MICHAŁ WASIUCIONEK, ÎNALTA POARTĂ ŞI ŢĂRILE ROMÂNE. RIVALI-TĂŢI ŞI ALIANŢE ÎN SECOLUL AL XVII-LEA [THE SUBLIME PORTE AND THE ROMANIAN PRINCIPALITIES. RIVALRIES AND ALLIANCES IN THE 17TH CENTURY], TRANSL. LIA DECEI (BUCUREȘTI: HUMANITAS, 2024), 360 P.
MICHAŁ WASIUCIONEK, ÎNALTA POARTĂ ŞI ŢĂRILE ROMÂNE. RIVALI-TĂŢI ŞI ALIANŢE ÎN SECOLUL AL XVII-LEA [THE SUBLIME PORTE AND THE ROMANIAN PRINCIPALITIES. RIVALRIES AND ALLIANCES IN THE 17TH CENTURY], TRANSL. LIA DECEI (BUCUREȘTI: HUMANITAS, 2024), 360 P.

Summary/Abstract: Despite having been largely overlooked in Romanian historiography, this book attempts to rethink “the political dynamics between the Sublime Porte, Poland–Lithuania and the Danubian principalities during the seventeenth century” (p. 8). The book's core tenet is that cross-border patron-client networks, rather than states and their formal institutions, were the main actors in the political life of seventeenth-century Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Accordingly, various episodes and processes are better understood through the lens of factional politics, rather than as relations – peaceful or conflictual – between states. Moreover, the author's argument amounts to a paradigm shift in how we conceptualize the relationship between the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, on the one hand, and the Ottoman Empire, on the other.

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