The Sword of Michael

Origins of Nationalist Politics in

Romania and Moldova

By Amory Stern

©2020, Amory Stern

San Diego, California
Scribd preview version

For the complete version, see the paperback and Kindle editions of this book.
 Michael the Brave, the
Ottoman Wars, and Count
Dracula
3
Michael the Brave

The history of Romania as a concrete country is

generally assumed to have started with the
Romanian, or Danubian, principalities, similarly to
how the history of Russia as a concrete country
starts with Muscovy. Both of these histories are of
late medieval origin, having come into being in the
wake of the Mongol invasions of Europe. In both
comparable cases, however, the concrete starting
point is not the same as the ethnologically related
spiritual precursor from which the original states
derived their patronage as states to begin with. In
the case of Russia, the spiritual precursor was the
Kievan Rus’, which was situated in present-day
Ukraine. For the Romanian principalities, it was
the intrusive but foundational Latin-speaking
element of Constantinople, which had originally
ruled that city. That their patronage originated in
Constantinople would be a crucial, if now
overlooked, starting point for the princes of
Moldavia and Wallachia — and their enemies.1
For example, Mehmed II “the Conqueror”
opposed the semi-autonomy of the Romanian
principalities as vassals of the Ottoman Empire. As
long as Wallachia and Moldavia still stood as states
in the 1400s, Mehmed’s work in overrunning
1
For the best English introduction to early Romanian history and
ethnology, see the first two chapters of A.K. Brackob, Mircea the
Old: Father of Wallachia, Grandfather of Dracula (Buffalo, N.Y.;
The Center for Romanian Studies, Histria Books, 2018)
4
Amory Stern

Constantinople was incomplete. This is why he

unsuccessfully sought to crush the principalities
with armies larger than the one he had used to
conquer Constantinople.2 Stephen the Great of
Moldavia did not really see himself as a crusader
against Islam, but he earned that reputation by
handing Mehmed the worst defeat the Turks had
yet seen in 1475.
Officially, the principalities of Wallachia and
Moldavia both, in early modern times, held the
status of what is known in traditional Islamic
international law as a “house of peace” — which is
neither a “house of Islam,” in the sense that either
Islamic countries or thoroughly conquered areas
like Bulgaria and Greece were, nor classified as an
enemy “house of war.” The Ottomans only had
2
The remarks in this essay about Ottoman war aims in relation to
the principalities’ original patronage were inspired by the author’s
conversations with Romanian historian Fr. Dr. Mihai-Andrei Aldea.
He is the author of several published and upcoming books in
Romanian. Dr. Aldea notes that most Western historians, when
dealing with the Danubian principalities, never seem to ask
themselves this question: On what kingdom’s authority did
Wallachia and Moldavia begin as principalities at all? The
principalities paid tribute to the Ottoman Empire, while some of
their princes attempted to switch their allegiances to the Kingdom
of Hungary, but neither power was the source of their claim to
patronage as principalities. Dr. Aldea, from studying
Byzantinology and original Romanian chronicles, has concluded
that the principalities’ original patronage derived from
Constantinople. Accordingly, their existence as states, even in a
position of vassalage, was unacceptable to Mehmed.
5
Michael the Brave

control of port cities on the northern bank of the

Danube or the coasts of the Black Sea, not firm
control of the land, as in the countries south of the
Danube.
The principalities were not considered outright
Ottoman territory until the beginning of the 18th
century. By the 18th century, the Ottomans, hoping
to pacify a geopolitically ambiguous region that had
caused them so much trouble, installed a dynasty of
initially pro-Turkish Greek rulers called the
Phanariots as puppet princes in the Romanian
principalities. Before the Phanariot rule, no
mosques (nor synagogues) could be legally built in
the principalities unless the Prince himself made an
exception for temporary wooden ones, and the
Romanian principalities were never allowed to be
sources of janissary conscription. Wars between
the principalities and the Turks had occasionally
erupted when these terms were violated.
It should be noted that Habsburg Austria
officially held the same status for decades. After
the Ottoman Empire overran the Kingdom of
Hungary (1526), Ottoman forces unsuccessfully
besieged Vienna (1529). For the remainder of the
16th century, these two powers would be at war.
Habsburg Austria, embroiled in other power
struggles in Europe, would be content with
appeasing the Turks, paying the Ottoman Porte to
6
Amory Stern

