On the separation of the Moldavian estates after the Bucharest Peace (1812). Several additions

Abstract

After the occupation of Moldavia between the Pruth and the Dniester, the Russian Empire imposed, through the Bucharest peace, to the estate owners to choose within 18 months the country side where they would live. For a while, the Romanians believed that the Russian army would retreat, like it happened beforehand, so they postponed making a decision until the fall of 1813, when they had to “separate” themselves from the estates to the left or to the right of the Pruth. Most of the great landowners chose to stay in Moldavia under Ottoman domination. Hence, proportionally, most of the estates sold were on the side of the country occupied by the Russian Empire. The way this process unfolded was reconstructed by Alexandru Lapedatu (1916), and the current paper brings a series of additions and clarifications, as well as a list, unpublished and unused in the Romanian historiography, with 387 villages and parts of villages, from Moldavia left from the Pruth, sold or changed in the last two months of the year 1813 and in the first days of the year 1814. At the same time, this paper suggests, at a general level, the way the separation of estates and families led to the separation of Moldavia, but, at the same time, secondarily, this multitude of names of settlements and masters may be used, sometime in the future, to the elaboration of a historical and toponymic study of the localities from the left of the Pruth, following the model of the one elaborated for the localities on the right bank of the Pruth by the toponymy collective with the “A. Philippide” Romanian Philology Institute, coordinated by Prof. Dragoș Moldovanu.