Kingdom of Romania

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingdom of Romania was born on the 15th of March 1881, when the Romanian parliament raised the country to the status of a kingdom and crowned a German prince as its first king. That prince, Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, had arrived in Romania just fifteen years earlier, immediately adopted the Romanian spelling of his name, Carol, and set in motion a dynasty that would rule until the very last day of 1947. What followed was more than six decades of a state trying to become itself: fighting for independence from the Ottoman Empire, doubling in size after one world war, and then watching that territory crumble in the next. How did a small principality wedged between three empires become Greater Romania? What forces tore it apart? And who was the last man standing when the monarchy finally ended?

• 2. From Principality to Kingdom

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  Alexandru Ioan Cuza became prince of both Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859, uniting an identifiably Romanian nation under a single ruler while remaining nominally subject to the Ottoman Empire. On the 5th of February 1862, the two principalities were formally joined as the Principality of Romania, with Bucharest as the capital.

  Cuza's reign ended abruptly in February 1866, when a coalition of Conservatives and radical Liberals forced him to abdicate. The group was mockingly called a "monstrous coalition" by its critics. The German prince Karl was appointed in his place, a deliberate move to secure Prussian backing for Romanian unity and future independence.

  For more than a decade, Romania was still formally a vassal state, but that status was increasingly hollow. The country flew its own flag, played its own anthem, and from 1867 had its own currency. Real independence came through the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, after which the Treaty of Berlin recognized Romania as a sovereign state. The price was painful: Romania gained Dobruja but was forced to surrender the southern part of Bessarabia to Russia.

  The new kingdom found itself geographically exposed, squeezed between the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires. It looked to France for cultural, educational, and administrative models, a choice that would shape its institutions for generations.

• 3. Greater Romania

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  Romania delayed entering World War I until 1916, when it declared war on the Central Powers and launched an offensive into Transylvania. The campaign quickly went badly. Bulgarian forces regained Dobruja, the Central Powers occupied Wallachia, and by the end of 1916 Bucharest itself and the strategically vital oil fields were in enemy hands.

  In 1917, fierce Romanian resistance at the Battle of Marașești could not compensate for Russia's withdrawal from the war following the October Revolution. Romania, nearly surrounded, signed the Armistice of Focșani and then, in May 1918, the Treaty of Bucharest. The situation seemed irreversible.

  But the war's end transformed everything. After Bulgaria was knocked out of the war by the successful offensive on the Thessaloniki front, Romania put an army back in the field on the 10th of November 1918, one day before the armistice in Western Europe. On the 1st of December 1918, representatives of Transylvanian Romanians gathered at Alba Iulia and proclaimed the union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania. Bessarabia had already united with Romania earlier that year, its National Council filling the power vacuum left by the Russian civil war. Bukovina followed.

  At the Paris Peace Conference, Romania received Transylvania, part of Banat, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. By 1920, Romania was more than twice the size it had been in 1914. The acquisition brought with it a large Hungarian minority accustomed to political dominance; the postwar government responded by requiring all state employees to speak Romanian, while still permitting Germans and Hungarians separate schools, publications, and judicial hearings in their own languages. These rights were not extended to Jews.

• 4. Democracy Unraveling

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  Between 1930 and 1940, Romania had over twenty-five separate governments. The instability was not accidental. The 1923 constitution gave the king the power to dissolve parliament and call elections at will, and successive governments exercised that provision constantly.

  The death of King Ferdinand in 1927 set off a succession crisis. His son Prince Carol had renounced his rights to the throne following marital scandals and spent three years in exile, leaving his young son Michael as king under a regency. Carol then changed his mind. With support from the National Peasants' Party and its leader Iuliu Maniu, Carol returned and proclaimed himself king in 1930, on the promise that he would abandon his mistress Magda Lupescu. He did not keep that promise. Lupescu returned to his side, and her influence over Carol became a persistent source of political toxicity throughout his reign.

  The Great Depression, which reached Romania in 1929, destabilized an already fragile system. The early 1930s brought high unemployment, social unrest, and strikes. The government violently suppressed the 1929 miners' strike in Valea Jiului and the strike at the Grivița railroad workshops. By mid-decade the economy had recovered somewhat, but around eighty percent of Romanians still worked in agriculture.

  On the 10th of December 1933, Liberal prime minister Ion Duca dissolved the Iron Guard and ordered thousands of its members arrested. Nineteen days later, Iron Guard legionnaires assassinated him. The quasi-mystical movement, which exploited nationalist sentiment, fear of communism, and antisemitism, had already embraced the politics of assassination. In December 1937, King Carol appointed the poet Octavian Goga, leader of the National Christian Party, as prime minister of Romania's first openly fascist government. Carol had also met with Adolf Hitler, who pushed for a government led by the pro-Nazi Iron Guard instead.

• 5. The Royal Dictatorship

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  On the 10th of February 1938, King Carol II dismissed Goga's government and declared a royal dictatorship, using a public insult Goga had directed at Lupescu as his pretext. Seventeen days later, a new constitution took effect under which Carol personally named not just the prime minister but every minister in the cabinet.

