The Romanian-speaking Rudari, “țigănised Romanians”, “old Romanians” or “Romanianized Gypsies” (Weigand 1897, 1908: 174), “other Gypsies” (Block 1938: 108, nowadays Bengelstorf 2009) are a population who traditionally inhabited the entire Balkan area and Central European parts. See Marushiakova and Popov 2021, for their different appellations and their current status and migration. Those who live outside the Romanian borders were and are better researched than those who live in Romania. One of the few historical research projects (Constantin Șerban, 1959 and 2002) shows the Wallachian Rudari from the seventeenth century onwards were gold-washers and subordinated to the Cozia Monastery, the authority of which they continually contested for centuries until they eventually became State Gypsies in the nineteenth century. In the absence of gold mines, Wallachian local specialty was the panning of native gold from the riverbeds of the main rivers and their tributaries, an activity carried out by the Rudari amply described by foreign observers or administrators. This paper explores the role of the Cozia Monastery in the history of the Rudari in Wallachia. For the governance of gold production, the Rudars were organized in 1388 by the Wallachian ruler as țigan of Cozia Monastery, which was built by him on the Olt Valley. In time, the panning of gold and its submission to the Crown was done through an officer of the central administration, the Chief Police Commander (Marele Armaș) and the relation to Monastery was ascertained through a vătaf headman chosen from among them, who was responsible for their surveillance and the tax collection for the Monastery. This relationship with the Monastery continued as long as slavery was legal, and the Monastery claimed that “all” Rudari belong to Cozia, through many donations. Here we will investigate the context of the original donation with the aim of seeing how the nature of slavery in relation to the Rudari developed and identifying the roots of later intense conflicts between the Rudari and the Monastery. The sources used will include material from the monastery archive which were partially integrated into the previous research (Constantin Șerban 1959) and socio-demographic data from the MapRom database (www.maprom.se).