Romania

Borderland of Europe

Lucian Boia

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781861891037
• eBook ISBN:
  9781861894588
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Romania occupies a unique position on the map of Eastern Europe. It is a country that presents many paradoxes. In this book the pre-eminent Romanian historian Lucian Boia examines his native land’s development from the Middle Ages to modern times, delineating its culture, history, language, politics and ethnic identity. Boia introduces us to the heroes and myths of Romanian history, and provides an enlightening account of the history of Romanian Communism. He shows how modernization and the influence of the West have divided the nation - town versus country, nationalists versus pro-European factions, the élite versus the masses - and argues that Romania today is in chronic difficulty as it tries to fix its identity and envision a future for itself.

The book concludes with a tour of Bucharest, whose houses, streets and public monuments embody Romania’s traditional values and contemporary contradictions.

III How Romania was Created

FROM DACIA TO THE MEDIEVAL PRINCIPALITIES

The phrase ‘De la Nistru pîn’ la Tisa’ (‘From the Dniester to the Tisza’) is well known to Romanians. It defines the limits of an ideal Romania (though we should note that the Romanian population extends in the east beyond the Dniester, while both banks of the Tisza are completely Hungarian for most of the river’s length). To the south, the Danube completes this symbolic geography of Romania: an enclosed space between three rivers, with an area of some 300,000 sq km, comparable with that of Italy or the British Isles. Rivers, then, are perceived as natural borders, separating Romanians from Others. But what about mountains? The Carpathians divide Romanian territory in two. Their ‘responsibility’ has been seen in different ways by historians. Xenopol saw the mountain barrier as the main explanation for the Romanians’ division into different states: the Carpathians separated Transylvania from the other two provinces, and moreover obliged Moldavia to look eastwards and Wallachia towards the south. Other historians have attributed a unifying function to the Carpathians, considering them to be the ‘spinal column’ that structures and supports the Romanian organism. It is possible to claim almost anything about the role of geographical factors in history, as indeed about the causes of historical evolutions in general. It is not easy to say what Romania would have been like without the Carpathians – or the British Isles if they had not been isles! What is certain is that the Danube and the Carpathians are the lines of resistance of the Romanian space. Since Romania as such has not always existed, its present territory can be suggested by the expression ‘Carpathian-Danubian space’ or, more recently, ‘Carpathian-Danubian-Pontic space’, to include Dobrogea and the Black Sea coast. (However, the Romanians have not looked towards the sea very much, as it never had anything like the significance which the mountains and Danube have had for them. They are not a ‘maritime’ people, and the sea only really entered their history with the acquisition of the mouth of the Danube and Dobrogea in 1878.)

Regardless of reasons, there is no doubt that until the modern period the ‘Carpathian-Danubian-Pontic space’ was not unitary in its evolution but, on the contrary, fragmentary and subject to diverse, even divergent, foreign influences.¹ The Getae and Dacians were only incorporated into a single political unit in the time of Burebista (mid-first century BC), a contemporary of Julius Caesar. And we may be sure that even this ‘empire’, which extended considerably beyond the borders of present-day Romania, did not have the degree of cohesion imagined by some recent historians, and especially by the historical-political propaganda of the Ceausescu period (when Burebista’s ‘centralized and unitary’ Dacian state was spoken of in terms suggesting its equivalence with Ceausescu’s Romania). In any case, Burebista’s state ended with him and was divided into a number of political entities. It was only towards the end of the first century AD that Decebalus reunited the greater part of Dacia under his rule. But this second attempt to create a Dacian kingdom also came to nothing. As a result of their two wars against the Dacians, the Romans extended their dominion over the Danube and the Carpathians. Three distinct zones now took shape within the present-day territory of Romania. For the next 165 years, the western regions made up Roman Dacia. The east and the north remained in the possession of the free Dacians. Dobrogea, on the other hand, which had been included in the Empire as early as 28 BC, initially formed part of the province of Moesia before becoming a province in its own right, under the name of Scythia Minor; it was to remain under Roman, later Byzantine, rule until the seventh century.

