of the dragoman (interpreter) of the Porte and the title of hospodar (prince, or
more appropriately, governor) of the Danubian Principalities, which meant that
only rich and influential dragoman s could hope to gain, whether by licit or illicit
means, the Moldo-Wallachian thrones. In practice, the title was often sold to the
highest bidder who subsequently attempted to recover his losses by raising taxes
and dues and by selling, in his turn, government and administrative offices to
boyar s (i.e. native nobles) increasingly dependent on state service.
Throughout their history, the native boyar s have built their wealth, power, and
sense of identity within the complex network of relationships that evolved among
the Ottoman suzerain, the Prince, his Greek-Phanariot and native Romanian
clients, and the rest of society: the clergy, peasants, Gypsy slaves, and a steadily
growing merchant and professional class which often sought—and gained—entry
into boyar dom. Contesting the Ottoman-appointed ruler and appealing to one
great power or another (France, Russia, Austria, Turkey) for the preservation
of the principalities’ autonomy and of their own rights as a class became the
boyar s’ main foreign political objective and dominated Romanian political life
up to at least the 1840s and 1850s, when a new social and national awareness led
to political energies being increasingly channelled towards reforming society and
building the nation.
Historians’ views on “Phanariotism” have been predominantly negative, but
revisionist readings of the period started to emerge more consistently in the 1970s.
Jianu, Women, Fashion, and europeanization
203
My own analysis of the channels of Europeanization in the Principalities is based
on this re-adjusted view, according to which—irrespective of the overall negative
impact of foreign domination and its political legacy—the Phanariot régimes
contributed in a positive way to the refashioning of the capital cities Bucharest
and Iaşi in the early nineteenth century as “centres of Hellenic culture, a crucial
intersection of Ottoman, Russian, Italian and central European influences.”7 Many
of the Ottoman-appointed princes who arrived in the Principalities with retinues
comprising French- and Greek-speaking doctors, secretaries, and scholars, had
major roles in building schools, printing presses, hospitals, and orphanages, as
well as in commissioning the codes of law that served as the foundations of
modern Romanian jurisprudence.
Negative readings of Phanariotism owe much to the rivalry of “natives” and
“foreigners” in the pursuit of power and wealth in ancien-régime Romania. Late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ethnic Romanians must have resented
the Phanariots’ presence, the ensuing competition for resources, as well as the
superiority of the Greek language and culture that dominated at the courts and the
academic centres of Bucharest and Iaşi, forgetful that this culture was “European”
in a foundational sense of the word. In a study which remains little-quoted in the
relevant literature, the late historian Vlad Georgescu made what so far apparently
remains the only attempt at a quantitative study of the corpus of political texts
produced in the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia between
1369 and 1878.8 His sample comprised 2,049 texts (princes’ decrees, memoranda,
theoretical works, reforms projects) produced by 302 authors on 172 general
themes subdivided into topics as varied as the “meanings” of history and the
“historical destiny” of the Romanians, the international status, sovereignty, and
autonomy of the Principalities, representations of the Ottomans and the Greeks,
the merits of industrialization, pleas for civil and human rights, and many others,
minutely categorized and quantified by Georgescu. In terms of the Romanians’
broad political-cultural choices as set out by their intellectual élite in the Phanariot
period, most texts advocate a rapprochement with western Europe, a distancing
from the “East” (the Ottoman suzerain power and the Russian protecting power),
and a clearly expressed inclination to distinguish themselves from the “southeast”
of Europe (a trend that continues today in the form of a reluctance to be seen as
part of the “Balkans”). Anti-European views were rarely expressed before 1821,
and when they were, they originated, in Georgescu’s view, in dogmatic disputes
largely fuelled by the Patriarchate of Constantinople.9 On the contrary, most
Romanian authors viewed education in West-European schools and travel abroad
in a very positive light. Attacks on the “corrupting” influence of the West belong
almost exclusively to the post-1848 period.
The contemporaries’ negative views of the Phanariot period (1711–1821) as
disruptive of this pro-European path are reflected in the comparative stagnation
in the production of political texts between 1720 and 1770, and in the prevalence
of ideas of decline and backwardness in the available texts. Most of the causes of
decline as perceived between 1760 and 1830 are connected to foreign domination
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or protectorate (Ottoman-Greek between the sixteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, Russian after 1821), hence the prevalence of foreign political rather than
domestic-social issues in the texts covered by the survey. Very few authors in the
period prior to 1821 attributed the country’s economic and cultural backwardness
to the corruption, venality and/or inefficient administration of the native (ethnic
Romanian) élites. Instead they primarily pursued increased autonomy and
ultimately independence from the Porte, Austria, and Russia.
