Mănăstirea Strâmba şi ctitorii ei. Noi contribuţii documentare
The founders of the Strâmba Monastery. New documentary evidence

Summary/Abstract: The aims of the present study are twofold. The first one is to research into the history of the Strâmba Monastery, founded in the Gorj region at the beginning of the 17th century by Stoichiţa Râioşanul, an important dignitary of that time. The second is to reconstruct, as far as possible, the genealogy of the founding family. At the beginning of the year 1620, Stoichiţa Râioşanul decided to entrust the biggest part of his wealth to the monastery of Strâmba. In addition, he placed the same monastery under the protection of the Wallachian lord and of the metropolitan bishop. For the next two centuries, Stoichinţǎ’s endowment of the monastery was to be challenged both by his relatives and by the Wallachian lords. Thus, some of the lords, such as Gavrilă Movilă and Alexandru Iliaş, tried to settle Stoichiţa’s debts by confiscating some of the monastery villages. Simultaneously, Stoichiţa’s relatives argued that they bought back from the Wallachian lords the right of patronage over the monastery. For that reason, they frequently interfered in the life of the monastery and even used for their own purposes the monastic wealth. The monks had a long and strenuous judicial fight with Stoichiţǎ’s collateral descendants, which ended in an agreement only at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thus, the founding family finally gave up any patronage right and acknowledged that the monastery of Strâmba was places solely under the obedience of the Râmnic bishopric. The study has an appendix that includes several, previously unpublished, documents that shed new lights on this lengthy dispute.

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