After the Romans abandoned Dacia, the region remained open to invasion, and its fragmented and only vaguely politically structured territory came under the control of a succession of different masters. Almost everything about this millennium remains a matter of hypothesis, beginning, as we have seen, with the presence of Romanians north of the Danube. If we accept the thesis of continuity, there remains the question of what sort of political formations the Romanians lived in, and what their relations were with the dominant peoples and states in this part of Europe. One’s initial impression is of an almost ‘vegetal’ life, a merging with the mountains and forests. (Xenopol argued for a ‘withdrawal to the mountains’, while C. C. Giurescu, somewhat later, saw the forests as the Romanians’ principal refuge in the period of migrations.) These romantic images certainly do not completely correspond to reality, but they have nonetheless fed an entire mythology describing the difference between Romanians and ‘Others’, the distinct character of the Romanians’ civilization, their relation to nature (‘the forest, brother to the Romanian’) and so on. What is certain is that for centuries, this zone lay on the edge of Europe and knew a ‘diminished’ historical life.

An interesting hypothesis concerns the socio-political role of the Slavs. According to this thesis, Slav conquerors made up the ruling class. The term boier (‘boyar’, ‘noble’) is indeed of Slavic origin (having previously been borrowed from the Turkic Bulgars). This would also explain the double sense of the word rumân: ‘Romanian’ but also ‘dependent peasant’. The condition of the Romanians would indeed have been that of peasants subject to a Slav aristocracy (which was, of course, assimilated in the course of time, and which later constituted the Romanian boyar class). The hypothesis of the ethnic origin of social categories (supported in the Romanian case by historians such as Petre P. Panaitescu² and C. C. Giurescu) was evidently inspired by similar situations in, and interpretations of, the histories of France and England, the French aristocracy having been formed by Frankish conquest, and that of England by Norman conquest from France (such interpretations enjoyed a considerable vogue in the nineteenth century, particularly due to the work of the French historian Augustin Thierry).

The expansion of the Hungarians towards Transylvania began with their settlement in the Pannonian plain in AD 896. The twelfth-century chronicle of Anonymus mentioned in Chapter II refers to three small Romanian or Slav-Romanian principalities which submitted to the Hungarians (though the point is disputed by Hungarian historians). By around 1100, Transylvania had already been organized as a principality (known by the Slavic – or Romanian-of-Slavic-origin – term voivodate) within the Hungarian kingdom. The first Bulgarian tsardom held dominion on the other side of the mountains (though it is hard to say in what form and to what extent). This had been founded after the invasion of the Bulgars, a people of Turkic origin, in AD 679, followed by their settlement in the northern part of the Balkan peninsula (where they were Slavicized, leaving only their name to the Bulgarians of today). In the early eleventh century, the Byzantines destroyed this first Bulgarian state and returned to the Danube. In 1185, a rebellion led by the brothers Peter and Asen ended with the expulsion of the Byzantines and the formation of the second Bulgarian tsardom, known in Romanian historiography as the ‘Romanian-Bulgarian empire’. Here too there is an interesting historical dispute. Was ‘Romania’ once ruled by Bulgarians? Or, on the contrary, was Bulgaria itself created by Romanians? In the Middle Ages, the Balkan Vlachs (the descendants of Romanized Thracians – ‘brothers’ to the Romanians north of the Danube) were still numerous; in time, they would disappear into the Slavic mass. From the point of view of Romanian historians, the fact that the very founders of the new state were Vlachs seemed to justify the label ‘Romanian-Bulgarian’. In fact, participation in ‘great history’ south of the Danube compensated in the Romanian historical imaginary for the lack of such history north of the river.

The Romanian space began to take on a more stable form in the course of the thirteenth century. Around the middle of the century, there is mention of a number of statelets south of the Carpathians, dependent on the Hungarian crown. Their unification, in the first decade of the fourteenth century, resulted in the creation of Wallachia. Just in time, it might be said, as the Hungarians, who already had control of Transylvania, were getting ready to extend their domination beyond the Carpathians too. In 1330, at the battle of Posada, the voivode of Wallachia, Basarab, won a resounding victory in the mountains over King Charles Robert of Hungary. This is one of the key dates of Romanian history: the moment when Wallachia was truly born. Around the middle of the same century, Moldavia also came into being, likewise as a result of a process of ‘separation’ from Hungary.

