Conceptualizing Moldavian Ottomanness: Elite Culture and Ottomanization of the Seventeenth-Century Moldavian Boyars

The scope of the article is to provide a conceptual framework for the evolution of the material culture of Moldavian and Wallachian boyar elites throughout the early modern period, specifically their reception of Ottoman models and sartorial tastes. Whereas the Romanian historiography has largely dismissed these developments as a skin-deep phenomenon at odds with the anti-Ottoman stance of the indigenous population, the author proposes a revision of the established master narrative. By recasting the boyar elite as a provincial elite of the Ottoman Empire, the paper argues that the sartorial shift reflected a deeper process of "Ottomanization" of the Danubian principalities, parallel to a similar process in other provinces of the empire