same source also reproduces, in the same vein, the reply given by the Grand Vizier to the mattress-maker Constantin Cantacuzino, who was demanding that Wallachian autonomy be preserved: ‘And as the Emperor reigns from east to west, and there is no other country worse than Wallachia, for no sooner does one madness subside than another arises’46.
What is certain is that the long and stable reign of Saint Constantin Brâncoveanu yet at the same time situated at a time of maximum tension in the conflicts between neighbouring powers – in 1699, the Peace of Karlowitz settled the long war with the Ottoman Empire in favour of the Habsburgs, and in 1711 the latter temporarily repelled, at Stănilești, the claims of Peter the Great – provides us with a wealth of data with which to assess the position of the Wallachian elites towards the Sublime Porte.
Even though feelings of Christian solidarity led to a leaning towards Vienna – and this was where a section of the high nobility, led by Aga Constantin Bălăceanu, was based – the prince rejected it for the time being out of prudence: ‘The time has not yet come, he thought, for the Turks and Tatars are still in their prime, and when the time comes, every Christian has a duty to help another Christian, and the lord still said that he would rise up with all his might to help the Christians and the Germans, in due course”47). This hesitation would provoke a harsh retort from the Austrian General Donat Heissler, a frequent visitor to Romanian territory, in a conversation with a boyar: “You did not wish to uphold the agreements and alliances, as we Germans say, the watchword ‘48’—you have breached all your covenants and broken the watchword as well” (here, perhaps, lay the revelation of a sad yet telling constant in Romanian politics, dating back to the very dawn of our modern era!). The same Heissler, a prisoner of the Wallachians and the Turks following the Battle of Zărnești (August 1690), would have a famous exchange with Brâncoveanu that defined the status of the Romanian prince in the eyes of a Westerner: ‘Even if I am a slave, I have only fallen into slavery today, whereas you have been a slave ever since your father made you one’49 This perspective of the prisoner from the Christian imperial army could not easily be refuted, given that, according to custom, ‘when the emperor (the sultan, author’s note) entered the tents, the lord would bow and kneel, and as the emperor passed, he would bow with his head to the ground’50 or that the Prince would travel to Adrianople ‘to kiss the imperial hem’51 or that his cousin and successor, Ștefan Cantacuzino, would kiss the hand of the imbrohor 52, the official in charge of the sultan’s stables…
The custom of royal submission had become so widespread that, if one peruses Brâncoveanu’s notes, one finds that he did not dislike the firman summoning him to the sultan 53. In any case, he wished ‘not to cause offence to his lords’54 whilst doing all this – as the official chronicler admiringly notes, ‘being wise and very conscientious, and desiring, above all, the good of his country and homeland from the bottom of his heart’55 (which, I might add, placed him in striking moral contrast to the highly cultured Moldavian nobleman Dimitrie Cantemir, who “like a coward fled with the Muscovites from his own country”56).
Will all this, I wonder, remain across the centuries as explanations for moral lapses, for a transactional mentality, for a persistent inclination towards procrastination, delays, clever opportunism and timely betrayals, but above all towards the great achievement of Romanian pre-modernity, namely statehood? The historian observes; others are called upon to judge; but we must not forget today the words spoken a hundred years ago by the father of our modern historiography. On 15 August 1914, marking two centuries since the beheadings ordered by the cruel Grand Vizier Gin Ali Pasha, Nicolae Iorga delivered a significant lecture at the Athenaeum entitled ‘The Political Significance of Constantin Brâncoveanu’, in which the historian exemplarily summarised the rigours of the Romanian destiny from the time of Stephen the Great onwards: ‘There was but a single political path, along which we have all walked for centuries… it consisted of many steps to the right and many steps to the left, of much boldness in moving forward, and of much resigned retreat57’.”
- 1
R. Theodorescu, ‘On the First Modernity of the Romanians’, in the Romanian Academy. Inaugural Addresses IX (1996–2005), Bucharest, 2006, pp. 202–203.
- 2
A few words, in The Chronicle of the Land of Moldavia, ed. G. Ștrempel, Bucharest, 1982, p. 168.
- 3
The History of Hieroglyphs, ed. P.P. Panaitescu, I. Verdeș, Bucharest, 1965, p. 25.
- 4
Ibid., Vol. I, p. 93.
- 5
Ibid., vol. II, p. 229.
- 6
Ten Years of Adaptation. The State of the Nation, Institul Pro, Bucharest, 2008, p. 8.
