The history of Romania

Romania lies where the arc of the Carpathian Mountains meets the lower Danube and the Black Sea. In antiquity it was the land of the Dacians, whose kingdom was conquered by Rome in 106 CE, and the Latin speech of the Roman province is the root of the Romanian language, the only large Romance language of Eastern Europe. After centuries of migrations, the medieval principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia emerged in the fourteenth century and lived for four hundred years in the shadow of the Ottoman Empire, while Transylvania belonged to Hungary and later to the Habsburgs. A modern Romanian state was formed by the union of the two principalities in 1859, gained full independence in 1878, and doubled in size in 1918. The twentieth century brought dictatorship, the Holocaust, communist rule under Nicolae Ceaușescu and a violent revolution in 1989; since then Romania has become a democracy and a member of NATO and the European Union.

Human remains about 35,000 years old found in 2002 in the Peștera cu Oase, the "cave with bones", are among the oldest fossils of modern humans in Europe. Farming spread from the Balkans after about 6000 BCE as part of the Neolithic Revolution, and at Poiana Slatinei in Moldavia people were boiling brine for salt at about the same time, perhaps the earliest known salt works anywhere. From the fifth millennium BCE the Cucuteni culture of Moldavia, the western part of the Cucuteni–Trypillia world that stretched into Ukraine, built large villages and made some of the finest painted pottery of prehistoric Europe, while the Hamangia culture of Dobruja produced the clay figure known as the Thinker.

From the seventh century BCE Greek colonists founded trading cities on the Black Sea coast: Histria, Tomis, the modern Constanța, and Callatis. The first written account of the native peoples comes from Herodotus, who tells how the Getae, a Thracian people of the lower Danube, resisted Darius the Great during his campaign against the Scythians around 513 BCE and believed in the immortality of the soul through their god Zalmoxis. Greeks called these peoples Getae and Romans called them Dacians. The Celts settled in Transylvania in the fourth century BCE until they were absorbed or driven out. In the first century BCE King Burebista united the Geto-Dacian tribes into a kingdom reaching from the middle Danube to the Black Sea; Julius Caesar is said to have planned a campaign against him, but both men died in 44 BCE and the kingdom broke apart. Its capital was Sarmizegetusa Regia, a fortified mountain sanctuary in the Orăștie Mountains.

Dacian raids across the Danube into Roman Moesia brought war with Rome. King Decebalus, who came to power in 87 CE, defeated a Roman army and won a favourable peace from the emperor Domitian. Trajan answered with two wars, in 101 to 102 and 105 to 106, in which the Romans bridged the Danube, stormed Sarmizegetusa and drove Decebalus to suicide, campaigns depicted on Trajan's Column in Rome. The core of the kingdom, with its gold mines, became the province of Dacia within the Roman Empire, and colonists from across the empire settled in new towns such as Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa and Apulum, today's Alba Iulia. Latin spread through the towns, camps and mines.

Under pressure from the Goths and Carpi, the emperor Aurelian withdrew the army and administration south of the Danube around 271 to 275. What happened to the Latin-speaking population is one of the most debated questions in the history of the region. Many Romanian historians hold that a Romanised Daco-Roman population remained north of the Danube and is the origin of the Romanians, while others, especially in Hungarian scholarship, argue that the ancestors of the Romanians lived south of the river and moved north in the Middle Ages. The sources are scarce, and the debate has often been coloured by modern claims to Transylvania.

For nearly a thousand years the plains north of the Danube lay on the path of migrating peoples. The Goths were followed in 376 by the Huns, and the region became part of the Hunnic Empire of Attila. The Gepids and then the Avars ruled Transylvania, and Slavs settled widely, leaving a deep mark on the Romanian language. From 681 much of Wallachia and Moldavia fell under the First Bulgarian Empire, through which the Romanians received Orthodox Christianity and the Church Slavonic liturgy. Pechenegs and then the Cumans of Cumania dominated the eastern steppe from the tenth to the thirteenth century. Romance-speaking Vlachs are clearly recorded in the Balkans from the tenth century.

Transylvania was gradually conquered by the Kingdom of Hungary from the late tenth century onward. The Hungarian kings settled Székely border guards in the east and invited German colonists, the Saxons, who founded towns such as Sibiu and Brașov. In 1241 the armies of the Mongol Empire swept across the region, and for a century the Golden Horde dominated the lands east of the Carpathians.