leave Vienna alone whenever possible. This

limited the struggles between the Habsburgs and
the Ottomans to battles and skirmishes on the
disputed Hungarian frontier for decades after 1529,
but it also left Austria in an uncomfortable state of
vassalage. The Turks continued to reject the
Habsburg Emperors’ preferred title “Emperors of
Rome.”
“In previous centuries,” noted the
controversial German jurist and philosopher Carl
Schmitt, “a controversy existed between the
German kaiser (and king of Hungary) and the
Turkish sultan on the question of whether the
payments made by the kaiser to the sultan were in
the nature of a ‘pension’ or a ‘tribute’. The debtor
stressed that he did not pay ‘tribute’ but ‘pension’,
whereas the creditor considered it to be ‘tribute’.”3
The issue Schmitt refers to here is that Austria
was technically an Ottoman vassal from the first
siege of Vienna in 1529 up until the conclusion of
the Long War in 1606, when the Ottomans
humiliatingly agreed to address the Habsburgs as
"Emperors of Rome." This undermined the entire
Ottoman mission since Mehmed II in the 15th
century, which had been to conquer and destroy any
state that claimed patronage from the Romans.

3
Carl Schmitt, translated by George Schwab, The Concept of the
Political, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 31
7
Michael the Brave

However, the amount of money paid to the Turks to

leave Vienna alone actually increased in return for
this Habsburg political victory, even as it was
discredited as true tribute money. This
contradiction wouldn't be resolved until after the
1683 second siege of Vienna, or Battle of Vienna.
Thus, the misnomer “Ottoman rule” does not apply
all that much more, as a legal status, to the pre-18th
century Romanian principalities than it does to
Austria at one point — though the Ottoman
vassalage had always been much more directly felt
in the principalities.
Michael the Brave (1558-1601) attempted to
do away with Wallachia’s vassal status altogether
and turn it into an empire. This Wallachian prince
was, as Hans Corneel de Roos has shown, the main
historical basis of Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula —
when the villainous vampire was still alive.4  De
Roos’ research, even more than earlier arguments
by Elizabeth Miller, has displaced the claim of
Raymond T. McNally and Radu R. Florescu that
Stoker based his character on Vlad Țepeș.
  Interestingly, McNally and Florescu
themselves, in Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His
Life and His Times, note that a certain character
4
Hans Corneel De Roos, “Count Dracula’s Address and Lifetime
Identity,” collected in Marius-Mircea Crișan (ed.) Dracula: An
International Perspective, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) pp.
95-118
8
Amory Stern

mentioned by the count appears to be based on

Michael the Brave.5  What they do not mention is
one important detail it simply takes a careful
reading of Stoker’s book to understand.  Namely,
that the count is speaking in the third person about
himself in life.6
In the count’s recollection in the third chapter
of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the nostalgic rant that
Jonathan Harker calls “the story of his race,” Count
Dracula describes an ancestor of his, whom Stoker
did indeed base on Vlad Țepeș. Stoker, as De Roos
has shown, confused Vlad Țepeș, or Vlad Dracula,
with his father (and Michael the Brave’s ancestor),
Vlad Dracul.  In making this mistake, Stoker
appears to have reflected his source, William
Wilkinson’s 1820 book Account of the
Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with
Political Observations Relative to Them.  Stoker,
again like his source, knew more about Michael the
Brave than Vlad Țepeș.7
This shouldn’t surprise us.  After all, Vlad
Țepeș was a late-medieval, pre-Columbian
historical figure, while Michael the Brave was a
5
Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, Dracula, Prince of
Many Faces: His Life and His Times, (Boston: Back Bay Books,
Little, Brown, and Company, 1989) p. 11 and p. 231
6
Bram Stoker, Dracula, Ch. 3, Ch. 18, Ch. 25, & Ch. 26
7
Hans Corneel De Roos, ““Bram Stoker's Vampire Trap—Vlad the
Impaler and his Nameless Double,” Linköping Electronic Articles
in Computer and Information Science 14 (2012), no. 2.
9
Michael the Brave

