Authors

Discussion

In the past few decades, there have been numerous contributions in the field of environmental history from Eastern Europe. In Romanian scholarship, however, this approach has rarely been applied. Yet, thinking in terms of environment enables historians to surpass the national and ethnic context that the past territory of today’s Romania is still predominantly embedded in. This paper discusses, through the example of ownership and usership patterns, the interaction between humans and their environment in the pre-modern Southern and Eastern Carpathians. These mountains are located in the middle of present-day Romania, but in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, they formed the frontier between the principalities Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia - countries that historians either study separately or within the framework of later Romania. Taking the mountains as a point of departure, however, one can highlight the entanglements not only between these individual principalities but also between highland and lowland, urban and rural, nature and culture, resulting in new fundings in the social and economic history of the region and beyond. Due to the scarcity of sources on the mountainous region (charters, letters, trial records, tax registers, estate descriptions, travelogues), the longue durée perspective is essential, taking into consideration also results of the natural sciences (palaeobotany, palaeoclimatology, dendrochronology). By showing that the need for pastures and forests influenced mountain society more than the state frontier, the paper underlines the role of the environment in Eastern European history.