Crossing the Grand Routes: Highwaymen on the Roads of the Romanian Principalities in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This paper draws from a larger research project whose aims are to extract spatial data from the Romanian hajduk genre fiction of the long nineteenth century (HaiRo Corpus), to set ground for an interdisciplinary database that provides a documentary framework for Hajduk criminality, and to contextualize territorial and topographical data-layers with geographically referenced information (GIS). The ca. 6,300 data-points that form the documentary frame of hajduk fiction are used in various vizualizations produced with QGIS in order to show the spread of criminality along the main routes and roads of the two Romanian Principalities. Certain spatial markers have been considered as typical for hajduk life, thus as proxies of such criminal phenomena: Post stations and inns from Austrian and Russian maps of the early nineteenth century; Monetary finds/ hoards; Geographic descriptions of places related to criminal activity; Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Criminal Court Documents; Forest Toponyms/Phytonyms; Travel accounts. Criminality along the main routes and roads has been analyzed with both qualitative and quantitative methods that brought to the fore the complexity of the phenomenon under discussion. The conclusions indicate that the historicity of the roads, with segments that are either abandoned or created according to political or commercial opportunities, is relevant in explaining data density in certain areas.