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Short
History
..."In the 1st century
BC, as the Roman empire was expanding and Roman provinces were being
created in Pannonia, Dalmatia, Moesia and Thracia, the Danube became,
along 1,500 Km., the border between the Roman Empire and the Dacian world.
In Dobrudja, which was under Roman rule for seven centuries beginning with
the reign of Augustus, poet Publius Ovidius Naso spent the last years of
his life, "among Greeks and Getae," as he was exiled there, to
Tomi (8-17, AD) by order of the same Caesar.
Dacia was at the peak of its power under King Decebal (87-106 AD).
After a first confrontation during the reign of Domitian (87-89), two
extremely tough wars were necessary (101-102 and 105-106) to the Roman
empire, at the peak of its power under Emperor Trajan (98-117) to
defeat Decebal and turn most of his kingdom into the Roman province called
Dacia.
The Dacians, although they had suffered heavy casuals, remained, even
after the new rule was established, the main ethnic element in Dacia; the
province was subjected to a complex Romanization process, its basic
element being the staged but definitive adoption of the Latin language.
The Romanians are today the only descendants of the Eastern Roman stock;
the Romanian language is one of the major heirs of the Latin language,
together with French, Italian, Spanish; Romania is an oasis of Latinity in
this part of Europe.
In the 4-13th centuries the Romanian people had to face the waves of
migrating peoples - the Getae, the Huns, the Gepidae, the Avars, the
Slavs, the Petchenegs, the Cumanians, the Tartars - who crossed the
Romanian territory.
The migratory tribes controlled
this space from the military and political points of view, delaying the
economic and social development of the natives and the formation of local
statehood entities.
The Slavs, who massively settled since the 7th century south of the
Danube, split the compact mass of Romanians in the Carpathian-Danubian
area: the ones to the north (the Daco-Romanians) were separated from the
ones to the south, who were moved towards the west and Southeast of the
Balkan Peninsula (Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians and Istro-Romanians). The
Slavic language was never a living language, spoken by the people, on the
territory of Romania; it played for Romanians, at a certain time during
the Middle Ages, the same role that Latin played in the West; in the early
modern age it was replaced for ever, in church, chancery and culture
included, by the Romanian language.
In fact the Romanians are the
only ones who, through their very name - roman - (coming from the Latin
word "Roman") - have preserved to this day in this part of
Europe the seal of the ancestors, of their descent, that they have always
been aware of. This will show later in the name of the nation state -
Romania.
Beginning with the 10th century,
the Byzantine, Slav and Hungarian sources, and later on the western
sources mention the existence of statehood entities of the Romanian
population - kniezates and voivodates - first in Transylvania and Dobrudja,
then in the 12-13th centuries, also in the lands east and south of the
Carpathians. A specific trait of the Romanian’s history from the Middle
Ages until the modern times is that they lived in three Principalities
that were neighbors, but autonomous - Wallachia, Moldavia and
Transylvania.
In the 14th century, with the
decline of the neighboring imperial powers (the Poles, the Hungarians, the
Tartars), south and east of the Carpathian Mountains range the autonomous
feudal states were formed: Wallachia, under Basarab I (around 1310)
and Moldavia, under Bogdan I (around 1359). The Polish and
Hungarian kingdoms attempted in the 14-15th centuries to annex or
subordinate the two principalities, but they did not succeed.
Alone or in alliance with the
neighboring Christian countries, more often in alliance with the
neighboring voivodes of the other two Romanian principalities, the
voivodes of Wallachia Mircea the Old (1386-1418) and Vlad the
Impeller (Dracula of the Mediaeval legends, 1456-1462), with Stephen
the Great and Holy (1457-1504), the voivode of Moldavia and Iancu
of Hunedoara, the voivode of Transylvania (1441-1456) fought heavy
defence battles against the Ottoman Turks, delaying their expansion to
Central Europe.
The end of the 16th century was dominated by the personality of Michael
the Brave. He became voivode of Wallachia in 1593, joined the
Christian League - an anti-Ottoman coalition initiated by the Papacy and
the Holy Roman Empire and he succeeded, following heavy battles (Calugareni,
Giurgiu) to actually regain the independence of his country. In 1599-1600
he united for the first time in history all the territories inhabited by
Romanians, proclaiming himself "prince of Wallachia, Transylvania and
the whole of Moldavia."
Michael the Brave (1593-1601)
who first united the three Romanian lands.
The ambitious dream of the czars to dominate the Bosporus strait and
Constantinople placed the Romanian Principalities in the way of Russian
expansionism.
Many wars were fought by Austria
and Russia against the Ottoman Empire (1710-1711, 1716-1718, 1735-1739,
1768-1774, 1787-1792, 1806-1812, 1828-1829, 1853-1856): those battles took
place on Romanian soil, always
accompanied by a foreign military occupation, which was often maintained
long after the war proper was over, so the Romanian lands endured not only
through devastation and irrecoverable losses but also through population
displacements and painful territory amputations.
