Danubian Principalities

The term was coined in the Habsburg monarchy after the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) in order to designate an area on the lower Danube with a common geopolitical situation.

In 1476 Wallachia and in 1538 Moldavia came under formal Ottoman suzerainty, preserving their self-rule in all aspects, except for the period of the so-called Phanariote Rule (1711 - 1821), when foreign affairs were dictated by the Sublime Porte.

These, while connected with the first administrative reforms, generally had to rely on spoliation, and coincided with a disastrous stage in the countries' history, given that the two became a major theatre of war in a series of confrontations between Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman forces (until the mid-19th century, they frequently came under temporary Russian or Habsburg occupation, and sometimes administration — as happened to the regions of Oltenia, Bukovina, and Bessarabia).

The Russian pressures for changes in the text were perceived by Wallachians and Moldavians as a drive to remove the territories from Ottoman rule and annex them to a much more centralised and absolutist empire.

Negotiations amounted to an agreement over a minimal and formal union - however, elections for the ad hoc divans of 1859 profited from an ambiguity in the text of the final agreement (specifying two thrones, but not preventing the same person from occupying both) and made possible the rule of Alexander Ioan Cuza as Domnitor of the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (the Romanian United Principalities from 1862).