Romania's history: a Latin claim and the borders built around it

Why Rome's short hold on Dacia still matters

Trajan's army defeated Decebalus in 106 AD, and Aurelian ordered the province evacuated in the 270s. Rome was on the ground for roughly a hundred and sixty-five years, and Roman Dacia covered Banat, Oltenia and most of Transylvania rather than the territory of the present country. About ten towns are known, all of them grown out of military camps, and eight held the rank of colonia.

The colonisation was heavy and it was not Italian. Of some 3,000 personal names recovered from inscriptions in the province by the 1990s, about 74% are Latin, 14% Greek, 4% Illyrian and 2% Thraco-Dacian, and the settlers arrived from across the empire carrying Latin as their working language. Eutropius wrote that citizens "from the towns and lands of Dacia" were resettled south of the Danube when the administration withdrew.

Whether anyone stayed is the contested question, and it has been contested for two hundred years. Daco-Roman continuity holds that Latin-speaking commoners remained north of the Danube through the Gothic, Hunnic, Gepid, Avar and Slavic centuries, and became the Romanians. The immigrationist reading holds that Vlach herders moved north from the Balkans from about the eleventh century, and that the Romanian presence in Transylvania is younger than the Hungarian one. Romanian historiography has generally taken the first position and Hungarian historiography the second. This catalogue records that the dispute exists and takes no position on it.

The documentary record between the withdrawal and the thirteenth century is thin, which is why the argument survives. The phrase torna, torna fratre, shouted "in native parlance" by a soldier on a Balkan campaign in 587 or 588, is cited as the earliest trace of a Romance vernacular in the region. Hungarian documents then name a township of Romanians in Bihar county in 1283 and a "land of Romanians" at Făgăraș in 1285. Between those two points there is very little.

Who ruled the Romanian lands before unification

Three territories, three sets of masters, and no shared institution between them until the nineteenth century.

Transylvania became a frontier province of the Kingdom of Hungary. Székely warriors settled in the centre around 1100, colonists from the Holy Roman Empire who became the Transylvanian Saxons arrived in the 1150s, and a royal official styled voivode governed the counties from the 1170s. After the peasant rising of 1437 was put down, the Hungarian nobles and the heads of the Saxon and Székely communities formed the Union of the Three Nations, from which the Orthodox Romanian knezes were excluded. The Edict of Torda of 1568 recognised four received religions, and Orthodoxy was tolerated rather than received, although Romanians made up more than a third of the population by seventeenth-century estimates. A census in 1733 counted them as the largest group in the province, and the legislation still called them tolerated.

South and east of the mountains the story is different. Basarab I united the polities between the southern Carpathians and the lower Danube in the 1310s and defeated the Hungarian royal army at Posada in 1330. Moldavia reached full autonomy under Bogdan I around 1360. Both principalities began paying regular tribute to the sultans, Wallachia from 1417 and Moldavia from 1456. Stephen III of Moldavia ruled for forty-seven years and beat an Ottoman army at Vaslui in 1475. Michael the Brave of Wallachia held all three lands in a personal union from May 1600; the neighbouring powers forced him to abdicate that September, and the four months became the reference point for every later unionist argument.

From 1711 in Moldavia and 1716 in Wallachia the sultans stopped trusting native princes and appointed Orthodox merchants from the Phanar district of Istanbul instead. The Phanariot princes dissolved the armies and taxed hard, and the neighbours took what was left unguarded: the Habsburgs annexed Bukovina in 1775 and Russia seized Bessarabia in 1812. Tudor Vladimirescu raised a revolt in Wallachia in January 1821 and was murdered in June. The Treaty of Adrianople strengthened the autonomy of both principalities in 1829 while confirming the sultan's right to approve the election of their princes.

How descent from Rome became a political demand

The route ran through a church. Habsburg pressure persuaded Orthodox Romanian prelates in Transylvania to accept union with Rome in 1699, formalised by a synod of bishops in September 1700, and the resulting Greek-Catholic Church sent its clergy to be educated in Catholic institutions. What came back with them was the Enlightenment. The Uniate bishop Inocențiu Micu-Klein demanded that Romanians be recognised as a fourth privileged nation of Transylvania and was forced into exile for it.

The scholars who followed him are known as the Transylvanian School. From the late eighteenth century they wrote the Roman element of Romanian origins into grammars, histories and dictionaries, and they built a Latin-based alphabet that eventually displaced the Cyrillic script the language had used since it adopted Old Church Slavonic as its liturgical language. In 1791 Uniate and Orthodox clergy and laymen jointly submitted the Supplex Libellus Valachorum to Emperor Leopold II, modelled on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, asking for political rights equal to those of the other nations of Transylvania. The monarch and the local authorities refused.

That petition is the point at which descent from Rome stopped being an antiquarian interest and became a legal claim. It was made from inside somebody else's kingdom, by people asking for civil rights, sixty-eight years before any Romanian state existed.

