The Great Union (1859-1918)

The 19th century is the century in which three countries begin to think of themselves as one. The Marea Unire of 1918 — that date the traveler will see repeated even on postage stamps — is the close of a process that had taken sixty years.

The Transylvanian School and the rediscovery of Rome

The first link is intellectual and comes from Transylvania. At the end of the 18th century, the Habsburg Empire allows Romanian Uniates (Greek Catholics) to study in Rome. They return with three ideas that will shake everything: the Romanian language is Latin and must be written in the Latin alphabet (not Cyrillic, as it was then); Romanians are direct heirs of Trajan’s colonists; and, therefore, they are as European and as ancient as any other nation on the continent. The so-called Școala Ardeleană — Samuil Micu, Gheorghe Șincai, Petru Maior — produces grammars, dictionaries and the first general history. Romania’s founding idea is built in Latin, in Rome, by Transylvanian Greek Catholic priests. Strikingly, none of the three principalities was yet called Romania.

The 1848 revolution and the Crimean War

In 1848, Europe’s year of revolutions, the three principalities explode simultaneously. In Wallachia, a liberal revolution — led by Nicolae Bălcescu, Ion Heliade Rădulescu and the Brătianu brothers — proclaims the Islaz Constitution, abolition of serfdom and agrarian reform. Ottoman and Russian troops crush it. In Moldavia, the revolt is briefer and more conservative, suppressed within days. In Transylvania, the Romanians led by Avram Iancu — a lawyer born in the Apuseni mountains — launch into a three-sided war against the Magyars of Lajos Kossuth, simultaneously defending the Habsburg emperor and the Romanian national cause. The operation ends in mutual massacres and, once Vienna restores order, without any political concession to Transylvanian Romanians.

The Crimean War (1853-1856) shifts the balance. Russia, defeated by the Franco-British-Ottoman coalition, loses its protectorate over the Danubian principalities. The Treaty of Paris (1856) places them under the collective guarantee of the great powers and opens the door to a unification that neither Russia nor the Ottomans would have tolerated separately.

Cuza and the “double vote”

On 24 January 1859, the two Danubian principalities — Wallachia and Moldavia — elect the same candidate, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, as prince. It is a legally questionable personal union but politically irreversible: the guaranteeing powers had foreseen two princes, not one, and the Romanians got around the problem by electing the same person twice. Cuza governs both principalities from 1859 to 1866 with an intense reformist agenda: an agrarian law that distributes land to 400,000 peasants, secularization of monastic estates (a quarter of the country’s territory then belonged to monasteries), a civil code based on the Napoleonic, a unified army.

That intensity cost him the throne. In February 1866, a “monstrous coalition” of conservative boyars and radical liberals forced him to abdicate. To neutralize instability, the principalities elect a foreign prince: Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, cousin of the King of Prussia, arrives in Bucharest in May 1866. He takes the name Carol I and will reign for 48 years.

Independence, kingdom and war

Carol I governs with Prussian patience. His great moment comes in 1877, when Russia goes to war against the Ottomans to liberate Bulgaria. Romania signs an alliance with Russia, declares independence from the Sultan and sends 38,000 men to the front. The battle of Plevna — where Romanian artillery covers the Russian flank during a five-month siege — is the country’s founding military moment. The Treaty of Berlin (1878) recognizes independence, though at a territorial cost: Russia keeps southern Bessarabia, and Romania receives in exchange Dobruja, a multi-ethnic region of Turks, Tatars and Bulgarians that opens the country to the Black Sea. In 1881 Carol I proclaims himself king and Romania officially becomes a kingdom.

The following decades — 1881 to 1914 — are those of the “Bucharest belle époque”: the boulevard of Calea Victoriei, the Romanian Athenaeum, the Haussmannian buildings. The economy grows on the oil of Ploiești and the wheat of the lower Danube. But the peasantry remains an impoverished majority, without enough land, and in 1907 a huge peasant uprising erupts — 11,000 dead in the repression — exposing the limits of the Carol model.

The Great War and the Marea Unire

Transylvania, Bucovina and Bessarabia are still outside. The First World War changes that. After two years of neutrality, Romania enters on the Allied side in August 1916, drawn by the Franco-British promise of the Austro-Hungarian territories with Romanian populations. The campaign starts badly: within weeks, the German-Austro-Hungarian-Bulgarian army occupies two thirds of the country. Bucharest falls in December. The court and the government move to Iași. But the Romanian army, reorganized by the French military mission of General Berthelot, withstands during 1917 the great battles of Mărăști, Mărășești and Oituz, halting the German advance.

The Peace of Bucharest (May 1918) is humiliating for Romania, but is invalidated by the Allied victory in November. In the chaos of the Austro-Hungarian collapse, the Romanians of each region take the initiative on their own. Bessarabia joins Romania in March 1918. Bucovina does so on 28 November. And, finally, on 1 December 1918, an assembly of 1,228 delegates — peasants, priests, teachers, merchants — proclaims in Alba Iulia the union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania.

That moment — the Marea Unire, the Great Union — is still Romania’s national date. The Coronation Cathedral of Alba Iulia is built to commemorate that unification and to crown King Ferdinand and Queen Marie in 1922 as sovereigns of Greater Romania. Iuliu Maniu, the Transylvanian leader who politically articulated the decision, would be one of the great names of the interwar republic — and would die in a communist prison in 1953. Greater Romania would last barely 22 years.