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THE PRINCELY COUNCIL AT THE END 15TH AND EARLY 16TH CENTURY WALLACHIA – SOME ASPECTS

R. Neacsa

Abstract

While the issue of the regional boyar families during the 15th and early 16th century Wallachia has already been approached, the princely council may yet be seen as a mixed up puzzle. Even if we have most of the pieces, the general picture continues to escape us. In our paper we wish to present the first results of a wider research. The study of the princely council during the reign of Radu the Great (1496-1508), but also with references to the previous reign of Vlad the Monk (1482-1496), his father, and to the one following his death, until 1512, intends to answer several questions: who were the predominant boyar families that occupied the offices? How and why did they occupy offices for such long periods of time? Was their constant presence in the council a strategy of the price to better define the circle of power upon which he relayed and which accepted his legitimacy? Our working hypothesis is that the reasons why the prince chose the council members, far from being random, were actually a strategy of constructing a network of power on which he relayed in ruling the country. Starting from the existing studies, but especially from the investigation of the existing corpus of documents, we identified some of the members of the council and their kin at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, each file being inserted into a database that in the end will clearly display the elements of continuity and change within the political environment. Moreover, if we corroborate the statistical situation offered by the charters with other sources, we will have drawn the image of an aristocratic stratum which dominated the WallachiaВ’s political landscape during the last two decades of the 15th century. What does the study of princely council tell us, after all? That after mid15th century, after a period of severe political crisis, a group of boyars and their families started to constantly get involved into the political life of Wallachia, creating a network of power which systematically interfered with that of the Wallachian prince. This constant collaboration created a period of equilibrium which came to a brisk end after Radu the GreatВ’s death, followed by a new political crisis. They were not merely local circles of power, but they also had strong international inferences. The results obtained so far gave us confidence that the database is a useful instrument of investigating the circle of power at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries, under all its aspects - social, political and economic.

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