The founding of Moldavia () was an event, traditionally dated to 1346, when a Vlach military leader (voivode), Dragoș, departed the Voivodeship of Maramureș in Transylvania and travelled eastwards with his fellow people to further settle the plain lying in between the Eastern Carpathians and the Prut river. This was incentivised by the Kingdom of Hungary who, after several military victories in the 1340s, drove the nomadic Mongols and Tatars out the region, which in turn facilitated expansion and settlement east of the Carpathians. Dragoș initially established a defensive borderland, protecting the Kingdom's eastern flank. 13 years later, Bogdan I, another Vlach voivode from Maramureș who had fallen out with King Louis of Hungary, crossed the Carpathians in 1359 and took control of Moldavia, wrenching the region from Hungary's vassalage and turning the borderland into a principality. For the next five centuries, the Principality of Moldavia would be an important player in regional affairs until its union with Wallachia in 1859, initiating the establishment of the modern Romanian state.
Cultural dynamics in the future region of Moldavia Moldavia developed in the lands between the Carpathian Mountains and the Dniester River, which had been dominated by nomadic Turkic peoples—the Pechenegs, Ouzes and Cumans—from around 900. The Golden Horde—a Mongol and later Turkicized khanate—took control of the lands east of the Carpathians in the 1240s. The Mongols promoted international commerce, and an important trade route developed along the Dniester. The circulation of Hungarian and Bohemian coins shows that there were also close economic contacts between the basin of the Moldova and Central Europe in the early . In addition to the Turkic rulers, medieval chronicles and documents mention other peoples who lived between the Carpathians and the Dniester, including the Ulichians and the Tivercians in the , and the Brodnici and the Alans in the .
The Vlachs' presence in that territory is well documented from the 1160s onwards. Their local polities were first mentioned in the : the Mongols defeated the Qara-Ulagh, or Black Vlachs in 1241, and the Vlachs invaded Galicia in the late 1270s. Even when dependent on their on Turkic conquerors, the Vlachs formed unions of territorial communities or agrarian communes, called "" (), throughout Moldavia, such as the ones in Vrancea, Câmpulung Moldovenesc, Tigheci and Sipenit.Istoria romanilor I. De la geneza etnica la geneza statala The rulers of the had the responsibility of gathering and paying tribute to the Golden Horde. Several such unions of would elect a military leader, titled voivode, and the territory governed by him would be called a voivodeship, such as the ones at Onuțu (near Hotin), Hanșca (in the Lăpușna region), Suceava and Bârlad.Cihodaru, Constantin; Platon , Gheorghe; Istoria orașului Iași, vol.I; Editura Junimea Iași;1980Apariţia problemei bucovinei în spaţiul geopolitic european, Aurelian lavric, Universitatea de stat din Moldova, 2014 These political formations were older than the voivodeship founded by Dragoș and were later integrated into the unified principality of Moldavia.Statutul juridic internaţional al Ţării Moldovei (de la origini şi până la începutul secolului al XVI-lea), Ion Eremia, 2010
The Vlachs—the earliest Romanians—and their neighbors
The Moldavian region—the lands between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester River—acquired a territorial identity in the . During the previous millennium, the region had been subject to invasions by nomadic peoples, followed by a peaceful period around 750, during the Khazar Khaganate, which led to population growth in the region. A new material culture—the "Dridu culture"—spread in the lands along the Lower Danube (in both present-day Bulgaria and Romania) and in the territory east of the Carpathians. After the arrival, in the 830s, of the Magyars in the Pontic steppes north of the Black Sea, the local inhabitants fortified their settlements with palisades and deep moats along the Dniester in the . The Ulichians, Tivercians, "Waladj", and "Blaghā" are ethnic groups that have been connected with the Vlachs, or Romanians, of the region of the Carpathians.
Victor Spinei has suggested that a runestone which was set up around 1050 contains the earliest reference to Romanians living east of the Carpathians. It refers to Blakumen who killed a Varangian merchant at an unspecified place.
A competing group, the Magyars, left the Pontic steppes for the Carpathian Basin after a coalition of the Pechenegs and the Bulgarians defeated them at the end of the . The Pechenegs took control of the territory, but most Dridu settlements survived their arrival. Only the fortifications were destroyed in the 10th or early . New settlements appeared along the lower course of the Prut. The local inhabitants' burial rites radically changed: inhumation replaced cremation and no grave goods can be detected after around 1000.