  In April 1938, Carol had the Iron Guard's leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, arrested. Known to his followers as "The Captain", Codreanu had previously assassinated the Prefect of Police in Iași in 1924 and been acquitted. On the night of the 29th and the 30th of November 1938, Codreanu and several other legionnaires were killed while supposedly attempting to escape from prison. The official account was generally disbelieved; it was widely understood that they had been murdered on Carol's orders in retaliation for a series of Iron Guard assassinations.

  The reprisal did not end the cycle. On the 7th of March 1939, Armand Călinescu formed a new government. On the 21st of September 1939, three weeks after Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, legionnaires assassinated Călinescu in turn, avenging Codreanu.

  Carol's position became untenable after the 1940 territorial losses, in which territories were ceded under pressure from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. After his forced abdication, his nineteen-year-old son Michael assumed the throne, obliged to hand dictatorial powers to General Ion Antonescu as prime minister. The country was renamed Legionary Romania.

• 6. War and Its End

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  Romania's World War II campaign on the Axis side brought catastrophe. The turning point came in 1944, when King Michael led a coup against Ion Antonescu. The kingdom shifted sides to the Allies and recovered Northern Transylvania as a result.

  The recovery was short-lived in a different sense. The Soviet Union's influence over postwar Romania proved decisive. Communist-dominated coalition governments steadily displaced other political forces. On the 30th of December 1947, King Michael I abdicated and the Romanian Parliament proclaimed the Romanian People's Republic, ending sixty-six years of monarchy and setting Romania's course as a Soviet satellite state.

  Two of the seven largest cities in Romania as recorded by the 1930 census are now located outside the country's borders, a consequence of the same border shifts that ended the kingdom's territorial ambitions. Chișinău, then the second-largest city with a population of just under 115,000, is now the capital of Moldova. Cernăuți, the third-largest at roughly 112,000, is now in Ukraine.

• 7. Oil, Steel, and Arms

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  In 1857, the first oil refinery in the world was built at Ploiești. That single fact positions Romania as an early industrial pioneer, and the oil sector grew to make the country one of the top exporters of crude oil by the late 1930s, a status that drew German and Italian interest in the country's resources.

  By 1938, Romania produced 6.6 million tons of crude oil annually, along with 284,000 tons of crude steel, 133,000 tons of pig iron, 510,000 tons of cement, and 289,000 tons of rolled steel. The MALAXA company, founded in 1921 by industrialist Nicolae Malaxa, had grown so rapidly that by 1930 Romania no longer needed to import locomotives at all; domestic industry supplied all required rolling stock.

  The armament sector was particularly inventive under pressure. During World War I, Romanian engineers converted up to 334 German 53 mm Fahrpanzer guns and 93 French 57 mm Hotchkiss guns into field and anti-aircraft artillery using locally built carriages. They also upgraded 120 German Krupp 105 mm howitzers into what was described as the most effective field howitzer in Europe at that time. Romania designed and built its own 250 mm Negrei Model 1916 mortar from scratch. The Vlaicu III aircraft, built during this period, is credited as the world's first aircraft made of metal.

  The interwar armament expansion went further. Between the 26th of May 1939 and the 1st of August 1940, the Concordia factory produced 118 French-designed 47 mm anti-tank guns under licence, with hundreds more following during the war. The Cugir gun factory built 5,000 ZB vz. 30 machine guns under Czechoslovak licence before Operation Barbarossa began in June 1941. The Mareșal tank destroyer, developed during the war, is credited with inspiring the German Hetzer design.

• 8. Land, People, and Limits

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  In 1919, seventy-two percent of Romanians worked in agriculture. The peasantry was among the poorest in the region, hampered by primitive farming methods, almost no machinery, and one of Europe's highest birth rates. The prewar Regat was traditionally organized around large estates worked by peasants who owned little or no land.

  The land reform passed in 1921, following pressure from peasant unrest and the example of the Russian Revolution, changed less than its advocates hoped. Large landowners still controlled up to thirty percent of Romania's land, including forests that peasants relied on for fuel. Redistributed plots were typically too small to be self-sustaining. Most peasants continued growing grain rather than cash crops, and underlying problems of rural overpopulation and technological backwardness went unaddressed.

  The 1930 census counted Romania's total population at 18,057,028. Romanians made up 71.9 percent; Hungarians were the largest minority at 7.9 percent, followed by Germans at 4.1 percent and Jews at 4 percent. Ruthenians and Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, and Romani each made up between one and three percent of the population.

  Bucharest was by far the largest city, with a population of 570,881 in 1930, or 639,040 including twelve suburban communities. Education followed the French model at secondary and university levels, but access was deeply unequal. Transylvania had the most educated population in Greater Romania; Bessarabia fared worst. In practice, few Romanians completed even the four years of schooling that the law required, and peasants had almost no path to higher education. Romania's 1938 GDP amounted to 387.204 billion lei, with public debt standing at about twenty-nine percent of that figure.