Alexander Mourouzis

ambassador in Curtea Nouă. A member of the Mourouzis family of Phanariotes and the son of Constantine Mourouzis (one of the few Ottoman-appointed Princes to die in office), he was educated to speak six languages in addition to Greek. His mother was a member of the Ghica family. After reforming its system of worker employment and payment, as well as hiring Saxon experts from Transylvania to manage the industry, he denied the workers' request to institute two weeks off for each week of labor, and ordered activities to be resumed, while stressing that it was imperative to respect the Ottoman demand for textiles (see Labor movement in Romania). At the time, the employees did not receive payment, but worked in exchange for tax exemptions. News of the Craiova's destruction reached Bucharest and Mourouzis forbade fleeing the city; however, this did not prevent the boyars from sending their wealth into Habsburg lands for safekeeping. Mourouzis built fortifications on the road to Craiova and on the banks of Olt River; he attacked Pazvantoğlu's troops, who used the city's ruins as barricades — after several days of fighting, Pazvantoğlu and his troops fled Craiova and returned to Vidin. Powerless against the latter's destructive attacks, he asked to be relieved of his position, and, in a highly unusual gesture, paid off Ottoman authorities in exchange for his own replacement. At the insistence of the French Empire, he was again appointed Prince of Moldavia (1802–1806 and 1806–1807), but was ultimately dismissed through another French intervention at the Porte - on August 12, 1806, Horace Sébastiani, the French Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, called on Selim III to punish Constantine Ypsilantis' pro-Russian activities in Wallachia, and to prevent a Moldavian-Wallachian-Russian alliance. This last event constituted one of the causes for the Russo-Turkish War of 1806–1812. Mustafa IV ordered Mourouzis to be sent to the galleys, but he was pardoned soon after. He died at his home in Constantinople, and rumor had it that he was poisoned. ==Achievements==

Mourouzis was an Enlightenment prince, whose time on the two thrones was connected with modernization. The prince belonged to the Freemasonry, having affiliated with two separate Lodges: in 1773, he was a member of the one active in the Transylvanian city of Hermannstadt, and, after 1803, belonged to the Moldavian Freemason branch in Galați. During his rules in Bucharest, Mourouzis notably rebuilt the princely residence of Curtea Nouă, instituted a boyar office as centralized tax collection in the capital city, and increased the water supply by tapping sources in the Cotroceni area. His interest in waterworks was also manifested during his stay in Moldavia, where he tapped water and built a reservoir for the capital Iași (through a system leading up to Golia Monastery) and provided Focșani with water from over the Milcov River (achieved following an understanding with Wallachia's Alexander Ypsilantis). Among the educational institutions he created was the Orthodox seminary in Iași's Socola Monastery. At the time, it was recorded that associations of fruntași could function as estate leaseholders in the service of boyars or Orthodox monasteries. This right was suppressed in 1815. ==In cultural references==

Mourouzis was the recipient of a panegyric authored by the Moldavian boyar poet Costache Conachi, who praised the prince's achievements in hydrotechnics. Comments made on the poem, published by the Romantic nationalist Gheorghe Sion, were the subject of an 1873 disagreement between him and literary critic Titu Maiorescu. The latter placed Sion's essay among his examples of "inebriation with words" (a term which he and the Junimea society had coined as a definition for incoherent and needlessly subjective criticism). ==Notes==