Outside the principalities lay Transylvania, whose government and economy were dominated in the countryside by the Calvinist and Roman Catholic Hungarian nobility and in the cities by the Lutheran German-speaking Saxon upper class. A large Romanian population lived there also, but Romanians were excluded from public affairs and privileges because they were overwhelmingly peasant and Orthodox. Their fortunes improved when Transylvania was brought under the Habsburg crown at the end of the 17th century. In order to strengthen the Roman Catholic Church as a unifying force, Austrian officials and Jesuit missionaries persuaded a portion of the Romanian Orthodox clergy to accept a union with Rome in 1697–1700. In return for recognizing the pope as head of the Christian church and accepting a few minor changes in doctrine, Romanian clerics were promised a political and economic status equal to that of Roman Catholic priests.

Although the advantages promised the new Eastern rite Catholic, or Uniate, clergy by the union fell short of expectations, they did allow a vigorous, public-spirited Romanian intellectual elite to form under the guidance of Bishop Ion Inochentie Micu-Klein (in office 1729–51). In the second half of the 18th century, Micu-Klein’s disciples strove to achieve recognition of the Romanians as a constituent nation of Transylvania. They also elaborated a modern, ethnic idea of nationhood based on the theory of Roman origins and the continuous presence of the Daco-Romans in Dacia since Trajan’s conquest. It was to serve as the ideology of the Romanian national movement in the 19th century.

The growing role of Russia

The immediate objective of Romanian boyars—the traditional leaders of society—was independence. In the last quarter of the 18th century, success seemed near, as Russia, in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774), gained the right to protect the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire. As a result, Russian influence in the principalities increased; but the boyars were reluctant simply to exchange Ottoman for Russian domination, and they were dismayed by Russia’s annexation of the Moldavian region of Bessarabia in 1812.

The international crisis caused by the War of Greek Independence had important repercussions in Moldavia and Walachia. Because all Greeks were now suspect, the Ottomans abolished the Phanariot regime and restored the native Romanian princes. Another consequence was Russian dominance in the principalities. The Treaty of Adrianople (Treaty of Edirne) of 1829, which ended another Russo-Turkish war, established a virtual Russian protectorate over the principalities and reduced Ottoman suzerainty to a few legal formalities. Paradoxically, the treaty also raised a challenge to Russian hegemony by abolishing the Ottomans’ commercial monopoly and opening the principalities to the international market.

The Russian protectorate, despite a promising beginning—notably the promulgation of constitutions, which brought unaccustomed order to government administration—increased Romanian resentment of Russia. Liberal, Western-educated boyars demanded political reform and an end to foreign domination, which kept authoritarian princes in power. Many of these boyars and other intellectuals formed the vanguard of the revolutionaries of 1848. Responding enthusiastically to the overthrow of conservative regimes in Paris and Vienna, they drafted liberal constitutions and proclaimed their intention to form governments that would be responsive to the economic and social needs of the common people. But they lacked a mass following and an organization, and they relied too heavily on the power of ideas to bring about social change. In Moldavia the prince quickly put down their agitation for reform, but in Walachia more-radical “forty-eighters” established a provisional government to carry out reform and prevent foreign intervention. Despite desperate efforts, they failed to gain support from France and Great Britain, and in September 1848 a Russian army occupied Bucharest and dispersed the provisional government.

Independence

In the 1850s forty-eighters led the struggle for the union of Moldavia and Walachia, which they regarded as an essential preliminary to independence. This time they had the support of the western European Great Powers. The victory of the European allies over Russia in the Crimean War brought an end to that country’s domination of the principalities and placed them under the collective tutelage of the West. The powers stopped short of recognizing the union of the principalities or their independence, but the Romanians themselves settled the matter of union by electing the same man, Alexandru Cuza, as prince in both Moldavia and Walachia in 1859.

The reign of Cuza, a forty-eighter, was a crucial stage in the achievement of independent statehood. He brought about the administrative union of the principalities in 1861 and initiated an ambitious program of political and social reform, which culminated in 1864 in an extension of the franchise, the enactment of land reform, and the promulgation of a new constitution that assured the prince’s predominance in government. He also promulgated legislation that diminished the role of the Orthodox clergy in civil affairs, thereby contributing to the secularization of Romanian society. By initiating these changes on his own authority before seeking permission from his nominal suzerain, the Ottoman sultan, Cuza asserted the de facto independence of Romania, as the united principalities were now known. But his authoritarian methods made many enemies, and these foes united in 1866 to force his abdication.

