The princes of Walachia and Moldova ran, since the establishment of the two countries, a constant policy of rural colonisation with ‘foreigners’, supposed to tackle the demographic deficit and therefore the lack of agricultural labor as much as the need to increase the number of taxpayers. The main beneficiaries of the right to colonise new villages were the nobility and the church. The article shows that most of the secular colonisers were themselves aliens, the decedents of aliens or relatives of migrants, while the monasteries involved in this practice were for the most part dedicated like metochia to orthodox ‘Holy Places’, administered by ‘alien’ monks.