Even though such comprehensive statements must be treated with due caution,
they do provide signposts for an understanding of the period in Romanian history
up to 1850 largely as a culturally pro-European and politically reformist period.
This was the crucial period in which a small but influential group of reformist
nobles and intellectuals addressed concepts such as the nation, the ethnic unity and
shared traditions of the Romanians in the various provinces they inhabited, the pro-
European option, and the rejection of Ottoman, Russian, and southeast European
developmental models. Their largely theoretical efforts prepared the ground for
landmarks such as the abolition of the Ottoman commercial monopoly in 1829,
the unification of the Principalities in 1859, the establishment of a constitutional
monarchy in 1866, and, eventually, national independence in 1877.
Travellers, Exoticism and Turquerie
Travellers’ accounts are a major source of information for the largely source-
impoverished social history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
Romania, as suggested by a major research project at the “Nicolae Iorga” Historical
Research Institute in Bucharest involving the publication of a still growing
collection of such accounts in Romanian translation.10 There is in addition much
documentary travel literature not yet published in Romanian, published a long
time ago in obscure periodicals, or insufficiently exploited so far. Icono
graphy—
chiefly lithographs by itinerant artists, votive church murals, and the earliest
formal portraiture in early nineteenth-century Romania—is a source that has been
investigated to some extent by art historians and historians of fashion such as Al.
Alexianu, Andrei Cornea, and Adrian Silvan Ionescu,11 although even here much
remains to be done.
To a lesser extent, internal primary sources such as the period’s dowry papers,
testaments, and wealth inventories are also suggestive sources, but they, of course,
never offer a “living” image of how clothes were actually worn, nor a sense of what
material possessions meant for their owners, donors, and observers. What these
sources have preserved, however, is the extensive and, until the 1850s, almost
exclusively Turkish, lexicon of wardrobes, as well as occasional information on
prices and consumption, and on the “social circuits” of clothes—that is, on the
ways in which clothes were purchased, offered, transmitted, and recycled in the
period from roughly the 1780s to the 1850s.12 The language of a late-eighteenth-
century dowry record from Wallachia or Moldavia is almost incomprehensible
to a present-day Romanian, due mainly to the Turkish names of now largely
obsolete items of clothing and domestic appliances. Such names entered the
Jianu, Women, Fashion, and europeanization
205
language mainly via Greek, the official language of administration, law, and trade,
which explains the hesitant spelling of, for instance, cübbe (overcoat), rendered
variously as giubeo, ğiubeoa, or giubea, or of entari, normally listed as anteri in most documents. Thus, for instance, the items given by a Moldavian boyar
lady to her daughter in a dowry list of 1775 include “a cübbe lined with samur
(sable),” a “cübbe of kakum (ermine) with gold thread,” a “cübbe lined with sincab
(squirrel),” as well as a “night entari of germesud (satin).”13 Until the 1830s at
least, dowries were replete with items such as biniş, alaca, ferace, kontoş, and
many other similar items. At this stage, Romanian historiography is still lacking
in detailed studies of prices, trade, and inheritance patterns of boyar family estates
for the period under consideration here. In addition, the wide range of Central
European and Ottoman coins used in transactions and the rapid fluctuations in
exchange rates and monetary values makes it extremely difficult to assess, for
instance, levels of consumption within a family or across several families, or
to make comparative analyses of budgets and expenditures among families, or
social, ethnic, and professional groups. I am, therefore, giving a few examples
that have a purely suggestive value for price/income ratios in late eighteenth-
century Moldavia, around the time when the above-mentioned dowry list was
issued. Thus, in 1763, when the residing Ottoman Divan Effendi (judge) received
a monthly salary of 250 lei,14 his secretary 140 lei, and the Phanariot prince’s cook
30 lei, a squirrel pelisse and piece of atlas cost 65 lei, a ferace was also 65 lei, while a horse, a very valuable item at the time, was worth 246 lei, and a carriage
was 125 lei.15 The Moldavian state budget for 1764 lists salaries of dignitaries,
officials and court servants ranging between 60 lei per month to the Uşierul cel
mare (grand court usher) and a mere 2 lei per month to the gardener. The Greek
doctor Fotaki, with 20 lei as official monthly income, and the fur-maker with 10
lei, could hardly have engaged in conspicuous consumption, although one should
not forget the gifts (Slav. mile) made to civil servants and court professionals by
the Prince.16
During this time, an accelerated pace of change dramatically transformed
upper-class female fashions, the patterns of consumption, imports and leisure,
domestic amenities and interiors, as well as, one can speculate, the élites’—
especially élite women’s—sense of their own identity. Members of the urban
élites, on which this discussion is focused, included higher and lesser nobility (the
native boyar s), a few wealthy merchants, and some members of other upwardly
mobile urban socio-professional groups, such as doctors and civil servants who
could gain relatively easy access into the boyar class, usually via purchases of
titles. The term “Phanariot” or “Greek-Phanariot” designates, as noted above,
members of the Ottoman-imposed governing élites of Wallachia and Moldavia
between 1711 and 1822, but the upper class groups I have in view also included
the ethnic Romanian boyar s, who, as landowners and state officials, administered
the Principalities and exploited their resources in conjunction, if not always in
harmony, with the Phanariots.
