IORGA, NICOLAE. - Historian, b. at Botosani on June 5, 1871, murdered in the forest of Pantelimon (Bucharest) on Nov. 28, 1940. The figure of I. is representative of the surprising cultural development that Romania experienced in the first 40 years of this century. A historian of world renown and competence, restorer of modern Byzantine studies — after 1920 — and of the Byzantine congresses, historian of the Crusades, and especially, from this point of view, of the papacy, he was able to contemplate from such heights the questions and the religious separations, with the dual Byzantine and Western culture of his country. Often difficult to read, and to verify, he is a naturally passionate writer and not always coherent.
A defender of the national and religious position of his people beyond Latin Europe, he at times made harsh or unjust assessments of Catholicism; but, on the whole and at crucial moments, he took a courageously understanding attitude.
On the eve of the First World War, when the Haidu-Dorog case — thousands of Romanian-Catholic faithful, united, attributed to a magistrate's diocese — aroused enormous emotion in Transylvania, then Hungarian, and in Bucharest, where the cry of Los von Rom! was heard, I. protested that it was not the case, for an occasional error, to take such a grave attitude toward a Church like that of Rome.
On the eve of the Second World War, in Jan. 1940, before the new-second-Romanian Patriarch, in a lecture of his on the traditional and popular, non-polemical character of Romanian Orthodoxy, I. concluded that the patriarch of Constantinople could not but act as a Greek, whereas the Pope of Rome acted as Father of all the faithful of whatever nation.
Among his works are remembered: Notes et extraits pour servir à l'histoire des Croisades ou XVᵉ siècles, 6 vols., Paris 1899-1916; Histoire des Croisades, ibid. 1924; Essai de synthèse de l'histoire de l'humanité, 4 vols., ibid. 1926-1928; Istoria Românilor, 10 vols., Bucharest 1936-39.