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"The Phanariote Century", the period between 1711 / 1716-1821, in which the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia were ruled by ethnic Greeks, loyal subjects of the sultan, from the rich Phanar district of Istanbul, was considered a period of decline characterized by the degradation of social life, by the accentuated impoverishment of a predominantly rural population, by the prosperity of the nobility, by the exacerbation of taxation and, last but not least, by the increase of corruption at all institutional levels in the two principalities. This paper is an analysis, based on documentary sources and historiographical studies, of the mechanisms of operation of local and central state institutions to determine the extent to which the facts we associate today with acts of corruption have significantly influenced, in a negative way, the Romanian society of that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]