Los rumanos en las memorias de viaje de los occidentales

For more than one hundred years (1711/1716-1821), the history of Moldavia and Wallachia was deeply marked by the realities generated through the installation and evolution of the Phanariote regime. The same situation will be found in Transylvania as well, where after the year 1699 the Habsburg regime will settle in (since 1699 until the year 1918, the Transylvanian Principality was included in the Habsburg Empire, and since the year 1867 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). In this quite complex historical context, in the 18th century, the Romanians of Moldavia and Wallachia, although under the formula of autonomy, were under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, and those in Transylvania under the dominion of the Habsburg Empire. Sure there were also other zones of the Romanian area that were under the direct dominion of the Ottoman Empire (Dobrogea) or under that of the Habsburg Empire (Banat) or even some territories were torn apart from the body of Moldavia (Bukovina - 1775) or Wallachia (Oltenia 1718-1739) and ceded by the Ottoman to the Habsburg Empire. The foreign travelers that came through the Romanian area (Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania) in the 18th century or even lived here for a while left a series of testimonies about the Romanians, which entered the category of the historical sources. However, out of all these foreign travelers that under various forms left testimonies about the Romanians, most of them were Westerners (French, English, Germans, Austrians, Italians but also other nationalities). Being on different missions in the agitated context of the 18th century, of the various wars between the great European powers or simple occasional travelers, as missionaries, writers, journalists, officers, diplomates, they left to the posterity a series of works, especially with the character of memoir, out of which one can grasp almost all the features of the Romanian society. The merit of these travelers is all the greater not just because they contributed to making the Romanians known in Europe but to a certain extent some of them participated to the rebirth of the Romanian people during this period. Thus, our approach aimed in this sense, to make an overall review of the analyses of the 18th century Western traveler memoirs about the Romanians, based on all the historiographic sources available at present, of the Western travelers who came through the Romanian area during the period 1700-1800 from the perspective of the drafting of some short portraits of them and a division of them on nationalities, to present these testimonies about the Romanians insisting especially on the large memoirs, on the study and of the classification of the type of image taken from these writings. In other words, we have tried, especially at the end of this work, after having gone through some necessary preliminary stages, to catalogue mainly, to analyze and then to present by several more illustrative examples what the Western travelers wrote in their travelogues about the Romanians in the 18th century. It is an evident fact that, in the travel memoirs, in general, but also in the 18th century Westerners’ memoirs, in particular, in some cases, subjectivity intervened (having to do with several factors of which we shall remind for example the intellectual training of the Western traveler, the mission he had in the Romanian area, the Western society he was coming from, the time spent in the Romanian area) and some errors (especially that a great part of these works have been published a considerable period of time after the voyage through the Romanian area) but more often than not, the Western travelers have tried to be as objective as possible, delineating in their writings an image as close to reality as possible. We can note the fact that most of the 18th century memoirs about the Romanians were elaborated and published after the year 1770, with a few exceptions