Orăşeni stăpâni de pământ în Moldova secolului al XVIII-lea. Cazurile satelor Roşcani şi Găureni
Landowning Citizens in 18th Century Moldavia. The Cases of the Villages of Roşcani and Găureni

Summary/Abstract: The author tries, by means of case studies, to approach the problem of landowning in the case of citizens. The topic has not enjoyed by now, in the Romanian historiography, special investigation, being only tangentially dealt with, most of the times in relation to the citizens’ aspiration to gain access to the boyars’ social category. From this standpoint, in the absence of a more thorough analysis, the acquiring of lands by the citizens tends to be interpreted rather as a mandatory phase in legitimating a future ennoblement, while the economic motivation of landowning is passed over. By researching the content of several documents from the collection of volumes about the history of the city of Iaşi and of a number of unpublished acts from the National Archives of Iaşi, the author tried to reconstruct, partially at least, the destiny of two families of merchants that owned, in the 18th century, two estates near Iaşi (Roşcani and Găureni). At the same time, the author attempted an identification of the reasons – particularly the economic ones – why some merchants, inhabitants of the cities of Iaşi and Botoşani, with business relations in Transylvania and Poland, became owners of large estates neighbouring the city.

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