Soviet historiography, with a few exceptions, denied the presence of a Romanian indigenous element in Moldavia during the 10th to 13th centuries, suggesting that they came to these lands from Transylvania, particularly from Maramureș, following voivode Dragoș. The indigenous population was, according to them, only Slavic and were forced to leave due to the nomadic invasions. In this historical framework, the migration of the Romanians to areas vacated by the Slavs was seen as a chaotic process. Authors of this theory, such as V. Zelenciuk and L. Polevoi, claim that written sources from the 13th–14th centuries sometimes referred to the territory between the Dniester and Prut rivers as Rosovlahia or Moldoslavia.Гацак, Рикман 1977: В.М.Гацак, Э.А.Рикман, Легенда о Драгоше и отражение в ней средне-вековой этнической сиуации в Восточном Прикарпатье. În: Этническая история и фольклор (Москва 1977)
On the other hand, Romanian historian Ion Eremia noted that Byzantine sources do not contain the term 'Moldoslavia', which only appears in Ukrainian folklore, and that the term cannot be dated to the 13th–14th centuries. Meanwhile, the term 'Rossovlahia' is considered to be of Byzantine origin and means 'the Wallachia near Russia', suggesting a large Romanian indigenous population.Statutul juridic internaţional al Ţării Moldovei (de la origini şi până la începutul secolului al XVI-lea), Ion Eremia, 2010
Anthropologist Henry H. Stahl, in examining medieval documents up until 1449, found that they mention a total of 755 Moldavian settlements, out of which 607 predate the establishment of the principality of Moldavia by Dragoș, also suggesting that there was a large indigenous Romanian population.Henry H. Stahl, Contribuţii la studiul satelor devălmașe românești, I (București 1958). Russian historian L.L. Polevoi concluded, based on rural toponyms, that, by the middle of the 14th century, 73.8% of the names of villages in Moldavia were of Eastern Roman origin and 24.5% of Slavic origin, while the ethnic groups in Moldavia were as follows: 48.7% were Romanian, 39.5% were Eastern Slavs, 3.3% were Southern Slavs and 8.5% were another ethnicity.Полевой 1979: Л.Л.Полевой, Очерки исторической географии Молдавии XIII-XV вв (Кишинев 1979). However, Russian historian G.G. Litavrin, studying the Vlach communities in the Balkans, concluded that Polevoi's study is unconvincing, as the Vlachs used to adopt personal and place names from other people, including the Slavs. This is not a phenomenon exclusive to the Vlachs; for example, many Bulgarians' personal names and villages names from the same period were Greek, which does not imply an assimilation of the Bulgarians by the Greeks, but rather the adoption of Greek personal and place names by the Bulgarians. As such, Litavrin argues, toponymical data cannot be used as reliable proof of an ethnic situation.Литаврин 2001: Г.Г. Литаврин, Византия и славяне (Санкт Петербург 2001)
Romanian historian Ion Eremia further criticizes Polevoi's method, considering his calculations uses to estimate the number of villages in Moldavia to be dubious, and the formation of exact data out of personal estimations to be erroneous.Statutul juridic internaţional al Ţării Moldovei (de la origini şi până la începutul secolului al XVI-lea), Ion Eremia, 2010 He argues that the migration of Slavs from Galicia to Bukovina in the 14th–16th centuries, which is well known and accepted even among Soviet historians such as T.V. Kosmina and V.V. Grabovetski, led to the Slavs founding new settlements. As a result, a large number of new villages appeared in the region; thus, they cannot be used as evidence of Slavic presence before the founding of Moldavia, and prove L.L. Polevoi's estimations of the ethnic group percentage to be inaccurate. Furthermore, his estimation about the number of villages in Moldova is very liberal. Polevoi estimates that there were about 800 villages in the 14th century and 1000 villages by the end of the 14th century, with a very large margin of error of about 200 villages. By Polevoi's own calculations, with each village having 15 houses containing families made of 5 people, that margin of error is 15,000 people, or 19.1% of the total population, according to his own population estimations of 78,480 people. One cannot create such specific estimations of 48.7% Romanians and 39.5% Eastern Slavs with such a large margin of error.
According to Polevoi's study, 596 Moldavian villages had 41,720 inhabitants, which made up 48.5% of the total population, but 322 East Slavic villages had 31,020 inhabitants, making up 39.5% of the population. Polevoi justifies this by saying that villages in East Slavic regions were larger. Following his own formula, he would have ended up with a population of 44,700 Moldovians and 24,150 Slavs. Polevoi does not explain how calculated the population of each particular village, but they do not follow the author's own formula, which indicates that numbers are entirely arbitrary and have been adjusted to fit a preconceived idea. Eremia also points out that one fact left out by Polevoi was the Slavicization of place names in the 14th–16th centuries by the Moldavian chancery, caused by the use of Old Church Slavonic. Historian N.A. Demcenco found out that the villages of Goluboi, Potok, Sredne Vodeanoe, Dibrovo, Krasnoilsk, Mejdurece and Dubovka were inhabited by Romanians; had he relied exclusively on toponymical data, he would have concluded that the villages weee inhabited by Slavs.Demografie şi politică la est de Carpaţi în secolul al XIV-lea: Aspecte istoriografice, Ion Eremia, 2013 According to Ukrainian historian N. Kotlear, the borders of the Principality of Halicz did not extend southward beyond the cities and castles of Vasilev, Onut, Bakota, Ușița, Kalius, Kucelmin, located on the upper course of the Dniester River.Котляр Н. Ф. Формирование территории и возникновение городов Галицко-Волынской Руси ІХ–ХIII вв. – К.: Наук. думка, 1985.
Mongol invasion and occupation