Romania Guide

Three principalities

Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania — three countries, three fates, and the forty-two days they almost became one.

⏱ 7 min read 🔄 Updated 2026-04-29

When the fog of medieval invasions lifts, on the map of future Romania there are three countries, not one. Each with its own voivodes, its own enemies, its own architecture. Four hundred years later, that fragmented past will still explain everything.

A thousand years of transition

Between the Roman abandonment of 271 and the appearance of the medieval principalities, a thousand years pass about which astonishingly little is known. Across the Romanian territory pass Goths, Huns, Gepids, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Cumans and Mongols. Each wave leaves traces — toponymy, vocabulary, techniques — but none builds a lasting state north of the Danube. The Latinized population withdraws to the mountains, where the dominant economic model is transhumance. When the documents speak of the territory again, in the 13th century, the inhabitants are no longer called Dacians or Romans: they are vlachi (Vlachs), a name that medieval chronicles apply to Romance-speaking shepherds scattered across the Balkans.

The Middle Ages: three principalities and three enemies

In the 14th century, as that fog begins to clear, three distinct political entities appear on the map that will mark Romanian history for the next 500 years:

Wallachia

from 1330

The southern principality, founded by the voivode Basarab I after the battle of Posada (1330) against Hungarian king Charles I of Anjou — the date that marks de facto independence. Capital first at Curtea de Argeș and later at Târgoviște. Open to the Danube plain, in direct contact with the Ottoman Balkans. Its voivodes swung between vassalage to Hungary, to Poland, or to the Sultan, as circumstances dictated. Here ruled Mircea the Elder (1386-1418), who extended the principality to the Black Sea, and Vlad III Țepeș (1448, 1456-1462, 1476), the Impaler, whose terror policy against the Ottomans was real and effective, and whose myth — Stoker's Dracula — is Victorian and Irish. The tragic figure of Constantin Brâncoveanu (1688-1714), cultured prince and builder of the architectural style that bears his name, was executed in Istanbul together with his four sons for refusing to abjure the Orthodox faith.

Moldavia

from 1346

The northeastern principality, capitals in succession at Siret, Suceava and Iași. Founded by Dragoș, a voivode arriving from Maramureș, and consolidated by Bogdan I, who broke with the Hungarian crown around 1359. More oriented toward Poland and Kyiv than toward the Balkans. Its peak figure is Stephen the Great (1457-1504), who defeated the Ottomans at Vaslui (1475) — the battle for which Pope Sixtus IV called him "athlete of Christ" — and whose legacy is the first fortified monasteries of Bucovina, built to celebrate each victory with a church. He won thirty-four of his forty-six battles. After him, Moldavia entered the Ottoman orbit, but kept a state, a chancery language in Old Church Slavonic, and a high monastic culture that would produce the exterior frescoes unique in Eastern Christianity.

Transylvania

12th century – 1918

Region on the plateau enclosed by the Carpathians, under Hungarian sovereignty from the 12th century and settled through planned colonization. The Hungarian kings brought in Saxons (Germans from Saxony-Luxembourg-Moselle) to defend the borders and develop the cities, and Székelys (border Hungarians) to garrison the east. The legal system articulated three privileged "nations" — Magyars, Saxons and Székelys — with political rights. The Romanians, the demographic majority, were left out: serf farmers without representation. That exclusion would last until 1918 and would fuel Romanian nationalism in the 19th century. After the battle of Mohács (1526) and Hungary's fall to the Ottomans, Transylvania becomes an autonomous principality under Turkish suzerainty; after the Peace of Karlowitz (1699) it passes to the Habsburg Empire.

For four hundred years, these three principalities live apart, with separate fates. Wallachia and Moldavia pay tribute to the Sultan but preserve internal autonomy (they are, technically, vassals, not provinces): their Orthodox Church, their voivodes elected by the boyars, their customary laws. Transylvania is first part of the Kingdom of Hungary, then an autonomous principality under the Báthorys and, from 1699, one of the “crown lands” of the Habsburg Empire, where the new Catholic master clashed with the Orthodox Romanian majority and forced it into Uniatism (the creation of a Greek Catholic Church in 1697-1701, recognizing the Pope but keeping the Byzantine rite).

Each principality developed its own architecture, its own political life, its own elites. That is why Brașov today resembles Nuremberg, Iași looks like Kyiv, and Bucharest like neither. And that is what the attentive traveler perceives without needing to know history: the Saxon roofs of Sibiu, the bulbous Moldavian domes of Suceava and the Haussmannian buildings of central Bucharest tell, without words, three different trajectories.

Michael the Brave: the forty-two-day union

In 1600, a Wallachian voivode named Michael (Mihai Viteazul) unites, for the first — and for centuries, the last — time, the three principalities under one rule. He enters Alba Iulia, capital of Transylvania, with the opportunistic support of his usual rivals and the ambiguous blessing of Habsburg emperor Rudolf II, and for forty-two days he is ruler of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania. A Polish-Hungarian coalition, alarmed by his growing autonomy, has him assassinated in 1601 at the hands of the Austrian general Giorgio Basta.

Forty-two days that in the 19th century would become the founding myth of national unity.

The real history is more complicated than the nationalist narrative: Michael was not trying to “unite the Romanians” — a concept that did not exist in his time —, he was trying to build a personal domain taking advantage of Ottoman weakness, Habsburg chaos and Polish distraction. His armies were mixed mercenaries: Serbs, Bulgarians, Wallachians, Cossacks. But 19th-century Romantic storytelling turned him into the first unifier, and the city of Alba Iulia — where he entered in 1600 — would for that reason become the chosen stage in 1918 to proclaim Greater Romania. The symbolic is built that way: by superimposing dates that a serious historian would not accept as coincidence, but that a state in formation needs in order to have epic.