A History of Romania: Land, People, Civilization

By Nicolae Iorga and David Prodan

Nicolae Iorga's A History of Romania: Land, People, Civilization is an intimate portrait of a land and its people written by its greatest historian. Much like Herodotus in antiquity, Iorga can be considered "the father of history" for his country. Like a true artist, he paints a portrait of Romania, bringing to life the complex history of this fascinating land. Iorga skillfully weaves together history, art, architecture, language, literature, and culture to give the reader an understanding of the fabric of Romanian society.

The author presents the history of the Romanian lands from ancient times until the end of World War I, reflecting on the great personalities and events that shaped the nation, while examining the various threads that bind it together.

The book includes a list of rulers, a bibliography, an index, and numerous illustrations. It includes a foreword by David Prodan, another great personality of Romanian historiography, discussing Iorga's contributions to Romanian scholarship. Nicolae Iorga's A History of Romania is essential reading for anyone interested in the story of this fascinating land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Center for Romanian Studies
• Release date: Sep 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781592111091

Book preview

Foreword

Our generation of historians – young and old – has had the good fortune to develop in the all-embracing shadow of that unique man, Nicolae Iorga, a man who lived among us, yet transcended all ordinary measures applied to human beings. We never cease being amazed when faced with his achievements.

Due to his boundless energy and vast range of activities, it is almost impossible to analyze anyone dimension of this multi-faceted individual. Who can separate Iorga the historian from Iorga the man of culture, the scientist from the politician? Who would venture to study this man of action in parts, to measure him by ordinary standards?

With regard to his work, we must resort again to the vocabulary of nature in order to estimate it. It is equivalent to a gigantic eruption, followed by a vast flood, avoiding no field of history, indeed no field of culture in general. Who else, not only in Romania, but on the European continent, has accomplished so much? The sheer volume of his bibliography is amazing. He succeeded in redefining the science of history itself, in refreshing its tools, in extending its scope, in deepening its outlook. His presence is also felt in all fields of culture to which he contributed, to no lesser degree.

As for the history of his own people, it has been greatly enlightened by his activity. The vastness of his work, the endless number of subjects – great and small – he dealt with, the endless number of essays and syntheses he produced nearly flooded Romanian historiography, and set it in motion. Which of the branches of the history of the Romanian people was left in the shadows? Which of the branches of its culture didn’t benefit from his activities? Who didn’t gain from the vastness of his knowledge? Who didn’t reap the rewards of the vastness of his reference materials, of the avalanche of facts and ideas that pour out impetuously from his unlimited work? To pretend that you’ve learned nothing from him? Who would believe you? In the company of historians, you are infested with the wisdom he spread in the very air you breathe. One is simply overwhelmed by the discourse with him.

He had hurried and busy activity, stretching out simultaneously in several different directions – as many as possible – giving it the complex tint that amazes us today, creating that welter that makes partitioning it so difficult.

The vastness of history itself is revealed through his work, leading us to deepen our own investigations; what infinite implications he points out! So many facets of humanistic culture are revealed: philosophy, literature, and art, with all their dimensions and aspects. They are skillfully interwoven with history itself. In his case, you do not ask yourself in how many directions he pursued his studies, but what he could have left out.

But what amazes us above all is the vastness of Romanian history and culture and his understanding of its diversity and profoundness, his ever-present desire to study anything belonging to the Romanian people, and especially its vital foundation, the peasants with their constant virtues. The peasant plowman, but also soldier when needed, bearer of the virtues of his native land, relying on the work of his hands, finding shelter in his village, in the warmth of his wood and clay cottage this also a work of his hands and of his craft. The peasant village where the miracle of a unique culture was born and raised were the very soul of the nation, and Nicolae Iorga carried this in his heart like no one else. Who valued the peasant spirit more than him? Who better comprehended the work and the art of the Romanian peasants? And, generally speaking, who valued more the work, in all its forms, of mankind? He cherished human civilization like no one else.