The revolutions of 1848 split along the same seam. In Moldavia and Wallachia, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Nicolae Bălcescu and others demanded the emancipation of the peasants and the union of the two principalities, and Russian and Ottoman troops crushed them. The Wallachian revolutionaries adopted a blue, yellow and red tricolour carrying the motto Dreptate, Frăție, justice and brotherhood, to stand for the bond between the two populations. In Transylvania most Romanians backed the imperial government against the Hungarian revolutionaries, because the Hungarian diet had just voted to merge Transylvania into Hungary. Bishop Andrei Șaguna asked Vienna for a separate duchy of the monarchy's Romanians and was refused.

How two principalities elected the same prince

The Crimean War produced the opening. The Treaty of Paris of 1856 put Moldavia and Wallachia under the joint tutelage of the Ottoman Empire and the great powers, and the Paris Convention of 1858 conceded a minimal union: one name, the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, but two thrones, two governments and two separate elections.

The text specified two thrones. It did not say that two thrones could not hold the same man. The Moldavian assembly elected Alexandru Ioan Cuza on 5 January 1859 and the Wallachian assembly elected him on 24 January, dates that fall on 17 January and 5 February in the Gregorian calendar the country uses now. The great powers accepted the result. A country had been made out of a drafting gap.

Cuza then spent seven years merging what the convention had kept apart. He abolished serfdom, secularised the monastery estates, unified the government and the parliament, and in 1862 changed the country's name to the United Principalities of Romania. In 1866 a coalition of opposed parties, remembered as the monstrous coalition, forced him to abdicate and leave. His replacement was imported: Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen arrived as Prince Carol and swore the new constitution on 10 May 1866.

Independence was proclaimed on 10 May 1877, during the Russo-Turkish war, and won on the battlefield at Plevna. The Treaty of Berlin recognised it in 1878 on terms that cost something: Romania handed southern Bessarabia to Russia and received Dobruja and a Black Sea coast in exchange. Carol was crowned king on 10 May 1881. Southern Dobruja followed after the Second Balkan War and the Treaty of Bucharest of 1913.

The same constitution that carried the state into Europe restricted citizenship to Christians. Romanian Jews were treated in law as aliens with no civil or political rights, expulsions were carried out on vagrancy grounds, pogroms were tolerated, and the British and United States governments protested repeatedly. Many of those affected emigrated.

What the Great Union added and cost

Romania had a secret alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary dating from 1883, which almost nobody in the political class knew about. King Carol I revealed it at a midnight crown council in 1914 and was overruled: the council chose neutrality, and Carol died on 10 October that year. On 4 August 1916 his successor Ferdinand signed a political treaty and military convention with the Entente, which promised Bukovina, Transylvania as far as the Tisza, and the whole of Banat.

The campaign went badly. The Romanian army attacked into Transylvania on 27 August 1916 and took about a third of it before German forces arrived, and the Central Powers entered Bucharest on 6 December 1916. The line held in the summer of 1917 at Mărăști, Mărășești and Oituz, where Romania lost more than 27,000 men and the Central Powers more than 60,000. Then the October Revolution took Russia out of the war and left Romania encircled, and in May 1918 its parliament signed the Treaty of Bucharest: Dobruja to Bulgaria, the Carpathian passes to Austria-Hungary, and the oil reserves leased to Germany for ninety-nine years. Ferdinand refused to sign it.

That refusal turned out to matter. Romania renounced the treaty in October 1918 and re-entered the war on 10 November 1918, one day before the German armistice, which nullified the Bucharest terms the following day. Total Romanian deaths from 1914 to 1918 within the country's present borders are estimated at 748,000.

The assembly at Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918 is the national holiday. What it produced, once the treaties caught up, was a state of nearly 300,000 square kilometres containing 18,057,028 people at the census of 1930, of whom 71.9% were counted as Romanians and 28.1% as members of minorities. The Alba Iulia resolution had promised those minorities wide autonomy. The 1923 constitution recognised them and seated them in parliament; the autonomy was not delivered. The Hungarian-Romanian war of 1919 and the Tatarbunary rising of 1924 came out of the same settlement.

Interwar politics were unstable in a way the treaties did not cause. More than twenty-five governments held office between 1930 and 1940. The National Liberal Party lost its dominance to the National Peasants' Party and then to a set of antisemitic and ultranationalist movements, of which the Iron Guard was the most violent. Carol II returned from exile in 1930, took his son's throne, and assumed dictatorial powers in 1938.

How Romania fought on both sides of one war

Three states took territory from Romania in ten weeks, and none of it was defended.

The losses destroyed Carol II. He suspended the 1938 constitution, appointed General Ion Antonescu prime minister with full powers, and abdicated in favour of his nineteen-year-old son Michael in September 1940. Antonescu and the Iron Guard proclaimed a National Legionary State on 4 September 1940 and Romania signed the Tripartite Pact in November. The partnership lasted four months: the Guard attempted a coup on 20 January 1941 combined with a pogrom against the Jews of Bucharest, Antonescu suppressed it within four days, and the Guard was thrown out of government.

Romania declared war on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and recovered Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. In August 1941 Hitler persuaded Antonescu to take Transnistria, the territory between the Dniester and the Southern Bug, as compensation for the Transylvania that had gone to Hungary. Odessa fell in October 1941. The Third and Fourth Romanian armies were destroyed at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 and 1943.