figure from what Anglophone historiography

remembers as the Elizabethan era.  Michael the
Brave, a relative of Vlad Țepeș and a more
successful military strategist, was more often
written about in English than his predecessor until
the 20th century.  There is reason to suspect that
Prince Michael was written about contemporarily in
Britain.
In Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in
Early Modern England, Anders Ingram writes:
“The years of the Ottoman–Hapsburg ‘Long War’
of 1593–1606 brought an unprecedented flood of
English publishing on the Turks. A substantial
portion of this material either directly describes, or
explicitly refers to, the events of this conflict.” 
During this time — which was also the age in
which the plays of Christopher Marlowe, which
likewise display a keen interest in Ottoman Wars,
revolutionized English literature — England’s
“contemporary news market was dominated by
foreign news, or reports of English involvement on
the continent, rather than domestic affairs.”8
Michael the Brave was a central figure of the
Long War.  Although not mentioned in Ingram’s
study, it would be an interesting task to determine
whether and to what extent the Wallachian prince is

8
Anders Ingram, Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early
Modern England, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 37
10
Amory Stern

mentioned in any of “the fifty-four [English] items

on the topic of the Turks recorded in the years 1591
to 1610,” of which “twenty-two relate either
directly to the Long War, the state of Hungary, or
Ottoman–Habsburg conflict, while numerous others
allude to contemporary events.”9 Considering
Prince Michael’s outstanding role in the Long War,
it would be more surprising to come up empty-
handed in this endeavor than to see this question
answered in the affirmative.  During the Long War,
until his 1601 assassination, he was both an
accomplished military commander and a
controversial political leader.
A 1901 article entitled “THE JEWS OF
ROUMANIA FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO
THE PRESENT DAY,” published by the American
Jewish Committee, offers a glimpse into what led
Prince Michael to reject the status quo in
Wallachia’s relations with the Ottoman Empire.
“With the sixteenth century,” explains this study,
“came new immigrations, composed of Polish and
Turkish Jews… This was exactly at the time when
the Jews of Turkey began to play an important rôle
in the State and to gain diplomatic influence at the
court, in the harems, and with the pashas and the
grand viziers; and the princes of Moldavia and

9
Ibid, p. 37 [Note: The discrepancy in the spelling of “Habsburgs”
is in Ingram’s original.]
11
Michael the Brave

Wallachia turned to these influential Jews to obtain

the throne or to strengthen themselves in
possession. Commerce with Turkey was extended,
and the Jews of Constantinople and other places
frequently visited the principalities. Many
established themselves there permanently. But the
situation of the Jews varied with the prince, and
depended upon the favor which he obtained from
an influential Jew or Jewess at Constantinople.”10
Before Michael the Brave came to the
Wallachian throne in 1593, he had worked this
corrupt system like any other ambitious contender.
Upon his rise to power, however, the moneylenders
who had expected to control him were fatally
disappointed. “In 1594,” notes the above-
mentioned Jewish source, “Michael the Brave of
Wallachia assembled his creditors, Turks, Greeks,
and Jews, and had them all massacred; and he then
informed certain individuals that they would all be
released from their debts. This was the signal for a
general slaughter of Turks and Jews. The entire
community of Bukharest [sic] perished.” Thus
began the first stage of an anti-Ottoman crusade in
which Michael and the allied Moldavians

10
E. Schwarzfeld, “THE JEWS OF ROUMANIA FROM THE
EARILIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT DAY”, The American
Jewish Year Book, Vol. 3, pp. 25-62, Published by the American
Jewish Committee
12
Amory Stern

“massacred the Jews wherever their armies

passed…”11
The final decade of the 16th century in
Eastern Europe has been described as “the time
when the fierce sword blows of the crusader
Michael were striking against the Turks along the
Danube.”12 And even far beyond the Danube,
pushing as far south as Adrianople (today’s Edirne,
Turkey). It was thus that Mina Harker could say of
Count Dracula in life that he “won his name against
the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of
Turkeyland.”13

