IORGA, NICOLAE. — Historian, born in Botosani on 5 June 1871, assassinated in the Pantelimon forest (Bucharest) on 28 November 1940. Iorga’s figure is representative of the remarkable cultural development that Romania experienced in the first forty years of this century. A historian of worldwide fame and competence, restorer of modern Byzantine studies—after 1920—and of Byzantine congresses, historian of the Crusades, and especially, from this perspective, of the papacy, he was able to survey from such heights the religious questions and divisions, with the dual Byzantine and Western culture of his country. Often difficult to read and to verify, he was a naturally passionate writer, not always consistent.
A defender of the national and religious position of his people beyond Latin Europe, he sometimes expressed judgments of every kind regarding Catholicism; but, on the whole and in crucial moments, he maintained a courageously understanding attitude.
On the eve of the First World War, when the Haidu-Dorog case—thousands of Romanian-Catholic faithful, united, assigned to a Magyarized diocese—aroused great emotion in Transylvania, then Hungarian, and in Bucharest, where the cry of *Los von Rom!* was heard, Iorga protested that it was not appropriate, on account of an occasional error, to adopt such a grave stance toward a Church like that of Rome.
On the eve of the Second World War, in January 1940, before the new Patriarch of Romania, in a lecture on the traditional and popular, non-polemical character of Romanian Orthodoxy, Iorga concluded that the Patriarch of Constantinople could not but act as a Greek, whereas the Pope of Rome acted as the Father of all the faithful of whatever nation.
Among his works are: *Notes et extraits pour servir à l'histoire des Croisades au XVe siècle*, 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.