ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the two Romanian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were placed under a new legal-political order for over 100 years (1711–1821), generically referred to as the Phanariot regime. The Phanariot regime was a period of societal upheaval and contradictory pressures. On the one hand, the regime was in a state of almost continuous crisis: the Porte’s constant interference in local affairs led to endemic political instability, compounded by recurrent wars, lost territory, and long periods of foreign occupation. On the other hand, the Phanariot regime was also a period of wide-ranging reforms. The drive for reforms was, first and foremost, pragmatic. The legal measures were only intermittently applied and were therefore largely ineffective. The influence of the Constantinople-based Ottoman Greeks continued to grow steadily and reached its peak. At the political level, the Greek and Romanian national discourses moved apart after the anti-Ottoman revolt instigated in 1821 by the conspiratorial Greek organization Philiki Hetaireia.