11
Ibid
12
Nicolae Iorga, tr. Laura Treptow, Byzantium After Byzantium,
(Portland, OR: The Center for Romanian Studies in cooperation
with the Romanian Institute of International Studies, 2000), p.149
13
Bram Stoker, Dracula, Ch. 18. Note that Stoker’s villain, before
he became a vampire, is portrayed as more of a Napoleonic
adventurer than a cruel tyrant. Stoker, again, was more familiar
with Michael the Brave’s life and reputation than with those of
Vlad Țepeș. Elizabeth Miller, who has studied Bram Stoker’s notes
for Dracula – and edited them for recent publication, along with
Robert Eighteen-Bisang – has questioned whether Stoker knew
anything about Țepeș’ controversial reputation at all. This
skepticism is more convincing than the unsubstantiated and
discredited claim of McNally and Florescu that Stoker was inspired
by accusations of bloodthirstiness leveled at Vlad Țepeș. The
nickname “The Impaler” does not appear either in Stoker’s notes or
in Wilkinson’s account of Romanian history, nor do any of the
disputed stories about Țepeș’ atrocities. On the other hand,
Wilkinson demonstrates a knowledge of, and interest in, Michael
the Brave’s military career.
13
Michael the Brave

Michael the Brave, later feeling betrayed by

his Hungarian allies, the Báthory princes of
Transylvania, turned his attention northwestward
and controversially conquered that Hungarian-ruled
principality, with the help of the Hungarian-
speaking Szeklers.14 His conquest of Moldavia in
the northeast was similarly based on betrayal by a
formerly allied principality. It was in Moldavia that
he would recruit many Polish-registered Cossacks,
who settled there.
Making quite a few enemies from Turkey to
Central Europe, from the Jews to the Ottoman Porte
to the papacy, the outspokenly (though not
zealously) Eastern Orthodox Michael the Brave
was assassinated in 1601 by an Albanian-Italian
mercenary general named Giorgio Basta.
According to one historian of Hungary, Austria,
and Slovakia during the Long War, Basta later
“likely accompanied the Pope, both in a ceremonial
and protective capacity,” and probably “served as
an emissary to the Papal entourage” as well.15
14
Stoker’s depiction of Count Dracula as a Szekler rather than a
Wallachian is a fictional flourish, perhaps (in De Roos’ opinion)
deliberately designed to obscure the character’s historical identity,
but it arguably reflects Michael the Brave’s close political ties to
that ethnic group of Transylvania.
15
Kimberly L. Craft, Infamous Lady: The True Story of Countess
Erzsébet Báthory, SECOND EDITION, (South Charleston, S.C.:
CreateSpace, 2014), p. 120
14
Amory Stern

Basta’s subsequent iron-fisted rule over

Transylvania led to revolts among the Hungarian
nobles, and the Christian side of the Long War was
then reduced to the defensive, freeing Austria from
official Ottoman vassalage at a high price by 1606.
However, the Ottoman Empire still had to
defend itself from the network of Cossack raiders
that Michael had helped build throughout the
principalities, especially in Moldavia, by
enthusiastically using Cossacks in his armies.
Some of these Cossacks were also registered in
Poland’s army, and accordingly they dragged
Poland into wars with the Turks. This would be a
problem for the Porte for the duration of the
infamous Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618-
1648), when the Ottoman sultans had to deal with
constant Cossack raids and a rebellious janissary
corps — and were thus unable to take advantage of
the Thirty Years’ War and strike at Vienna. In
Polish historiography, this period is known as the
Moldavian Magnate Wars.
By the time they belatedly and unsuccessfully
besieged Vienna in 1683, the Turks faced a new,
rationalistic system of Western international law.
On both sides of the English Channel, this new
system of thinking about foreign affairs had been
built in response to the 17th century’s bloody
sectarian fighting within Continental Europe and in
15
Michael the Brave

the British Isles. In this cold new order, the

Ottoman rule of Hungary had no place, and the
former Kingdom of Hungary was wrested from
Ottoman hands by the end of that century. Thus
began the two centuries of the receding of the
Ottoman holdings in Southeastern Europe.
By this time, so much blood had been spilled
that Michael the Brave was largely forgotten as one
of the chief instigators of the Christian reconquest
of Southeastern Europe on land, following the
Ottoman Empire’s defeat at sea with the Battle of
Lepanto (1571). In Romania, he is mostly
remembered for uniting Transylvania with
Wallachia and Moldavia for a brief time. His
dream of a pan-Christian empire stretching from the
Carpathians to the Mediterranean Sea, Orthodox in
character but tolerant of Protestants and Catholics,
had died with him. But it was an ideal that helped
turn the tide of history in its time.