All this completes the portrait of the man of action in every way. He understood that he not only had to write history, but also to make history. He was in full competition with time itself, which became scarcer and scarcer; his trips to archives, libraries, museums, historical monuments, churches, and monasteries never ceased. His obligations increased with books, lecturing at summer and winter courses, speeches, the Romanian Academy, newspapers, magazines, organizational work... He wrote constantly, anywhere he could, on board ships, in trains; he wrote about everything. How much should time have been expanded to encompass all of his activities?

His political activity is another facet of his vast work. His efforts to deal with the major internal and external problems of his own nation, with all of its sorrows, great and small. He was always found in the front line, or even in the lead, on such important issues as the great struggle for national reunification, for creating and strengthening the unitary state. But where don’t we find this omnipresent, all-inclusive man, this lively, tireless mind?

There is only one case, only one place where we do not find him: resting quietly, enjoying our beautiful holiday resorts, forgetting himself, forgetting about his pen. And yet he pretended he rested normally, like everyone else.

I remember one day at the Romanian Academy, in a small group, the President of the Academy, Traian Săvulescu, asked us historians when we were going to reconsider Nicolae Iorga? Mr. President, I said "which of us considers himself to be worthy to judge Nicolae Iorga? Does Iorga need our pronouncements? Of what use would they be? Isn’t it more sensible to submit humbly to his knowledge, to continue tacitly to benefit by the vastness of his work, without undergoing a reconsideration which is beyond us?" To our credit, such an insolence deliberately never happened and we continue to benefit from his work.

Personally, I cannot boast of having read a vast amount of Iorga’s work. But even if I had claimed to have read much, that would still be very little when compared to the vastness of his work. I’ve always read his work with great care, meditatively, overwhelmed by the avalanche of ideas and his rich style. I’ve always felt small, like a novice, frightened by his dimensions. I once even had the occasion to listen to him in person, to enjoy the fluency and impetuosity of his speech and the humor of his elocution, in Cluj. A unique moment in my life, unforgettable for that reason.

Excerpts of his works have been constantly reprinted, the number of volumes increases continuously, and certainly will never reach an end, for he wrote roughly a whole library. And how much more would it have increased if he had not been murdered, while at the summit of his creative power, at the height of his career as a historian?

He died, struck by the most awful act of human ingratitude, tortured, humiliated, cruelly murdered, leaving behind an unforgettable vestige in the history of his people, in the very history of mankind. A terrible end, preventing perhaps another that lay in store for him by the justice of the new communist society which exterminated the former high officials of our country, the very elite of Romanian society. Especially for him, who, due to his explosive temper, was not the kind of man to endure with resignation inhuman blows of fate.

With this publication, we are doing our pious duty to restore him to the place where he belonged from the beginning: in the very heart of his people, painting a portrait of the land and the people he loved.

David Prodan

Chapter I

The Home of the Romanian Nation

Between the center of Europe and the Russian steppe, the somber lands of the north and the sunny Balkan Peninsula in the south, there lies a region without any geographical unity in respect of its natural characteristics. It is, on the contrary, full of contrasts. The severe, snowy winters of northern Moldavia are far removed from the temperate climate of Wallachia, where during the winter months a biting wind from the northeast may give a seasonable aspect to the fertile country, but as early as a February the moist warmth of the thaw seems rather like the first smile of spring.

The valleys of Oltenia, with their peculiar orientation, have a Mediterranean atmosphere in comparison with the Wallachian plain, where violent storms sweep irresistibly over the land. Often it is snowing at Iași while at the most a few drops of tepid rain fall from the clouds which sprawl over the rose-tinted sky above the smiling face of Bucharest.

