Ad hoc divans

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Ad hoc divans" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Romanian. (January 2021) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Romanian article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Romanian Wikipedia article at [[:ro:Adunările Ad-Hoc]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ro|Adunările Ad-Hoc}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The two ad hoc divans were legislative^{[citation needed]} and consultative assemblies of the Danubian Principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia), vassals of the Ottoman Empire. They were established by the Great Powers under the Treaty of Paris.^[1] By then, the Crimean War had taken the two states out of Russia's sphere of influence, and had nullified the Moldo-Wallachian Regulamentul Organic regime. Officially, the two assemblies were provisional replacements for the traditional assemblies, the Sfaturi (or Divanuri). The term "divan", is derived from the Ottoman rule, being the name of a high governmental body in a number of Islamic states.

The elections for the two Divans confronted two local movements: the National Party, which supported the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia, as "Romania"; the anti-unionists, which sought to maintain the status quo. The National Party emerged as the victor in 1859, when its candidate Alexandru Ioan Cuza was crowned Domnitor over both countries. The resulting United Principalities were the political embryo of modern Romania.^[2]