Michael’s memory appears to have survived

among Romanian peasants in the form of magical
incantations recited to mitigate bad weather – or
vanquish their enemies. These include: “With
Michael’s sword, / With the axe given by God, /
Chop the man’s head off.” Also: “With Michael’s
16
Amory Stern

knife / You behead the Jew”; “With the sword of

Michael / Pass the club to me / Slaying Judas I
shall, / Judas is now dead, / Water is now free”;
“With Michael’s sword / I’ll behead the Turk.” It is
disputed, however, whether these folk lyrics refer to
Michael the Brave or to the Biblical figure of the
Archangel Michael.16 It is quite possible that the
traditional sayings deliberately conflate the two
revered figures. Whatever the case, Michael the
Brave’s disputes with the Jews, as well as his
integration of the Cossacks into Romanian lands
(Moldavia in particular), would importantly impact
future centuries.

16
Andrei Oisteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in
Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures (University
of Nebraska Press, 2009), p. 430
17
Michael the Brave

Vlad Țepeș Dracula

Michael the Brave

In Search of A.C. Cuza
19
In Search of A.C. Cuza

When Alexandru Constantin Cuza was born in Iași,

Moldavia in 1857, Romania was not yet a unified
country fully freed from Ottoman
vassalage.  Turkish rule had not been as direct or
oppressive here as in the lower Balkans, but it left
the young state and ancient nation with a host of
social problems.  Cuza was a child when Wallachia
and Moldavia were united in 1866, and not yet
twenty years old during the start of the war by
which Romania would gain her
independence.  After studying in both his native
Iași and in Dresden, he would go on to study in
France and earn doctorates in political science and
law.  
In The Romanian Road to Independence,
Frederick Kellogg describes the mostly
economically driven anti-Semitism that existed in
the nascent united and independent Romania,
especially in the former principality of Moldavia,
when A.C. Cuza came of age:

“Thrifty Jewish entrepreneurs earned distrust

as well as profit from Romanian aristocrats
and peasants.  In Moldavia, Jews were bankers
—moneylenders and moneychangers—
innkeepers, lessees of taverns in villages:
grocers, rug merchants, peddlers, besides
being artisans—tailors, turners, glass makers,
20
Amory Stern

and carpet makers.  Romanians reckoned

Jewish money lenders in particular to be
dangerous to the social order owing to their
pervasive influence on impoverished farmers
and perennially indebted landed
proprietors.  Boiers, or aristocrats, regarded
commerce and industry to be beneath their
dignity, thereby leaving the door open for
their Jewish creditors to seize control of an
important segment of the economy.  An
additional problem was the Jewish way of life
in Moldavia.  The Jews’ exclusive family
circles and non-Romanian customs clearly
identified them as outsiders.  Romanians
considered them to be aliens, and some were
indeed foreign subjects protected by one or
another of the great powers.”

         It was in this atmosphere of decaying

Ottoman suzerainty and Ashkenazi immigration
that anti-Semitism such as A.C. Cuza’s was
fostered.  Nevertheless, historian Irina Livezeanu
has labeled him “the father of Romanian anti-
Semitism,” so influential was he on the younger
generation of Romanians.  To best understand his
worldview, it is important to take note of Cuza’s
early intellectual development.
21
In Search of A.C. Cuza

In his youth, Cuza met a brilliant poet and

editorialist named Mihai Eminescu. The latter
would later become known as Romania’s national
poet. Cuza was involved in the production of one
of the few known photographs of Eminescu.
Of peasant origin on his father’s side and
descended from Moldavian boyars on his mother’s
side, Eminescu had not put his inherited wealth to
waste.  Educated in the German language since
childhood, Eminescu was culturally, if not always
geopolitically, an enthusiastic Germanophile.  As a
young man, he had studied in Vienna and in
Bismarck’s Prussia, where he’d learned Sanskrit
and immersed himself in the philosophy of Arthur
Schopenhauer.  He had also been a student of
Eugen Dühring.
Eminescu had intellectual precedents in his
own country, but he often made radical departures
from them.  His ideas were influenced by a leading
conservative Romanian cultural circle called
Junimea, which originally reflected the interests of
the old Moldavian boyar class that had been
displaced by the liberal bourgeoisie in the 19th
century.  However, there are significant differences
between Eminescu’s philosophy and Junimism.
“The Junimists,” notes Hungarian-Jewish
historian Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, “wanted
literature to be separated from politics; to
22
Amory Stern