These differences are due to the situation of the mountains and the plain in each of the regions composing the country — a country with a distinct unity in spite of its great diversity. For, while Transylvania consists wholly of narrow valleys between the peaks of the Carpathians and the lines of the hills which cross it in every direction, while the arable land is represented only by the spacious valleys of rivers like the Olt, the Târnave, and the Someș, Wallachia, including Oltenia and Moldavia, as it was before the dismemberments of 1775 and 1812, has all the appearance of a complete territory; and these provinces form a kind of artificial museum of the different aspects possible in a fertile land which has at once a little of the cold west, with its green fields and its frequent fogs, and of the blue sky, the burning sun, and the fabulous harvests of the east. In the course of a few hours, in Wallachia, one leaves a region of naked rocks, pine forests, and streams from the heights which race, boiling into the gorges, and one reaches hills where there are smiling orchards like that of England, framing old white houses whose timbers are blackened with age. A little lower down one finds oneself, under a scorching sun, on a plain where corn that broke through the soil only in April bends under the weight of the golden ear about the middle of June; while the early flowers of spring have not yet faded, on the mountains, and the lilac still blooms before the windows of the village huts. In the end a quite new world fills the traveler with astonishment. This is the region of the Danube, with forests of knotty willows that seem at first sight impenetrable, though they have clearings where the fisherman cleans and mends his nets and prepares his fish for the market. In the Dobrudja this zone spreads across the river to the right bank, passing through a wild, masterless country of immeasurable antiquity, as far as the great lakes, the tortuous delta of the Danube, and, ultimately, the sea. There another fishing region awaits the native as well as the foreigner, who has for ages come from north and south to exploit its infinite wealth.

It is the same in Moldavia. One comes down from the rugged summits of the Ceahlău, and one finds oneself amongst the orchards of smiling villages and of the ancient monasteries, the domes of which soar above the interminable forests. A little farther on is the broad flood of the majestic Siret, its clear waters dotted with islands. Its sunny banks bear magnificent harvests every year. Here and there on the pasture-land, which at one time reared one of the noblest races of cattle in Europe — a breed of broad-headed cattle with long, straight horns — are the lakes which the former boyars made to supply themselves and their peasantry with fish during the long months of the Orthodox Lent. Then, beyond the slow-flowing Prut, which is almost hidden by its high clay banks is the gently undulating plain of Bessarabia, with excellent farming land. This thinly populated region which has everywhere the same character of steppe-land, the same reminiscence of the desert it once was leads on to the great lakes of the Danube, which are like those of the adjacent Dobrudja and the liman of the Dniester. There ends the principality which its fourteenth-century rulers proudly claimed, in their title, to have extended from the mountains to the sea.

Oltenia, which is in many respects like the adjoining country of Serbia, and belongs rather to the lands with a trend toward the Adriatic instead of the Sea of Marmora, affords us another example of this charming succession of every variety of climate, landscape, and produce, from the solitary peaks of the Parâng to the lovely hills of the districts of Mehedinți, Gorj, and Vâlcea, the rich plains of the Dolj and the Romanați, and the fisheries on the Danube, near Celeiu, a place of little importance today, which were famous in the thirteenth century.

Resembling each other, as they do, in this harmonious variety, the different zones of the geographical regions of Oltenia, Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania (with its appendages) are nevertheless separated by marked divergences which give each a distinct and peculiar character. We have already said that Oltenia has some resemblance to Serbia, the Olt, from which it takes its name, being a Morava of the left bank of the Danube. But, while there is between Wallachia and Moldavia the common element of the steppe which, comprising the whole of southern Bessarabia, extends beyond the Prut to the district of Galați, then sinks toward Brăila and spreads over the former desert of Ialomița, not unlike the ocean of rich ephemeral vegetation in southern Russia, there is nothing in Moldavia corresponding to the soft and fertile plain, as open to all the winds as it is to every human migration, every ruthless and transforming invasion. The hills succeed each other and fuse together, bending the capricious lines of their venerable forests with the many-toned carpets of the cultivated areas. The Siret, the Prut, and the Dniester have, it is true, the fine straight courses of the Wallachian rivers (the Vedea, the Argeș, the Dâmbovița, the Prahova, the Ialomița, and the Buzău), but the Moldova, the Bistrița, and the Putna, flowing down from the western mountains, do not make directly for the Danube. They cross the elevated part of the country and mingle their waters with those of the Siret, which is one of the main arteries of Moldavia. On its right bank the river receives only the scanty waters of the Bârlad, which pursue a tortuous course through the valleys and seem to be ever in danger of disappearing in the yellow friable soil. The Prut receives only the corresponding waters of the Jijia, on its right bank; and two other streams, not inconsiderable in volume, cut their way across Bessarabia and fall into the Dniester.