The reign of Cuza’s successor, Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (prince, 1866–81; King Carol I, 1881–1914), coincided with new achievements in nation building: a constitution, based in large part on Western models, was promulgated in 1866; political groupings coalesced into two major political parties, the Liberal and the Conservative, which were the primary engines of political life until World War I; and formal independence was achieved through participation in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. In order to enhance his country’s and his own prestige, Carol obtained the Great Powers’ formal recognition of Romania as a kingdom in 1881.

During Carol’s reign the main features of the Romanian parliamentary system were defined. The king himself was the key figure in both domestic and foreign policy. A relatively small political class shared power with him, and a narrow franchise excluded the mass of the population from direct participation in political life. Yet freedom of the press and of association were generally respected, and this allowed the opposition ample scope to air its views.

Carol’s main objective in foreign policy (shared by the majority of Liberal and Conservative leaders) was to make Romania a regional power and an indispensable ally of the Great Powers in maintaining international stability, thereby guaranteeing his kingdom’s security and vital interests. To this end Carol and a small number of ministers made Romania a member of the Triple Alliance in 1883. The primary attraction was Germany, whose military and economic power they admired and hoped to use as protection against Russia. But the majority of Romanians were sympathetic to France, and for this reason the treaty was kept secret. Also, Romania’s adherence to the Triple Alliance was under constant strain because of friction with Germany’s partner, Austria-Hungary.

By 1900 the primary issue in dispute between Romania and Austria-Hungary had become the Hungarian government’s policy of assimilating the Romanians of Transylvania. To achieve this goal, Budapest restricted the use of the Romanian language in education and public affairs and diminished the autonomy of the Orthodox and Uniate churches—the principal Romanian cultural bulwarks. The Hungarians also rejected Romanian demands for collective political rights as a nationality, while the Romanians resisted integration into a Hungarian national state. Compromise proved impossible, for both sides were convinced that ethnic survival itself was at stake.

Romanian society: between tradition and modernity

The traditional structures of Romanian society remained largely intact during this period. The great majority of people continued to live in the countryside. The large landowners, although small in number, exercised enormous political and economic power through the Conservative Party. The peasantry formed the broad base of the rural population. At the top was a narrow stratum of well-off peasants, whose relatively comfortable circumstances contrasted sharply with the condition of the landless and other poor at the bottom of the scale; in between lay the bulk of peasants, who lived out precarious existences. In the cities a middle class of industrialists, bankers, and professionals rose to political and economic prominence and, through the Liberal Party, challenged the great landowners for leadership of the nation.

Agriculture remained the foundation of the national economy and provided the majority of the population with its livelihood. Agricultural production grew but, because of obsolete methods and tools, at a lower rate than the increase in land brought under cultivation. By the end of the century both landlords and peasants had become dependent on the raising of grain, especially wheat, for export and had thus exposed themselves to the vagaries of the international market. In 1907 harsh working and living conditions led to a massive peasant uprising; the deaths of many peasants gave a powerful impetus to reform, but change came slowly.

Other branches of the economy were experiencing more significant changes. Beginning in the 1880s, industry, which benefited from government protection and foreign capital, supplied an increasing quantity of consumer goods. Yet by 1914 it still lacked such crucial elements of a modern industrial base as metallurgy. Foreign trade expanded, especially with Germany and Austria-Hungary, and was characteristic of underdevelopment in consisting of exports of agricultural products and raw materials and imports of manufactured goods. Accompanying this accelerated economic growth were the reorganization of financial structures—notably the foundation of large private banks and of the National Bank of Romania in 1880 as the coordinator of financial policy—and a major expansion of the railroad and highway networks.

Romanian intellectuals observed with mixed feelings the course of development that their country had taken since the early decades of the 19th century. Titu Maiorescu, the leading literary critic of the second half of the 19th century, spoke for the influential Conservative group Junimea (Youth) when he criticized the Romanians’ sharp “deviation” from an agrarian past and ascribed to it the “contradictions” of contemporary Romanian society. Constantin Stere, the chief theorist of Romanian populism, argued at the turn of the century that Romania could become a prosperous, modern state by following the “laws” of development specific to agrarian societies. But others, such as the Liberal economist Petre Aurelian, who promoted industrialization, insisted that Romania must follow the Western model to become strong and secure.