The quest for renewal in
Wallachia was expressed in the revolution led by Tudor Vladimirescu (1821),
which broke out at the same time with the Greek’s movement for
liberation.
Although the brutal intervention of the Ottoman, Czarist and Hapsburg
armies was successful in 1848-1849, the renewal tide favoring democratic
ideas spread everywhere in the next decade.
But the Romanians elected on January 5/17, 1859 in Moldavia and on January
24/February 5, 1859 in Wallachia Colonel Alexandru Ioan Cuza as
their unique prince, achieving de facto the union of the two
principalities.
The Romanian nation state took on January 24/February 5, 1862 the name of
ROMANIA and settled its capital in Bucharest.
After the abdication of Alexandru Ioan Cuza (1866), Carol of
Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a relative of the royal family of Prussia,
who was supported by Napoleon III and Bismark, was proclaimed on May 10,
1866, following a plebiscite, ruling prince of Romania, with the name of
Carol I.
Within a favorable international
framework - in 1875 the Oriental crisis broke out again and the
Russo-Turkish war started in April 1877 - Romania declared its full state
independence on May 9/21, 1877. The government led by Ion C. Bratianu,
in which Mihail Kogalniceanu served as Foreign Minister, decided, upon the
Russian request for assistance, to join the Russian forces that were
operative in Bulgaria.
On March 14/26, 1881, Romania
proclaimed itself a kingdom and Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was
crowned King of Romania.
In Transylvania
the National Assembly called at Alba Iulia on November 18/December 1, 1918
voted, within the presence of over 100,000 delegates, to unite
Transylvania and Banat with Romania
So, in January
1919, when the peace conference was inaugurated in Paris, the union of all
Romanians into one single state was an accomplished fact.
The international
peace treaties of 1919-1920 signed at Neuilly, Saint-Germain, Trianon and
Paris, established the new European realities and also sanctioned the
union of the provinces that were inhabited by Romanians into one single
state (295,042 square kilometers, with a population of 15.5 million).
When World War II broke out, Romania
declared neutrality (September 6,1939) but she supported Poland (by
facilitating the transit of the National Bank treasure and granting asylum
to the Polish president and government). The defeats suffered by
France and Great Britain in 1940 created a dramatic situation for Romania.
The Soviet government applied Plank
3 of the secret protocol of August 23, 1939 and forced Romania by the
ultimatum notes of June 26 and 28, 1940 to cede not only Bessarabia, but
also Northern Bukovina and the Hertza land (the latter two had never
belonged to Russia). Under the Vienna "Award" - actually a
dictate - (August 30, 1940) Germany and Italy gave to Hungary the
north-eastern part of Transylvania, where the majority population was
Romanian. Following the Romanian-Bulgarian talks in Craiova, a treaty was
signed on September 7, 1940, under which the south of Dobrudja (the
Quadrilateral) went to Bulgaria.
Despite the human
and economic efforts Romania had made for the cause of the United Nations
for nine months, the Peace Treaty of Paris (February 10, 1947) denied
Romania the co-belligerent status and forced her to pay huge war
reparation. payments; but the Treaty recognized the come-back of
north-eastern Transylvania to Romania while Bessarabia and Northern
Bukovina stayed annexed to the USSR.
On the territory of Romania Soviet troops were stationed and the country
was abandoned by the Western powers, so the next stage brought a similar
evolution to that of the other satellites of the Soviet Empire. The whole
government was forcibly taken over by the communists, the political
parties were banned and their members were persecuted and arrested; King
Michael I was forced to abdicate and the same day the people’s republic
was proclaimed (December 30, 1947).
At the death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1965), the communist leader
of the after-war epoch, the party leadership, which was later identified
with that of the state as well, was monopolized by Nicolae Ceausescu.
In a short period of time he managed to concentrate into his own hands
(and those of a clan headed by his wife, Elena Ceausescu) all the power
levers of the communist party and of the state system. Romania distanced
herself from the USSR (this publicy inaugurated in the
"Statement" of April 1964); the domestic policy was less rigid
and there was some opening in the foreign policy (Romania was the only
Warsaw Treaty member-state that did not intervene in Czechoslovakia in
1968); all this, as well as the political capital built on such a less
Orthodox line were used to consolidate Ceausescu’s own position, to take
over the whole power within the party and the state. The dictatorship of
the Ceausescu family, one of the most absurd forms of totalitarian
government in the 20th century Europe, with a personality cult that
actually bordered on mental illness, had as a result, among other things,
distortions in the economy, the degradation of the social and moral life,
the country’s isolation from the international community.
The
victory of the revolution on December, 1989 opened the way for a
re-establishment of democracy, of the pluralist political system, for the
return to a market economy and the re-integration of the country in the
European economic, political and cultural space.".
thanks and more details at History
of Romanians
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