In Transylvania, the river-system which gives the country its character is quite different. In spite of the dividing line of the Carpathians, it is obvious that the southern part of the province, with its Olt land, its Bârsa land, and the Sibiu district, really belongs to Wallachia, where the sources of these rivers are. The Wallachian princes have often succeeded in annexing it, just as the princes of Moldavia have repeatedly endeavored, through Bucovina and Pocuția, to reach the sources of the Siret, the Prut, and the Dniester. But the other large rivers — the Mureș, the Someș, the three branches of the Criș, the waters of the Banat and Timișoara — turn westward and empty in to the Theiss, the great collecting channel which pours its mingled waters into the Danube.

There is, however, a broad unity amidst all this apparent diversity. It would be difficult even for a geologist, who assigns the constituent elements of a chain of mountains, to settle, not the point where the line of the Carpathians commences, but that at which it begins to dominate the landscape — which is the essential thing from the point of view of human, and particularly historical, geography. It would certainly not be found in Galicia, where there is a range of mountains, though neither in respect of landscape nor of the conditions of life — economic, social, and political — can they be said to give a character to the country. The land and its population do, indeed, lean upon the mountains which, in the west, fringe the great marshy plain of Poland (which means plain land), but it is not the mountains which determine the limits or, at once protecting and inspiring, are responsible for the physiognomy of all that is found beneath their shade.

It is otherwise as soon as the Carpathians reach the regions which represent the country as it once was — the traditional land of the Romanian race, essentially Romanian in its rocks and on the deep valleys which furrow the last wooded outliers of the mountains. Take, first, their names. The citadel of the Carpathians, dominating the entire region with its lines, which seem so many convolutions instinct with thought and life, was known to the Magyars, late invaders, incapable of themselves of colonizing, as the forest, the king’s forest. It corresponds, in the East, to the great forest of Serbia, which stretched from Belgrade to Nish and, by its hidden perils, swallowed up so many crusaders; or to the great forests of the west, the Hercynia of Caesar and Tacitus, the Forest of the Ardennes of the Middle Ages. All that lay beyond was, in medieval Latin, a Transylvania, a term which in time became generalized and embraced the entire province. From this land beyond the forests one descends to the Transalpina, the Havasalföld of the Magyars, the land beyond the Alps. For the Romanians of adjoining Moldavia, of more recent origin, it is Muntenia, the land of the mountains, inhabited by the Munteni, or mountaineers. When in the fourteenth century the Byzantine patriarch made Wallachia an archibishopric for the Romanians, the new seat received the title of Ungrowallachia and the mountain tablelands (Romanian plaiuri). The richly wooded land of Moldavia, the future Bucovina of the Austrian usurpation of 1775, appears for the first time in the Polish chronicle under the name of Plonyany, or the mountains.

The shepherds, whose wandering life amongst the valleys is the first stage of the history of the Romanian people, are just as truly a product of the mountains as are its pines and its larches. The first political groups were formed by the voivodes under the shadow of the lofty peaks, not far from the passes: not with the idea of being able to fly abroad through this open door, but so as to be able to check an invader at his very first attempt against the natural defenses of the frontier. There were built the first stone churches and the first mansions, round which clustered the houses of the merchants. Even in regard to agriculture it is now proved that, after the interruption of the civilizing work of the Romans, it was resumed on the high tablelands out of the path of invaders.

This Romanian land is embraced by the mountains on every side. Three great rocky boulevards rise above it, and each of these was destined to be the cradle of a State. It seems clear that the ancient and independent Romanian voivodate had, before the Hungarian invasion of Transylvania, its center and its stronghold in the towering bulk of the Bihor, which dominates the western province. It was in Argeș and the mountains of the Jiu that the political life of the Wallachian principality took its rise. Indeed, without Bucovina, and even without the mountainous county of Maramureș which is the western continuation of it, and had it not been for which there would have been no Moldavian dynasty, and the essential condition of the creation of the country would have been lacking, Moldavia would have been the second of the Romanian States, and the one which was long the more vigorous. As far as Bessarabia, which is only the eastern half, detached as late as 1812, of the former Moldavian unity, if it were not for these lines of hills which, by the protecting shade of their forests and the freshness of their valleys, watered by sluggishly flowing streams, maintain the fertility of the soil, the whole of this territory would have remained a neglected and uncultivated corner of the vast empty steppe.