HISTORICAL LATECOMERS

What is striking is the relatively late formation of the Romanian states. The Romanians were latecomers to history. It was not that they had not been around previously, but it was only now that their presence in Europe became ‘visible’ and their distinct voice began to be heard. The medieval period effectively began in the Romanian lands in the fourteenth century, at a time when it was coming to an end in the West and the Renaissance was approaching. The historical discrepancy is considerable; the Romanians’ problem was (and still is) how gradually to reduce their handicap. On top of this, they were small states which could hardly be compared with Hungary and Poland, the ‘great powers’ of Central Europe, or even with the kingdoms of Bulgaria and Serbia, south of the Danube, which had known their moment of expansion and glory long before the foundation of the Romanian lands. The latter had, in Western terminology, the status of ‘principalities’ (with the ‘prince’ bearing the double title of voivode and domn – from the Latin dominus). They could not – according to the feudal hierarchy of the Middle Ages – be placed on a level of equality with the neighbouring kingdoms. The King of Hungary claimed from the beginning to be the suzerain of the two lands. In order to counter these Hungarian pretensions, the princes of Moldavia, who were initially vassals of Hungary, took an oath of vassalage to the kings of Poland. Wallachia remained closer to Hungary; there, manifestations of independence alternated with periods in which the relation of vassalage was recognized.³

This rather modest condition, in relation not only to the West but also to their neighbours, gave rise to an inferiority complex in the Romanians’ modern consciousness and, logically enough, to various compensatory tactics. Thus emphasis was placed on the distinctive character of Romanian civilization (not inferior to others but different from them), on the victories won against more powerful opponents, and on the Romanians’ role in the defence of European Christendom. One fact that was highlighted was the remarkable vitality of the Romanian lands, which succeeded in maintaining their existence – by war and by diplomacy – in adverse conditions, while formerly powerful countries like Hungary and Poland (not to mention the Balkan states) fell, were swallowed up by even greater powers and disappeared for a time from the stage of history. It is indeed a consolation, but one that cannot completely cancel out the frustrating memory of having played a secondary role for too long.

The unfortunate system of succession to the throne (or rather the lack of any real system) came as a supplementary handicap. The succession was neither hereditary nor simply elective but a mixture of the two: hereditary in principle, with two dynasties (Basarab in Wallachia and Muşatin in Moldavia), but without the Western criterion of transmission of the throne in the direct line. Not only sons but also brothers or more distant relatives could aspire to princedom (women were excluded from the start). The only condition was to be ‘princely bone’, to belong to the family. At first, selection worked within reasonable limits. In time, however, the pretenders multiplied. Even illegitimate sons succeeded to the throne, and, in these conditions, there were of course men who only pretended to be sons of a prince. (Such was the case with Michael the Brave, the most renowned of all of the Romanian voivodes, who declared himself to be the posthumous son of the voivode Petrascu the Good; modern historians seem less than convinced of this relationship, which would in any case be impossible to prove.) In time, very distant relatives appeared who were not really relatives at all; some adopted the name Basarab in order to be more convincing. In a final phase, not even this formality mattered anymore; the rulers were now appointed by the Turks anyway.

How were rulers chosen, whether from within the dynasty or from outside it? In principle, they were picked by an assembly of boyars, sometimes by a larger assembly of the country. However, in the absence of a strict procedure (unless a prince had made his son an associate on the throne, thus theoretically ensuring his succession), conflicts were numerous. In addition, help was sometimes sought from outside, providing an excuse for the Hungarians or Turks to intervene. In these circumstances, not all reigns reached their natural term; some rulers were deposed or killed. There were, however, a few long reigns, and it is to them that the most lasting political and cultural achievements belong. Thus we have Mircea the Old (1386–1418) in Wallachia, and his contemporary Alexander the Good (1400–1432) in Moldavia; then Stephen the Great (1457–1504), whose reign – the longest of all – is considered the most glorious period in Moldavia’s history; the parallel reigns of Matei Basarab (1633–54) in Wallachia and Vasile Lupu (or Basil the Wolf, 1634–53) in Moldavia; and finally, in Wallachia, Constantin Brîncoveanu (1688–1714). But these are the exceptions. The norm was frequent changes of rule, short reigns of a few years at the most and an instability which increased with each century that passed.

The general instability of this part of Europe was aggravated by internal instability – too much instability! In fact, there is a marked note of anarchy about the history of the Romanians. How could anything durable be built out of it? We can see here the origins of a distrust of history, a lack of confidence in any long-term project. A dose of fatalism was working its way into Romanian culture, a state of mind expressed memorably by Miron Costin: ‘The times are not steered by man; rather poor man is under the rule of the times.’

FACING THE TURKS

Relations with the Turks constitute an important chapter in the history of the Romanians, but also in their mythology. The mythological image is of an uninterrupted struggle in which the little Romanian lands won many glorious victories against a vast empire. The Romanians thus preserved their national existence while at the same time defending Christian Europe. The historical reality was, as usual, more complex and substantially different.