What the Antonescu government did to Romania's Jews

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that approximately 220,000 Romanian Jews were killed or died of mistreatment, a figure that includes at least 90,000 people from northern Transylvania deported to Auschwitz by Hungarian authorities after that territory changed hands. At least 4,000 Jews were murdered in the Iași pogrom of June 1941. Between 1941 and 1944, German and Romanian authorities murdered or caused the deaths of between 150,000 and 250,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews in Transnistria, which the Romanian administration governed without ever formally annexing.

Romanian public accounts denied most of this for half a century. In October 2003 the Romanian president appointed an international commission chaired by Elie Wiesel to establish the record, and its final report, presented on 11 November 2004, concluded that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered or died as a result of the deliberate policies of Romanian civilian and military authorities. The commission also documented the deportation of Roma to Transnistria and the deaths of thousands of them there. The report is the Romanian state's own finding about its wartime government.

How the king removed his own dictator

On 23 August 1944, with the Red Army breaking through in northern Moldavia, King Michael ordered Antonescu arrested after he refused to sign an armistice. Michael had been treated as a figurehead for four years. He broadcast a ceasefire that night, declared war on Germany, and offered the Allies a Romanian army of close to a million men. German troops tried to seize Bucharest on 24 August and were driven off by the city's defences; Romanian units attacked the German garrisons at the Ploiești oilfields and took more than 50,000 prisoners.

The switch bought less than it looked worth. Soviet forces captured around 130,000 Romanian soldiers and moved them to camps in the Soviet Union, where many died, and the armistice signed on 12 September 1944 was on terms Moscow wrote. Antonescu was executed as a war criminal on 1 June 1946. The Paris Peace Treaties of 1947 returned northern Transylvania and confirmed that Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and southern Dobruja were gone.

What communism took and what it built

King Michael was forced to abdicate in December 1947 and the People's Republic was proclaimed. The constitution of 13 April 1948 formalised the new regime, the banks and large businesses were nationalised on 11 June 1948, and agriculture was collectivised. Between 1945 and 1964, 73,334 people were arrested, and between 60,000 and 80,000 political prisoners were held.

Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej led the party until his death in 1965, and his lasting achievement was getting Khrushchev to withdraw Soviet troops from Romania in April 1958. Nicolae Ceaușescu, who succeeded him, turned that distance into policy. Romania was the one Warsaw Pact state that refused to join the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the one that kept diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967. Western governments were correspondingly slow to comment on what was happening inside the country.

How the foreign debt was repaid by austerity

Romania borrowed heavily to industrialise, and its foreign debt rose from about 3 billion dollars to about 10 billion between 1977 and 1981. Ceaușescu's response was to repay all of it. The austerity programme exported food and fuel, rationed both at home, and ran until the debt was cleared in 1989, a few months before the government fell. The Securitate was expanded to hold the arrangement in place. A decree of 1966 banning abortion and contraception was among the first measures reversed once the regime ended.

Why the revolution here ended in a trial

Protests in Timișoara in support of the Reformed pastor László Tőkés began in mid-December 1989 and spread. A rally summoned in Bucharest on 21 December to support Ceaușescu turned against him. He and his wife Elena left the city by helicopter, ended up in the custody of the army, were convicted of genocide by a summary court, and were shot on 25 December 1989. More than 1,100 people died in Timișoara and Bucharest. Of the changes of government across the Eastern bloc that year, this was the one that killed people in four figures and ended in an execution.

How Romania has governed itself since communism

The National Salvation Front took power on 22 December 1989 under Ion Iliescu, a Communist Party official whom Ceaușescu had sidelined, and it was staffed largely by former officials of the old regime. Elections on 20 May 1990, the first free ones since 1937, gave Iliescu 85% of the presidential vote and the Front two thirds of parliament. Protesters who called the result illegitimate occupied University Square from April to June, and on 14 June 1990 thousands of miners from the Jiu Valley arrived in Bucharest and attacked them. Later parliamentary inquiries found that government intelligence officers had helped instigate and steer both crowds.

A permanent constitution was adopted by referendum in 1991, and the presidency has since changed hands by election in both directions, from Iliescu to Emil Constantinescu in 1996, back to Iliescu in 2000, then to Traian Băsescu and to Klaus Iohannis. The National Anticorruption Directorate was created in 2002. Romania joined NATO on 29 March 2004 and the European Union on 1 January 2007, took an International Monetary Fund loan in 2009, and saw the largest street protests since the revolution in 2017 and 2018, with more than 500,000 people out against changes to the criminal law. Checks at air and sea borders with the other Schengen states were lifted on 31 March 2024 and at land borders on 1 January 2025.

In December 2024 the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential election, citing evidence of foreign interference in the campaign, and ordered the vote rerun. The rerun was held in May 2025.

Romania's borders have not changed since the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947. Assembling the country inside them took eighty-eight years, counting from the double election of 1859, and the Latin descent first argued to a Habsburg emperor in 1791 is now a question for archaeologists rather than for foreign ministries.