The chain of mountains is so familiar to the Romanian that it has no special name. Possibly it was once called the Caucasus, but the word means no more than the word Alps, as it is the same as the common term for rock. It was in schoolbooks that the young Romans learned the name Carpathians; for the mass of the people the name was simply Muntele.

In order, however, to have a complete grasp of the geographical unity of these parts one must take into account another element — the river, the Danube; for it is the combination of the chain of mountains and the river which gives a unity to a country which offers so much variety.

There is not one Danube only: there are several — at least three. The swift rush of waters that issues from the depths of the Black Forest retains from a considerable stretch the romantic character of a German river. Even when it bears vessels of fairly large dimensions on its surface, after the mountain torrents have broadened it, the imposing aspect of a great river is still wanting. At Vienna itself, it fails to dominate the city; indeed, in spite of its blue waters, it gives the city no special character. But between the ancient historic Buda of the Magyar kings and of the Turkish pashas who succeeded them, and modern Pest, the parvenu city, with stone houses of bad taste the river is now a monarch. Its gigantic bridges are the chief ornament and the greatest engineering accomplishment of the Hungarian capital. In spite of its proportions, however, which give the Danube the position of one of chief river arteries in Europe, it has not yet the broad sweep, the exuberant vitality to which it owes the fact that it is not merely one of the great routes of European trade, but also the immense channel that receives the waters of a whole geographical region, the most active element in the entire life of a country, the defense and support, the supreme beauty and the highest pride, of a race which sees in the majestic river, as it were, a legendary figure of an ancestor and a symbol of a future in which are blended all the memories of a strenuous past and the energies of an agitated present to find harmony and peace in the destiny of the nation.

This character the Danube has not yet attained even at the stage where, crossing the Hungarian puszta, it boldly enters upon its great cascade toward the south. The plain on both banks is now determined by the river; the river itself is, in spite of its volume and the even body of its waters, lost in the immensity of a region which cannot be defined. For it to become the Danube sung with enthusiasm by poets, passionately loved by heroic young races it needs the association of the mountains, which, immediately beyond the junction with the Theiss, embrace it in the somber pass of the Iron Gates.

From that point onward, there is an unbroken association between the great river and the mountains which give birth to the streams that hasten to join it. It is in this association, and here alone, that one finds the unity of the entire territory inhabited by the Romanian people. By the tributary streams of the Carpathians are in continuous contact with the Danube, and the Danube outlines with its course the last ranges of hills which the mountains fling outward the south. At one time the river, in order to reach the sea, followed the bed which is indicated today by the railway from Cernavodă to Constanța. The whole of the Dobrudja was included in the same geographical group as Wallachia, and even Moldavia, with which it still has a sort of union by means of the heights around Galați. Today the new bed avoids the earlier tablelands of the Dobrudja, which have a character of their own, and follows the depression of the plain, the fringes of the steppe, and the farthest extension of the cultivated areas which run as far as the feet of the outlying hills.

The left bank of the Pannonian Danube, the bank which, having regard to the steppe, belongs to the Magyar race, has almost no tributaries, as if the reign of the river were not destined to spread in this region of vast plains; and the right or Balkan bank has only a few tributaries of no great importance. They cannot be compared with the Theiss and the burden it brings, or with the immense attributions of Wallachia and Moldavia. Although nearer to the river, as regards their summits and their hills, the Balkans have not the intimate connection which we find between the Carpathians and the river; the fringe of plain that lies between the line of the Danube and the hills is much less broad and less fertile. In the poetry of the Serbs the Danube has an important place, but for the Bulgars it is not a great tutelary river. Their folklore mentions it more rarely, and more casually, even than that of the of the Russians. The Romanian states, starting at the mountains, hastened to obtain possession of the river banks, and, by intense and energetic exertions, they succeeded in a few decades. Political Bulgaria, on the contrary, starting from the Russian steppe and ending in the delta of the Danube, did not linger long in these inhospitable regions, which could not provide their supply of soldiers, and made across the peninsula in the direction of Constantinople. The Balkans remains the almost inaccessible retreat of bands of marauders. As to the Danube, for the ambitious Bulgar khagans and their successors, the Tsars of the Slav tongue and the Orthodox creed, it meant only a starting point, soon abandoned and forgotten by men who dreamt of the conquest of the Bosphorus.

