From Property to Person

A Roma Woman’s Legal Battle for Freedom

The screening of the film Aferim! at Käte Hamburger Kolleg was a valuable opportunity to reflect on the history of the Roma people and their legal status in the nineteenth century. My colleagues’ reaction to the film differed significantly from its reception within Romanian society. Silence. Horrified glances. The past sometimes seems so distant—almost unknown.

Why, then, do I speak about Aferim!?

When director Radu Jude began working on the screenplay, he had read two of my books on men and women before the courts of justice in the eighteenth century. He therefore sought my assistance in constructing a story that would be historically credible and capable of provoking debate within society.

The film tells the story of a bailiff who, accompanied by his son, sets out in search of a runaway slave who had fled his master out of fear of being executed after an affair with the latter’s wife. The journey of the father–son pair through Wallachia in 1835 brings together a series of elements meant to draw attention to contemporary issues still insufficiently debated in Romanian society: the enslavement of the Roma, antisemitism, racism, and violence against women. Although the year 1835 may seem arbitrarily chosen, it in fact reflects the transition of Romanian society toward modernization, embodied in the father–son binomial: the father, a bailiff and thus a representative of the old regime, and the young son, a soldier dressed in the uniform of the newly established army.

My role was to assist the director (who was also co-author of the screenplay) in lending the film historical credibility through careful attention to the plot, vocabulary, costumes, landscape, and narrative structure.

Although the film sparked interest within Romanian society—often reluctant to acknowledge the traumatic past of the Roma population—it did not generate the debate that Radu Jude had hoped for, nor did it produce the rush to the archives that I had envisioned. Once again, the slavery of the Roma people has been covered by the dust of the past, awaiting another moment capable of stirring curiosity and, above all, sustained archival research able to construct a narrative strong enough to stand against persistent historical myths.

Law, Property, and the Grammar of Slavery

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Roma population (referred to in documents as Ţigani, corresponding to the English “Gypsies”) in the Romanian principalities lived in a state of slavery. The principal slaveholders were the prince, the boyars, and the Church. The film portrays all three social categories through scenes designed to help the viewer recognize them by the activities they performed.

Thus, the prince’s slaves were engaged in gold-washing in rivers, paying an annual tax to the princely treasury and enjoying freedom of movement and a degree of personal liberty not found among the other categories. Monastic and boyar slaves worked on monastery estates or on the properties of the boyars, who exercised full authority over them. Their masters—monasteries or boyars—could sell them, separate them from their families, and arrange their marriages without their consent (Legiuirea Caragea, 7&5). They lived and worked on their masters’ estates and were not permitted to leave. Nevertheless, the Caragea Law stipulated that the master “has no power over the Gypsy,” meaning that he could not kill him (LC, 7&4).

From a legal perspective, slaves were considered “goods” and appear as such in articles and chapters explicitly addressing property rights, dowries, and inheritance (LC, p. 112). They are mentioned in inventories—whether household registers, dowry lists, or estate inventories. When assessing the value of slave labor, the legal code introduced the notion of “obraz” (person), meaning an individual whose value increased due to his or her craft (LC, 7&7, 7&8), thus implicitly recognizing the slave as a human being capable of self-transformation. Yet the code said nothing about a slave’s legal capacity: whether he or she could sue in court, submit petitions, defend himself or herself, or serve as a witness.

Judicial practice, however, reveals various situations in which the slave shifted from being an “object of law” to becoming a “subject of law.” The following case study illustrates such a transformation.

Freedom at the Master’s Will

For most enslaved Roma, freedom did not arise from a recognized right but from an act of will. A person born into slavery (the word used in the documents is robie) could expect to die in the same condition unless a master chose to alter that fate. Liberty depended less on law than on benevolence.

Moments of transition—especially the approach of death—often prompted owners to reconsider the status of those who had served them. Granting freedom to a “faithful” slave became part of the moral economy of salvation. Manumission was imagined as a final good deed, one that might secure remembrance among the living and mercy in the afterlife. In this sense, emancipation functioned as a spiritual transaction as much as a social or legal one.

Yet even generosity required legal form. A declaration of freedom had to be written, signed, sealed, and witnessed in order to carry force. The document transformed a moral gesture into a juridical act. Without such formalization, freedom remained fragile, vulnerable to contestation by heirs or guardians who could reassert claims of property.

The reasoning behind these acts was rarely humanitarian in the modern sense, nor grounded in an abstract doctrine of natural rights. Rather, it drew on Christian notions of charity, repentance, and reward beyond the grave. Freedom, when granted, emerged less from the recognition of inherent personhood than from the master’s concern for his own soul.

Thus the paradox: the enslaved person’s liberty depended on the conscience of the owner, yet once inscribed on paper, it entered the realm of law—where it could be defended, disputed, and, at times, transformed into a durable claim to personhood.

A Woman Who Took Her Master to Court

In 1830, the local courts of Craiova heard the case of Tiţa, a former enslaved woman belonging to the boyars Smaranda and Dumitrache Urianu. The courts had to decide among three competing narratives in which the status of both objects and persons was interpreted differently.

Tiţa claimed that she had been freed shortly before her mistress Smaranda Urianu’s death. As proof, she presented a manumission document (carte de slobozenie) dated 13 October 1818, signed and sealed by both former masters. Yet she obtained her actual freedom only in 1829, ten years later, when she left her master’s household and moved to town, where she found employment as a servant.

