Hospodar

Rich patrons sponsored feasts as a way for them to promote and secure a political hierarchy built on the unequal mobilization of labor and resources, by displaying their generosity towards the rest of the community.

It might have arisen as an additional calque of the Greek 'despótēs' (-πότης), yet the presence of *potis in Iranic languages e.g Avestani dəng paitiš “master of the house”, might indicate an older and universal usage of the compound.

[6] The word *batь (attested in Bulgarian and Ukrainian and meaning bigger brother and later additionally transforming into 'bashta' or father in Bulgarian) is shared among Uralic, Turkic and Iranic languages, with the p- > b- transformation likely indicating a transition through a Turkic language of an originally Indo-European word.

Another view is that it is a baby-talk modification of *bratrъ (“brother”), since it morphologically resembles kin terms ending in *-tь, including *zętь (“son-in-law”), *tьstь (“father-in-law”), *netь(jь) (“nephew”).

In some languages the hospodars house or household is called "hospóda", however, in other, such as in South Slavic, "(g)ospoda" translates as "gentry" as just a plural derived from "gospodin" and/or "gospodar".

[10] In Slovene gospod ("Mister", "gentleman"), the Polish gospodarz ("host", "owner", "presenter") usually used to describe a peasant/farmer (formal name for a peasant/farmer is "rolnik," and common is "chłop" which also means "guy"), and the Czech hospodář (archaic term for "master").

Related to it is hospodář referring to a person, that manages some property (e.g. steward, major-domo, bailiff, manciple or bursar), especially in agriculture (e.g. husbandman, farmer, landowner).

In 1394–95, Ivan Shishman of Bulgaria referred to himself not as a Tsar (as traditionally), but as a gospodin of Tarnovo, and in foreign sources was styled herzog or merely called an "infidel bey".

At the end of this period, as the title had been held by many vassals of the Ottoman Sultan, its retention was considered inconsistent with the independence of the United Principalities'[1] (formalized from Romania only in 1878 — replacing the tributary status).