Around 1310 Basarab I united the lands south of the Carpathians into the principality of Wallachia, and in 1330 he defeated King Charles I of Hungary at Posada, securing its independence. East of the mountains, Moldavia was founded in the mid-fourteenth century by Romanian nobles from Maramureș, and Bogdan I broke free of Hungarian overlordship around 1359. In Transylvania, by contrast, the Union of the Three Nations of 1438 shared political rights among the Hungarian nobility, the Saxons and the Székelys, leaving the Orthodox Romanians, though numerous, without recognised status.

From the late fourteenth century the principalities faced the expanding power of the Ottoman Empire. Vlad the Impaler, who ruled Wallachia in 1448, from 1456 to 1462 and again in 1476, became notorious for mass impalements and is remembered in Romania as a harsh defender of the country against the sultan Mehmed II; in the West his name inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stephen the Great, prince of Moldavia from 1457 to 1504, defeated the Ottomans at Vaslui in 1475 and built dozens of churches and monasteries. Both principalities eventually became Ottoman vassals, paying tribute and seeing their princes appointed or removed by Constantinople, but they kept their own nobles, or boyars, church and laws. After the Battle of Mohács in 1526 Transylvania became an autonomous principality under Ottoman protection, ruled mostly by Hungarian Calvinist princes. Michael the Brave, prince of Wallachia from 1593, seized Transylvania in 1599 and Moldavia in 1600, ruling all three lands for a few months before he was murdered in 1601; the episode later became a symbol of Romanian unity.

From the fifteenth century until the mid-nineteenth, most Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia were held as slaves, owned by the state, by monasteries or by boyars, who could buy, sell and separate their families. Abolition came in stages, ending in both principalities in 1855 and 1856.

At the end of the seventeenth century the Habsburg Monarchy took Transylvania, a conquest confirmed in 1699. The Habsburgs promoted a union of part of the Orthodox clergy with Rome, creating the Romanian Greek Catholic Church, whose scholars of the Transylvanian School stressed the Latin origins of the Romanians and petitioned for their rights; in 1775 Austria also annexed northern Moldavia as Bukovina. From 1711 in Moldavia and 1716 in Wallachia the Ottomans appointed princes from the Greek Phanariot families of Constantinople, remembered for heavy taxation. The principalities became a battlefield between the Russian Empire and the Ottomans, and in 1812 Russia annexed the eastern half of Moldavia, which it named Bessarabia and which roughly corresponds to today's Moldova. An uprising led by Tudor Vladimirescu in 1821 ended Phanariot rule, and during a Russian occupation after 1829 the Organic Regulations gave the principalities their first modern constitutions.

In 1848 revolutions broke out in all three Romanian lands. In Wallachia a liberal government briefly took power before Ottoman and Russian troops restored the old order, and in Transylvania Romanian militias under Avram Iancu fought the Hungarian revolutionary government of Lajos Kossuth. After Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, the great powers allowed only a loose union, but in January 1859 the assemblies of Moldavia and Wallachia both elected the same man, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, as prince. Cuza merged the two governments with Bucharest as capital, adopted the name Romania in 1862, secularised the monastic estates and carried out a land reform, but he was forced out in 1866 and replaced by a German prince, Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who reigned as Carol I.

When Russia went to war with the Ottomans in 1877, Romania declared its independence and fought alongside the Russians at Plevna. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 recognised it, though Romania had to give southern Bessarabia to Russia in exchange for northern Dobruja, and it largely evaded the requirement to grant citizenship to its Jews. Carol was crowned king in 1881. The kingdom built railways and developed the oilfields of Ploiești, but most peasants remained poor, and a great peasant revolt in 1907 was suppressed by the army with thousands of deaths. In 1913 Romania took Southern Dobruja from Bulgaria. In Transylvania, part of Austria-Hungary after 1867, Romanians faced a policy of Magyarisation.

Romania joined World War I on the Allied side in August 1916 in the hope of gaining Transylvania, but it was overwhelmed by German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian forces, and Bucharest fell in December. In 1917 the army held the line in Moldavia at Mărăști and Mărășești, but the collapse of Russia forced a separate peace in May 1918. Romania re-entered the war on 10 November, a day before the German armistice. Its wartime losses, military and civilian, are estimated at around 750,000.

