The Rumanian Nation
Of the Emperor Hadrian's colony of Roman veterans at the mouth of the Danube there remain many architectural monuments, including parts of two fine bridges across the great river, a largely Latin in substance, and the name Romania. The Roman colony spread through the Carpathians along the Roman road into Transylvania. It was in part submerged by Hun and Magyar waves of invasion, and the western part of the Rumanian people, west of the Carpathians, is still under Magyar rule, while a small number of Rumanians inhabit the Austrian crownland of Bukowina, once Rumanian soil. The Turks, following in the track of the Huns and Magyars, once more swept over Rumania and on toward Vienna and Russia, completely submerging the Balkan Peninsula, with the exception of the Black Mountain, Montenegro, held by Serbs.
In the nineteenth century the Balkan nations began to extricate themselves: Greece, with the aid of France, England, and Russia; Serbia, with the aid of Russia; and the two principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which were later to become Rumania. In the wars of Catherine the Great and Suvoroff, which Byron has embodied in his comedy epic, making Don Juan take part in the siege of Ismail, Russia took from Turkey the Province of Bessarabia, named from an old Rumanian princely house and largely populated by Rumanians.
The western half of Bessarabia was taken back from Russia and restored to Turkey after the Crimean War, immediately after which, in 1861, the two principalities were united in the single principality of Rumania, under Colonel Cuza, a Rumanian, as Hospodar, or Lord, Turkish suzerainty being acknowledged. In this way the strip of Bessarabia which had been Russian for half a century became not Turkish, but Rumanian. When Russia declared war against Turkey in 1877 she announced to Rumania that she sought the restoration of her strip of Bessarabian land; and, knowing this, Rumania became Russia's ally in the war against Turkey, with Prince Carol as commander of her forces, he being of the Roman Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns. In 1881 he took the title of King, to which his nephew Ferdinand succeeded in 1914.