IORGA, NICOLAE. — Historian, born in Botosani on 5 June 1871, assassinated in the forest of Pantelimon (Bucharest) on 28 November 1940. The figure of I. is representative of the astonishing cultural development that Romania experienced during the first forty years of this century. A historian of worldwide fame 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 from such heights to contemplate religious questions and divisions, with his country’s dual Byzantine and Western culture. Often difficult to read and to verify, he was a naturally passionate writer, and not always a coherent one.
Defender of the national and religious position of his people beyond Latin Europe, he sometimes expressed harsh or unjust judgments concerning Catholicism; but, on the whole and at crucial moments, he maintained a courageously understanding attitude.
On the eve of the First World War, when the Haidu-Dorog affair—thousands of Romanian Catholic faithful, united and assigned to a magistratist diocese—aroused enormous emotion in Transylvania, then Hungarian, and in Bucharest, where the cry of Los von Rom! was heard, I. protested that an occasional error was no reason to adopt so grave an attitude toward a Church such as that of Rome.
On the eve of the Second World War, in January 1940, before the new second Romanian Patriarch, in a lecture on the traditional and popular, non-polemical character of Romanian Orthodoxy, I. concluded that the Patriarch of Constantinople could not fail to act as a Greek, whereas the Pope of Rome acted as the Father of all the faithful, whatever their nation.
Among his works are: 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.