- 7
R. Theodorescu, History and Prophecy in Wallachian Art of the First Half of the European Period, Bucharest, 1999, pp. 410–417.
- 8
Romanian Chronicles and Stories in Verse (17th–18th centuries), ed. D. Simonescu, Bucharest, 1967, pp. 55–60.
- 9
R. Theodorescu, Constantin Brâncoveanu between the ‘House of Books’ and ‘Europe’, 2nd ed., Bucharest, 2012, p. 9.
- 10
‘The Brâncoveanu Landmark’, in Roads to Yesterday, Bucharest, 1992, pp. 50, 55. This text was first published under the title ‘Three Hundred Years Ago: Romanian Opportunism and Betrayal’ in Istorie și civilizație 29, February 2012, pp. 20–22. The letter I am quoting is from Grigore Băleanu to Răducanu Dudescu, in C. Giurescu, Contributions to the Study of the Wallachian Chronicles, Bucharest, 1906, pp. 155–156.
- 11
R. Theodorescu, Constantin Brâncoveanu…, p. 12.
- 12
The History of the Reign of Constantin Basarab Brâncoveanu, Voivode (1688–1714), ed. A. Ilieș, Bucharest, 1970, p. 208.
- 13
First discussed at length in his acceptance speech at the Romanian Academy, On the First Modernity…, p. 201 ff.
- 14
A. Ilieș, in his commentary on The History of the Reign…, p. 12.
- 15
H. Focillon, L’ancien art roumain, in Moyen Age. Survinances et réveils, Montréal, 1945, p. 90.
- 16
The History of Wallachia from October 1688 to March 1717, ed. C. Grecescu, Bucharest, 1959, p. 118.
- 17
Information provided by Mihai Maxim in his presentation on 30 June 2011 at the Department of Historical Sciences and Archaeology of the Romanian Academy, The Romanian Principalities and the Sublime Porte: New Documents from the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul.
- 18
The History of the Lords of Wallachia by Radu Popescu, the Vornic, ed. C. Grecescu, Bucharest, 1963, p. 244.
- 19
Ibid., p. 213.
- 20
The History of Wallachia from October…, p. 113.
- 21
M. Maxim, New Turkish Documents Concerning the Romanian Principalities and the Sublime Porte (1526–1602), Brăila, 2008, pp. 137–139, 170.
- 22
N. Stoicescu, Dictionary of the Great Rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia: 14th–16th Centuries, Bucharest, 1971, p. 308.
- 23
R. Theodorescu, ‘The Inscription from Oltenia and the Inscription from Moldova’, in History Seen Up Close, Bucharest, 1971, p. 308.
- 24
The History of Wallachia, 1290–1690. The Cantacuzino Chronicle, ed. C. Grecescu, D. Simonescu, Bucharest, 1960, p. 72.
- 25
The History of the Lords…, p. 234.
- 26
From the Psychology of the Romanian People. Introduction, Albatros, 1995, p. 236.
- 27
The History of the Lords…, p. 202.
- 28
The History of Wallachia from October…, p. 111.
- 29
The History of the Reign…, p. 180.
- 30
See note 12.
- 31
See note 18.
- 32
See note 24.
- 33
See note 16.
- 34
The History of the Lords…, p. 157.
- 35
Ibid., p. 35.
- 36
Ibid., p. 40.
- 37
Ibid., p. 122.
- 38
The History of Wallachia…, p. 133.
- 39
The History of the Lords…, p. 136.
- 40
Ibid., p. 187.
- 41
The History of Wallachia…, p. 188.
- 42
Ibid., p. 17.
- 43
Ibid., p. 18.
- 44
M. Maxim, New Documents…, p. 230.
- 45
The History of Wallachia…, p. 142.
- 46
Ibid., pp. 144–145.
- 47
The History of Wallachia from October…, p. 21.
- 48
Ibid., p. 23.
- 49
Ibid., p. 32.
- 50
Ibid., p. 69.
- 51
The History of the Reign…, p. 143.
- 52
The History of the Lords…, p. 207.
- 53
E. Vârtosu, The Secret Notes of Constantin Brâncoveanu, 1693–1707, Bucharest, 1940, pp. 20, 22.
- 54
The History of the Reign…, p. 182.
- 55
Ibid., p. 183.
- 56
Ibid., p. 185. A view also shared by other Wallachian chronicles (Istoriile domnilor…, p. 273).
- 57
N. Iorga, The Political Significance of Constantin Brâncoveanu (excerpt), Vălenii de Munte, 1914, p. 16.