As the empires around it fell apart, Bessarabia voted to join Romania in March 1918 and Bukovina in November, and on 1 December 1918 an assembly at Alba Iulia proclaimed the union of Transylvania, the Banat, Crișana and Maramureș with Romania, now the national day. Romanian troops briefly occupied Budapest in 1919, and the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 confirmed the new border. Greater Romania covered almost 300,000 square kilometres, but nearly 28 per cent of its people were minorities. A land reform broke up the great estates. Political life was unstable, with more than twenty-five governments in the 1930s alone. King Carol II manipulated the parties, while the Iron Guard, a violently antisemitic fascist movement, murdered several politicians, including Prime Minister Ion Duca in 1933. The government of Octavian Goga stripped about 225,000 Jews of their citizenship in 1938, and the same year Carol established a royal dictatorship.

The 1939 pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union left Romania exposed. In 1940 it was forced to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviets, northern Transylvania to Hungary and Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. Carol abdicated in favour of his son Michael, and General Ion Antonescu took power in alliance with the Iron Guard, which he crushed after its revolt and pogrom in Bucharest in January 1941.

In June 1941 Romania joined Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II, recovered its lost provinces and occupied the land beyond the Dniester as Transnistria, including Odesa. Two Romanian armies were shattered at Stalingrad in November 1942. Antonescu's regime carried out its own genocide as part of the Holocaust. In the Iași pogrom of late June 1941 up to about 14,850 Jews were killed in the city and in sealed "death trains". Romanian and German units massacred Jews in Bessarabia and Bukovina, survivors were deported to camps and ghettos in Transnistria, where many died of hunger, typhus and shootings, and tens of thousands of Jews were killed in and around Odesa in late 1941. Most estimates put the number of Jews killed under Romanian rule at between 250,000 and 380,000. More than 25,000 Roma were also deported to Transnistria, and between about 12,000 and 20,000 of them died. Most Jews of the pre-1940 core of the country survived, while about 132,000 Jews of Hungarian-ruled northern Transylvania were deported and murdered in 1944.

On 23 August 1944, as the Red Army broke through, King Michael had Antonescu arrested and took Romania over to the Allies. Northern Transylvania was restored after the war, but the Soviet Union kept Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Antonescu was executed in 1946.

With Soviet troops in the country, and with Winston Churchill having accepted in 1944 that Romania would fall in the sphere of Joseph Stalin, the small Communist Party took power through rigged elections in 1946, and on 30 December 1947 King Michael was forced to abdicate. The people's republic of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej nationalised industry, collectivised agriculture and imprisoned tens of thousands of opponents, many of whom died in prisons and labour camps such as those on the Danube–Black Sea Canal. Soviet troops left in 1958.

Nicolae Ceaușescu, party leader from 1965, won admiration in the West when Romania refused to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. At home, however, his rule became one of the most repressive of the Cold War, with a pervasive secret police, the Securitate, and a personality cult for himself and his wife Elena. A 1966 decree banned abortion and contraception, and in the 1980s his drive to pay off the foreign debt brought rationing of food, heating and electricity, while much of old Bucharest was demolished for a vast palace.

As the Revolutions of 1989 swept Eastern Europe, protests began in Timișoara on 16 December 1989 in defence of a Hungarian pastor, László Tőkés. Security forces fired on the crowds, and on 21 December a rally Ceaușescu called in Bucharest turned against him. He and his wife fled, were captured, and after a summary trial were shot on 25 December. More than a thousand people died in the revolution. Power passed to the National Salvation Front of Ion Iliescu, a former communist official, which won the first free elections in May 1990; weeks later miners brought to Bucharest violently broke up anti-government protests.

A new constitution was approved in 1991. Governments alternated between the Social Democrats, heirs of the National Salvation Front, and centre-right coalitions, and Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union on 1 January 2007. Corruption remained a central political issue, and millions of Romanians moved abroad to work, especially to Italy, Spain and Germany. Romania became a full member of the Schengen area on 1 January 2025.

In December 2024 the Constitutional Court annulled the presidential election after the surprise first-round victory of the nationalist Călin Georgescu, citing interference that the authorities attributed to Russia, a decision that provoked protests. President Klaus Iohannis resigned in February 2025, and in the rerun in May 2025 the mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan, defeated the nationalist George Simion with 53.6 per cent of the vote. The government of Ilie Bolojan, which pursued austerity, fell in a vote of no confidence in May 2026, and after months of crisis an independent, Luca Niculescu, was sworn in as prime minister on 20 October 2026 at the head of a minority government.