remain l’art pour l’art, with no social content

desirable.” Eminescu rejected this doctrine. Nagy-
Talavera also points out that Eminescu was “less of
an elitist” than the prototypical Junimist, and that
“Junimism was opposed to anti-Semitism,
considering it to be a barbarous affront to human
intelligence.” With the latter opinion, Eminescu
disagreed.
According to William O. Oldson’s A
Providential Anti-Semitism: Nationalism and Polity
in Nineteenth Century Romania, Eminescu “stood
out as the most eloquent spokesman of the radical
anti-Semites.” Eminescu viewed Romania’s
relatively recent Jewish immigrant population, by
and large, as inherently unpatriotic.  He has been
described as a fierce opponent of civil equality for
the Jews, arguing, as summarized by Oldson, that
“they presently constituted a danger to the
Romanian nationality, when they did not possess
equality of rights.  They would be so much the
more a peril once naturalized.”
Eminescu’s anti-Semitism never went as far as
A.C. Cuza’s later did, but it evidently had an
impact on his formerly left-leaning younger friend.
To a large extent, so did Eminescu’s hostility to
liberalism. Nagy-Talavera summarizes Eminescu’s
worldview thus:
23
In Search of A.C. Cuza

“Eminescu’s goal — he defines it as his

‘supreme law’ — was the preservation of his
country and its ethnic identity…
Consequently, the national interest must
determine every political, educational, and
cultural decision.  Thus, in Eminescu’s eyes,
what he called ‘American liberalism’ (or
Western humanitarian values) might imperil
the uniqueness of the Romanian ethnic
character, and should therefore be rejected…
He rejected the incomplete and superficial
Westernization of 1848.  Eminescu recognized
only two positive classes in Romania: the
nobility, and, above all, the peasantry.  Any
development must be based on the peasant,
and it must be an organic one… Eminescu
was closer to the peasants than to the boyars.”

A stanza from one of his poems translates to

“He who loves strangers / May the dogs eat out his
heart.” Eminescu was killed by medical malpractice
in 1889. He was only 39 years old. Foul play has
been widely theorized. It was perhaps the
controversial fate of his older friend that led A.C.
Cuza to become such a bitter and obsessed man.
Cuza later became the dean and a popular
lecturer at the law school in Iași University, and
mentored Romanian students who feared the
24
Amory Stern

growing Jewish presence in higher education. The

most charismatic and influential of these students
was Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. The latter was the
son of Ion Zelea Codreanu, Cuza’s friend and
fellow Romanian nationalist.
According to Codreanu scholar Dr. Rebecca
Haynes, “Cuza became Codreanu’s godfather and
acted as his mentor when Codreanu was a student at
Iași University… In his attitude toward the Jewish
minority, Codreanu was greatly influenced by his
godfather, A.C. Cuza.” Together Cuza and
Codreanu established the League of Christian
National Defense (Liga Apărării Național Creștine,
L.A.N.C.) in 1923.  
This radical student group used the swastika
as a symbol a full decade before Hitler came to
power in Germany, where both Cuza and the part-
German Codreanu had studied.  In fact, Cuza had
flaunted the swastika even before the First World
War. According to Romanian historian Victor
Dogaru, it was Cuza who first coined the use of the
swastika as a symbol of anti-Semitism.
Such fateful influence on Central Europe,
coming from a Southeastern European leader,
should not be as surprising as it may seem. Though
in some ways an ultranationalist, Cuza was capable
of international networking in unlikely places. In
1925, for example, not long after the Hungarian-
25
In Search of A.C. Cuza

