Moldova, a small landlocked country of rolling hills, black-earth steppe and vineyards between the rivers Prut and Dniester, bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east and south, has been inhabited since Neanderthals built a ring of mammoth bones at Molodova on the Dniester more than 40,000 years ago. Farmers of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture raised some of the largest settlements of their age, Scythians, Getae and Sarmatians crossed the steppe, Greeks founded Tyras at the mouth of the Dniester, and Burebista's Dacian kingdom and the Roman frontier touched the land. Goths, Huns, Slavs, Avars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Cumans and finally the Mongols of the Golden Horde, whose town of Shehr al-Jedid stood at Orheiul Vechi, followed one another until the Hungarian victory of 1345.

About 1347 the voivode Dragoș came from Maramureș to the Moldova river and founded the march of Moldavia, and about 1359 Bogdan I made it an independent principality. Under Alexander the Good the Metropolis of Moldavia was recognised, and under Stephen the Great, who ruled from 1457 to 1504, the principality won the victory of Vaslui over the Ottomans, built the monasteries of Putna and Voroneț and the fortress of Soroca on the Dniester, and became a power between Hungary, Poland and the Ottoman Empire. After the campaign of Suleiman in 1538 the princes paid tribute to the Porte, the Ottomans held Tighina (Bender) and the Budjak, and the capital moved to Iași. The Movilești, Vasile Lupu and Dimitrie Cantemir ruled until 1711, when the Porte began to appoint Phanariot princes from Constantinople, while Habsburg Austria took Bukovina in 1775 and Russia reached the Dniester in 1792.

By the Treaty of Bucharest of 28 May 1812 the Ottoman Empire ceded the eastern half of Moldavia, between the Prut and the Dniester, to Russia, which named it Bessarabia. Bulgarians, Gagauz, Germans, Ukrainians and Russians were settled beside the Moldavian peasants, Chișinău grew into a provincial capital, the Jews of the Pale of Settlement made up nearly half of its people, and the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 shocked the world. After the revolution of 1917 the Sfatul Țării proclaimed the Moldavian Democratic Republic and in 1918 voted for union with Romania, which the Soviet Union never accepted. In 1924 Moscow created a Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on the left bank of the Dniester, and on 28 June 1940, after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and an ultimatum, the Red Army occupied Bessarabia and the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was created in August.

Romanian and German troops retook Bessarabia in 1941, and the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews and Roma to Transnistria followed, until the Red Army returned in August 1944. Soviet Moldavia suffered famine in 1946–1947 and mass deportations in 1949 and 1951, was collectivised and industrialised, and in 1989 the Popular Front and the language law of 31 August returned the Latin script. Moldova declared independence on 27 August 1991, but the Transnistrian region on the left bank broke away and fought a war in 1992, the Gagauz of the south obtained autonomy in 1994, and Russian troops remain in Transnistria. A bank fraud of 2014 cost about one eighth of the national income, but the pro-European presidency of Maia Sandu brought candidate status for the European Union in 2022 and accession negotiations in 2024. Fewer than three million people now live in Moldova, one of the most emigrant countries in Europe. Explore the eleven ages below through selected events from the timeline.