In 1830, the document was contested by Ana and Maria Urianu, who argued that it was a forgery drafted by their father in 1829 and backdated. Tiţa, they claimed, formed part of their mother’s dowry and therefore belonged to them as heirs; their father, acting merely as guardian, had no legal right to issue a deed of manumission. They described Tiţa as “a woman skilled in all things” and “rare to find,” someone they were unwilling to lose.

Dumitrache Urianu “admitted” that he had drawn up a false manumission document solely to pacify the dispute between his two daughters, who were fighting to retain the labor and skills of a slave who had, in effect, raised them.

The judges’ analysis revolved around two legal issues: (1) the heirs’ rights over their mother’s dowry; and (2) the legal powers of a guardian with respect to administered property. These issues obscured the fundamental question: the right to freedom of a human being.

Tiţa’s case brings to light one of the central questions raised by Aferim!: are Roma slaves human beings or mere objects? The judges repeatedly placed Tiţa among the category of goods, ignoring her right to freedom. Their arguments revealed what society valued most at that moment: property, social status, and inequality. The master was an important member of the local community; Tiţa was merely a “good” listed in a dowry register. Accordingly, they ruled that the “good” must return to its rightful heirs, who had been deprived of the utility of their property through a “mistake.” Only one judge issued a dissenting opinion, writing that “freedom, however obtained, is the most precious of all,” and that Tiţa should remain free, for re-enslaving her would constitute a grave injustice.

Tiţa ultimately gained her freedom thanks to her agency and perseverance in bringing petitions before successive courts. For three years she carried her fate from one local tribunal to another, and when all seemed against her, she appealed to the High Court in Bucharest (the High Divan), trusting in the letter of the law which proclaimed that “any freed Gypsy is of equal honor with the free subjects” (LC, 8&2).

Society, however, was not yet prepared to recognize the right to freedom of individuals who had for centuries been pushed to its margins. Tiţa herself acknowledged this when, after ten months waiting at the tribunal’s gates, she wrote that “a case of slavery is without value” to local officials who had indefinitely postponed summoning the defendant.

Valuing the culture of presence, the High Court waited for Dumitrache Urianu, repeatedly sending circulars to local authorities demanding his appearance in Bucharest. His defiance of central authority was recorded in the court’s memorandum, which ultimately judged the case in his absence and confirmed Tiţa’s freedom. She was entered into the register of taxpayers, thereby formally recognizing her belonging to the community of free people.

Claiming the Right to Be Human

Tiţa’s story was not unique. Other enslaved women—Maria, Dragomira, Ilinca—appear in the archives pursuing similar claims. Their cases reveal that enslaved women were not passive victims of a rigid legal system. They used the courts, mobilized written documents, invoked statutory clauses, and appealed across jurisdictions. They exploited the tensions between property law and emerging notions of legal equality. In doing so, they forced the courts to confront the instability of the categories they relied upon.

The year 1835—the setting of Aferim!—marks a moment of transition. Wallachian society stood between an old regime grounded in hierarchy and patrimonial privilege and a reformist impulse shaped by international pressures, administrative centralization, and new moral discourses. In this transitional space, the courtroom became a site where the ontology of the slave was negotiated. Was she property, subject to inheritance and exchange? Or was she a person capable of bearing rights?

The answer was never simple. Law simultaneously objectified and humanized. Masters invoked property; enslaved women invoked justice. Between these competing claims unfolded a struggle not only over status but over the meaning of personhood itself.

Through persistence, legal literacy, and strategic engagement with a plural legal order, women like Tiţa entered courtrooms as property and sought to leave them as persons. Their stories compel us to rethink slavery not solely as a system of domination, but also as a field of legal contestation in which the boundary between thing and persona was repeatedly tested—and, at times, redrawn.

Bibliography

National Archives of Romania, Bucharest, Fund Manuscripts, MS 952, ff. 327-330.

National Archives of Romania, Bucharest, Fund Înaltul Divan, 79/1832.

Allain Jean (ed.): The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historycal to the Contemporary, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012.

Constantin Florina Manuela: Statutul juridic al robilor țigani reflectat de practica socială a secolului al XVII-lea (Țara Românească), in: Studii și Materiale de Istorie Medie, 36, 2018, 101-126.

David Gaunt and Rotaru Julieta: The Living Coditions of Gypsy Slaves in Early Nineteents-Century Wallachia, in: Romani Studies 5, 31.1, 2021, 29-55.

Herzog Tamar: Enslaved as Outsiders, Enslaved as Property: Understanding Slavery in a Global and Early Modern Constext, in: Legal History, 32, 2024, 42-56.

Matei Petre: Understanding and Legitimizing Gypsy Slavery in the Traditional Romanian Society – the Life of St Gregory of Agrigento, in: Romani Studies, 32.2, 2022, 295-315.

Vintilă-Ghiţulescu Constanţa: Im Schalwar und mit Baschlik. Kirche, Sexualität, Ehe und Scheidung in der Walachei im 18. Jarhundert, Frank&Timmme, Berlin, 2013.

Vintilă-Ghiţulescu Constanţa: Liebesglut: Liebe und Sexualität in der rumänischen Gesellschaft 1750-1830, Frank&Timme, Berlin, 2011.

---

Cite as:
Vintilă, Constanţa, Vom Eigentum zur Person: From Property to Person: A Roma Woman’s Legal Battle for Freedom, EViR Blog, 20.03.2026, https://www.evir.uni-muenster.blog/en/from-property-to-person.

Lizenz:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.