Romanian war of 1919, an “anti-Semitic World

Congress” was held in Budapest, Hungary. In the
capital of his country’s bitterest rival, not a place
one would expect to embrace a leading Romanian
nationalist, Professor Cuza was apparently
welcomed with open arms.
Internal administrative politics in the League
soured the partnership between Cuza and Codreanu
by 1927, a break that Dr. Haynes attributes also to
Cuza’s being — at least at the time — “willing to
work entirely within the parliamentary
system.”  Codreanu seems to have been more
strongly anti-democratic than his mentor, and
despised the parliamentary system as such.  It
wasn’t until after Codreanu’s paramilitary approach
proved successful that Cuza adopted similar tactics.
         This has sometimes been unconvincingly
interpreted to mean their split occurred because
Codreanu was essentially more violent than
Cuza.  In fact, Cuza’s own rival militia has been
described by some scholars as more violent than
Codreanu’s Iron Guard — at least while Codreanu
was still alive. According to historian Dennis
Deletant, in his biography of Romanian military
strongman and key Hitler ally Ion Antonescu,
Professor Cuza’s organization of lancieri (lance-
bearers, or “blue shirts”) consisted of nothing but
26
Amory Stern

“an army of thugs,” so in the 1930s, “it was not the

Guard that posed the chief threat to public order.”
         A.C. Cuza’s willingness to work within the
parliamentary system paid off, at least for a
time.  In the 1930s he formed a new political party
with the poet Octavian Goga, a coalition that was
selected to govern the country by the increasingly
autocratic king in response to Codreanu’s growing
popularity.  During the period of the short-lived but
influential Goga-Cuza cabinet, anti-Jewish
discriminatory laws and measures were enacted in
Romania.
         Cuza’s party was not as popular as
Codreanu’s front group, due mainly to Codreanu’s
activities centered around helping small businesses
and the poor in Romania, and the Goga-Cuza
government ruled only briefly in late 1937 and
early 1938 before being forced out of power and
replaced by King Carol II’s direct dictatorship.  It
was this monarchial autocracy that had Codreanu
imprisoned and assassinated in late 1938. Corneliu
Zelea Codreanu had finally broken the
parliamentary system he so despised, though at the
cost of his own life.
         In the 1940s, which saw the Communist
takeover of Romania, Cuza had to leave Iași for
Transylvania.  However, he was apparently spared
the notorious fate of the executed Ion Antonescu,
27
In Search of A.C. Cuza

probably because Cuza was considered too old to

stand before a similar kangaroo court. Thus robbed
of the martyrdom seen in the trajectories of other,
more popular Romanian historical figures, A.C.
Cuza has not generated as much attention among
historians as he merits.  
That may explain the dearth of information on
him in English.  He passed away in 1947, just four
days short of 90 years old.  One particularly hostile
source, Romanian-Jewish historian I.C. Butnaru,
laments that “A.C. Cuza died comfortably in his
bed and was never judged for his misdeeds.”
         Cuza’s body of work is not always consistent,
except in its unapologetic anti-Semitism.  Cuza’s
1905 publication Nationality in Art, or Nationality
in the Arts (the book deals far more with literature
than with the plastic arts), was first published in
complete book form in 1908 and went through
several revisions throughout his lifetime.  This
book demonstrates that Cuza began as an Indo-
European chauvinist in the vein of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, though with none of Chamberlain’s
underappreciated nuance. In the book, Cuza
includes not only Europeans, but also Persians as
Aryan.  
         Cuza’s 1922 article “The Science of Anti-
Semitism,” which was later approvingly reprinted
in its entirety in Codreanu’s 1936
28
Amory Stern

autobiography For My Legionaries, reveals that

Cuza had by then reconsidered some of his
opinions, such as his appraisal of Islam and the
Arabs.  While maintaining his lifelong opposition
to “mixture of unrelated races,” Cuza, in “The
Science of Anti-Semitism,” has now abandoned his
racial chauvinism in favor of what might be called
pan-antisemitism.  On the other hand, Nationality
in the Arts continued to be published in several
editions long after “The Science of Anti-Semitism”
first appeared.
It is possible to view this seeming discrepancy
as rather a pair of different strands of a multifaceted
but coherent worldview. Cuza’s outlook was not
purely tribal or purely altruistic, but incorporated
both sensibilities at different times, for different
reasons, in different contexts. Nationality in the
Arts emphasizes the particularistic aspects of
Cuza’s thinking, while “The Science of Anti-
Semitism” focuses on the universalistic side of his
thought.
In Nationality in the Arts, Cuza is writing as a
Romanian, or at most as a European. Like many of
Eminescu’s articles and poems, Cuza’s Nationality
in the Arts rejects liberal values as posing a danger
to the nation. “Humanitarianism,” he declares, “has
no place in Romanian schools.”
29
In Search of A.C. Cuza