The Greeks called the river the Istros; whence the name of Istria and its mouth. The Romanians knew it as the Dunăre: a name which was borrowed from their remote ancestors, natives of its banks. Amongst the many rivers which have been celebrated in popular songs there is not one that can be compared to it in the veneration it has won from the race. One can no more imagine the fortune of the Romanian people without the Carpathians themselves. While the mountains sheltered them under the continual menace of invasion, the Danube gathered together the racial elements which were, in combination, to create the Romanian nationality. Without the work which was done by the river the Carpathians would, like the Alps of Switzerland, merely have afforded the security of their valleys to the fragments of different races that would have lived together there without fusing; without the Carpathians, there would indeed have been a fusion as in the Netherlands round the mouth of the Rhine, but the new national creation would not from the start have had the firm and permanent outlines of a political foundation.

Chapter II

The Creation of the Romanian People

Primitive Population. Scythian Influence. Sarmatian Influence. Gallic Influence. Greek Influence. The Illyro-Thracians. Roman Expansion and Conquest. The Work of the Romans.

Research that has been made, somewhat casually, without a general plan, and hitherto without a close study of the results obtained, gives us some idea of the character of the earliest Romanian civilization. Fragments of pottery have been found, grey and red, sometimes of fairly delicate workmanship and of varied designs, in some cases painted; also, statuettes which seem to be coarse reproduction of idols, metal implements, bronze weapons of elegant shape, very similar to those brought to light by archaeologists in the extreme west. The handles of the swords are decorated with an ornamentation which evinces great skill on the part of these prehistoric craftsmen, and the vases have the special lines which characterize a whole epoch of prehistoric art. Rich material, now kept in the University of Iași — apart from the objects which were imprudently lent to Berlin — was found at Cucuteni, near Iași, the site of which seems to have been surrounded by quite a number of settlements, with fairly large populations, which were violently destroyed during some unknown invasion; since these ancient centers of a dawning civilization were destroyed by fire.

We remember seeing a fine private collection of objects from the Moldavian mountains, in the district of Neamț, near Piatra. In the district of Prahova, near Vălenii-de-Munte, there was a surprising discovery at the ground level, probably there had been earlier excavations, of one of the richest collections of bronze weapons that has ever yet been found. In other places amateurs have discovered isolated pieces, such as those which, about the middle of the last century, formed the very mixed and largely spurious collections of Bolliac and Papazoglu, and were later housed in the Archaeological Museum at Bucharest.

As a rule, the Romanians have not lost the memory of the places where the precursors of the actual race lived. There are traces of them in popular references to things done by giants (uriași), by the Latin pagans (Letini), and by the Jews (Jidovi); which seems, in harmony with Biblical traditions, to point merely to the most ancient race. These prehistoric villages are most frequently found on the heights, which were later occupied by monasteries and citadels of the historic Middle Ages; popular usage still gives them that name, cetățuie (citadel), in vulgar Latin. As to the many obviously artificial tumuli, these often corresponded to the Russian kurgans. Together with pottery, weapons, and the remains of the sacrificed animal, they contain the ashes and skeletons of barbaric kings and chiefs. Some cover the sites of ancient dwellings; others seem to have been used only as stations for signal-fires, to warn of the coming of the bands which invaded the country almost every year until the sixth century.

The human remains found in these ancient prehistoric mounds have not yet received a careful study. Anthropologists have not decided with any accuracy the physical characters of this Thracian race of which we will speak presently, to whose very advanced civilization have been assigned the artistic objects discovered with them. Did these ancestors resemble the men who dwelt at the same period in the valleys of the Balkan Peninsula, and spread over the vast region between the Adriatic, the Black Sea, and the Archipelago? All that one can say is that there are serious grounds for believing that this primitive civilization was Thracian. On the other hand, it is certain that