The Turks began their expansion into the Balkans around the middle of the fourteenth century. Towards the end of the century, the two tsardoms into which Bulgaria was divided were conquered, and the Ottoman Empire reached the Danube, the border of Wallachia. The fall of Constantinople (1453) sealed the fate of the Balkan Christians. Western attempts at an anti-Ottoman crusade (Nicopolis, 1396; Varna, 1444) had ended in disaster. The Turks were finally stopped at Belgrade, where they were defeated in 1456. However, three-quarters of a century later, they renewed their expansion. The Hungarian army was destroyed at Mohács in 1526, and in 1541 the greater part of Hungary became a Turkish province. The Turks twice laid siege to Vienna, in 1529 and 1683, on both occasions without success; this was the extreme point of their advance towards the West.

The Romanian lands lay in the front line. The wars with the Turks have remained imprinted on the national consciousness more than any other historical theme. The Romanians’ vocation in the Middle Ages (and their great contribution to European history) would appear to have been to fight the Turks, in a prolonged struggle from which they emerged victorious most of the time. In reality, the years of conflict add up to only a few decades out of half a millennium of Romanian-Ottoman relations. The Romanians won some battles, the Turks won others. However, winning a battle does not mean winning the war. It was the Turks who won the wars in the end! And their result is indisputable: for a long period, the Romanian lands came within the Ottoman orbit.

Three battles are celebrated above all the others as great Romanian victories: Rovine (1394), Vaslui (1475) and Călugăreni (1595). Our knowledge about Rovine is fragmentary. It may in fact have been inconclusive. What is certain is that in its aftermath Mircea the Old, the Prince of Wallachia, was forced to take refuge in the mountains, and that he only regained his throne with the support of the King of Hungary, Sigismund of Luxemburg. Later, Mircea became involved in politics on a grand scale, intervening in the conflict between claimants to the throne of the Ottoman Empire. However, the Turks had the last word. Towards the end of Mircea’s reign, a territorially diminished Wallachia had to accept Ottoman suzerainty and to pay tribute to the Turks.

In the case of Vaslui, there is no possible doubt: it was a clear victory for Stephen the Great. But it was followed the next year by a Turkish victory and the devastation of Moldavia. A decade later, Stephen, too, had to submit and pay tribute, after losing southern Bessarabia into the bargain.

At Călugăreni (between Bucharest and the Danube), the result of the battle was equivocal – for the Romanians, it is a great victory, but the Turks consider it a victory as well. After the battle, Michael the Brave withdrew to the mountains, abandoning Bucharest. He returned with the support of a Transylvanian army, and the two principalities’ united forces managed to drive the Turks back across the Danube. However, a few years later the whole edifice was to crumble, leaving Wallachia a dependency of the Sublime Porte.

The Romanian lands repeatedly joined the anti-Ottoman coalitions of the Christian states. Hungary was a key part of this system. The victor over the Turks at Belgrade in 1456 was a voivode of Transylvania and regent of Hungary whose origins were Romanian. The Hungarians call him Hunyadi János and the Romanians Ioan (or Iancu) of Hunedoara. Regardless of his origins, he was Catholic and a Hungarian noble; his son Matthias Corvinus became King of Hungary. Ioan’s impressive castle can by admired at Hunedoara in southern Transylvania, as can his tomb in the Catholic cathedral of Alba Iulia (Transylvania’s medieval capital).

Why did the Turks not conquer the Romanian lands? Romanian historians have continually confronted this question. Why did these areas not suffer the same fate as Hungary, a country so much larger and apparently more powerful? The patriotic answer is easy to guess: the Turks did not conquer the Romanian lands because resistance was such that they were not able to. In this interpretation, the Romanians’ history becomes transfigured as heroic epic, a sort of replay of the struggle of David and Goliath. But what if the Romanian armies were not actually so small? The thesis of a ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I A Look at the Map
• II An Island of Latinity
• III How Romania was Created
• IV Romanian Communism
• V Between the Past and the Future
• VI Romanians and Foreigners
• VII Who’s Who in the Romanian Pantheon
• VIII A Walk through Bucharest
• Epilogue
• References
• A Note on Romanian Pronunciation and Spelling
• Photographic Acknowledgements
• Index of Personal Names
• Index of Place Names