In “The Science of Anti-Semitism,” by

contrast, he writes of “a duty toward civilization”
involving “the united efforts of all nations.” In this
essay, he argues from the perspective of a citizen of
the world as well as that of an enemy of the Jews.
Being one of those, in Cuza’s estimation,
inescapably entails being the other.
One way in which A.C. Cuza remained
consistent is that, unlike the traditionally Orthodox
Christian Codreanu – and also another Cuza
associate, unsung insulin discoverer Dr. Nicolae
Paulescu – Cuza was interested in a school of
revisionist Bible criticism similar to that which
would, in Germany, later be dubbed “Positive
Christianity.”  In contrast to Codreanu and Dr.
Paulescu, Cuza’s religious views were more
Wagnerian than Orthodox, though this was not a
reason for the 1927 falling out between Professor
Cuza and his godson.  
Cuza’s ideas represent a different tradition of
anti-Semitism than those of his associates. Dr.
Paulescu was an exponent of France’s anti-
Dreyfusard movement, and his work on occult
history and Jewish organized crime cites the
writings of anti-Dreyfusard historians. Himself
Orthodox, Dr. Paulescu was nevertheless pro-
Catholic in the vein of his French sources.
30
Amory Stern

Codreanu, on the other hand, appears to have

taken some of his inspiration from the Russian
Empire’s right-populist and proudly Orthodox
Black Hundred movement of the very early 20th
century, the age of Nicholas II. This only partially
qualifies as a foreign influence, however. The
Black Hundred movement was founded chiefly by
Russia-assimilated Moldavians from Bessarabia, a
mostly Romanian-populated region that had been
controlled by the Tsarist government since 1812.
Most notable among these unhappy Russified
Moldavians were Pavel Krushevan, the first
publisher of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
and Vladimir M. Purishkevich, a founding member
and the chief propagandist of the Union of the
Russian People. Purishkevich would later split
from his Muscovite partner Alexander Dubrovin,
with whom he had established Black Hundredism
together. Purishkevich named his breakaway
movement “The Union of the Archangel Michael.”
Similarly, after Codreanu left Cuza’s L.A.N.C., the
official name for his Iron Guard was “The Legion
of the Archangel Michael.” In all probability,
Codreanu’s interest in developments just east of the
Prut river had come from his father Ion, who was
descended from the Moldavian Cossacks of the 17th
century.
31
In Search of A.C. Cuza

(These subjects demand further examination.

For a brief overview of these Moldavian Cossacks
– who were sometimes misidentified as “Polish”
due to their being registered in the army of Poland-
Lithuania – see the previous essay in this book,
“Michael the Brave, The Ottoman Wars, and Count
Dracula” and the following essay in this book,
acclaimed Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga’s 1913
essay “Moldavian Ukraine.” Steven Zipperstein’s
2018 study Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of
History contains much helpful biographical
information on Krushevan. However, there has not
yet, as of this publication, been anything close to a
comprehensive biography of Purishkevich available
in English.)
Altogether different was the intellectual
tradition in which Professor Cuza wrote. Cuza was
an exponent of the Schopenhauerian metapolitical
legacy, which most notably includes Richard
Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
(Eminescu had been an admirer of Schopenhauer
and Wagner about a generation before
Chamberlain.) Critical of the Old Testament, this
school of thought sought to radically distance not
only Christianity as a religion, but also the
foundational figure of Jesus, from virtually any
affinity to Judaism.
32
Amory Stern

These ideas appear in A.C. Cuza’s work as

early as Nationality in the Arts and are expanded
upon in his 1925 book, The Teaching of Jesus.  The
former is in part an Iranophile manifesto, and
contains an argument (citing renowned German-
American Biblical scholar Paul Haupt) that Jesus
was of ancient Median origin; the latter attacks
pacifist interpretations of the New Testament. As
extreme as Professor Cuza’s arguments are, there is
something to be gained from their unsettling
lucidity.
33
In Search of A.C. Cuza

A.C. Cuza
34
Amory Stern

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

(Image courtesy of Victor Dogaru)

For the rest of the book, see the paperback and

Kindle versions.