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The writings of travellers to the “Orient” often include tactile little dramas of
foreigners and natives curiously gazing at or touching each other’s clothes, the
Turkish bath scene in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters (written 1716–1718,
published 1763) being only the most famous scene of this kind.
One such traveller’s tale provides a convenient introductory insight into what
a lady of the Phanariot élite in Wallachia must have looked like in the 1790s.
Travelling to Constantinople via the Romanian Principalities in 1794—on
a more adventurous route than was customary for young English men on the
Grand Tour—the young and wealthy John B. Sawrey Morritt (1772–1843) of
Rokeby Hall in Yorkshire, and his two companions, crossed the Carpathians from
Transylvania into Wallachia in carriages perilously drawn by oxen. Afterwards,
having been shaken for days on the terrible Wallachian roads of the time, they
were only too ready to be enchanted by the effortless hospitality of a Wallachian
lady who received them, surrounded by her children and her maidservants, in the
absence of her husband, an aga (i.e. police prefect) who was away on business.17
This tableau of exotic domesticity and colourful costume was complemented
the following morning by the minimal and—to westerners—unusual Turkish
breakfast of coffee and rose sherbet.
She was seated on a low board sofa which filled the whole of one side of the
room, surrounded by five or six Greek slaves in great state, [Morritt wrote
to his sister on 25 July 1794.] … Her gown was long-sleeved, coming up
before no higher than her cestus, which was tied à la Campbell.18 It was
gathered round her ankles and legs like trousers, and was made of a spotted
light muslin. On her head she wore a flat-topped high cap with a gold tassel
on the top, and a shawl handkerchief round her forehead, her hair hanging
loose about her shoulders. Over her gown she wore a long light blue silk
pelisse edged with fur, with half-sleeves; on her feet she had thin yellow-
leather boots, with slippers, which she left at the side of the sofa to put up
her feet, for they all sit cross-legged, à la Turque. Over her bosom she wore
a thin fold of muslin which fastened under her cestus; and I assure you,
though not of the première jeunesse, it is difficult to imagine a more elegant
figure.19
The drawings of the Viennese painter who accompanied Morr
itt on his travels
are presumed lost.20 However, the works of the French-born Swiss “peintre
Turc” Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–89) offer a plausible suggestion of the general
appearance of a Greek-Romanian Phanariot lady in the period under consideration.
Liotard spent a few years in Constantinople (1738–42), where, incidentally, he
must have obtained special dispensation to wear Turkish dress,21 and a much less
documented period in Moldavia (1742–43), where he gained first-hand knowledge
of the lines, colours, and fabrics, as well as of the social and political conventions
of the Turkish costume in a Balkan context. The only known Moldavian female
figure by Liotard is a sketch for the official portrait of Ecaterina Mavrocordat
(Greek: Mavrokordatos), wife of the ruling Prince Constantin Mavrocordat, but
Jianu, Women, Fashion, and europeanization
207
Figure 7.1. Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portrait of the Moldavian Princess
Ecaterina Mavrocordat. Red and black chalk, 1742–43.
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.
her dress and pose suggest late “Byzantine” court pomp rather than the more
relaxed and “bourgeois” attitudes of the Phanariot and native boyar s in daily life
(Figure 7.1). For purposes of illustration, Liotard’s presumed portrait of Mary
Gunning, Countess of Coventry, is probably a fairly accurate representation of the
late eighteenth-century Moldo-Wallachian every-day code of dress for women of
the urban élites (Figure 7.2).22
The basic elements of the “Phanariot look”—an essentially layered look—
were, for the women, a light gauze chemise ending in shalvars (Turkish: şalvar),
covered by a frock, usually of taffeta or velvet, and one or even two superimposed
long or short gowns or coats called anteri. In the summer, the anteri could be
covered in its turn by a ferace or a biniş, or, on grand occasions, by the maloté,
a very expensive coat lined with ermine fur. The entari, ferace, and biniş were
common to both female and male wardrobes, so that—details excepted—female
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
Figure 7.2. Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portrait d’une jeune femme en costume turc assise
sur un divan (presumed portrait of Mary Gunning, Countess of Coventry).
Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History Page 38
