Constantin experienced an episodic rise in status during the Greek War of Independence, when he supported the Ottoman Empire and had his loyalism rewarded with the title of Paharnic; however, he quickly reverted to the position of a minor copyist for the Moldavian Treasury, in which capacity he began gathering notes for his genealogical manuscript, Arhondologia Moldovei ("Moldavia's Peerage").

In that context, Constantin and Costache Sion, alongside the scholar Gheorghe Săulescu, began circulating forged documents which passed for official writs, and which managed to persuade the public that they descended from the ancient boyardom.

[9] This family may have originated in Angevin Hungary, and were commonly thought of as West Slavs (or more precisely Slovaks); likely ancestors include Ioan Tăutu, who served as Stephen's Logothete.

[10] Dissatisfied with his seemingly modest origin, and unaware of any records that would prove a more ancient lineage, Constantin invented a prestigious pedigree, whereby they descended from the Khan Girays of the Crimean Khanate.

[12] In his other accounts, the chronicler makes false claims about his paternal grandfather—from initiating a (completely fictional) revolt in 1742[13] to having led 84 men into defeating a 2,000-strong branch of the Budjak Horde in 1757—, as well as spuriously suggesting that Iordache had been a war hostage.

[23] Also in 1822, Sion began his work as a biographer and historian, seeing out elderly boyar and using their testimonies as sources; "around 1826", he was also consulting documents including the treasury register for 1793 and what he called "historical manuscripts".

The Sions' Turkophila pushed them into the opposition to this new regime: in 1823, Costache, identified as a conspirator against Sturdza, was captured by mounted police and pus în heră ("restrained with iron chains").

[37] Antohi never sent his children to Russia, but instead used the forged writs to obtain local recognition for the Sions as ancient boyars; the courts awarded them that status, but only formally, since they continued to be sidelined politically.

Săulescu was one of its members, but largely absented; the other figures were Asachi, Kogălniceanu, Damaschin Bojincă, Alecu Donici, August Treboniu Laurian, Costache Negruzzi, and Alexandru Papadopol-Calimah.

[6] Kogălniceanu dedicated himself to the topic, publicizing his points by means of the magazine Stéoa Dunărei; the conclusion he provides here is reserved, noting that the work was probably inauthentic, but still "of great interest".

[57] The latter choice, which required him to electioneer for the younger Sturdza in areas "north of Focșani", was imposed on him by his brother Costache; secretly, Constantin despised Grigore as well as Mihail, and detailed his contempt for both in Arhondologia.

[62] The chronicler spent the final years of his life in "Sionești" or "Săonești", a village he was trying to establish (or, by his own account, reestablish) on land between Pungești and Fundul Racovii, some of which he had purchased from Ioniță Sion.

[65] Sion was seemingly unaware of literary works by his contemporaries—viewing Kogălniceanu, Negruzzi, Vasile Alecsandri, Alexandru Hrisoverghi and Costache Negri only as exponents of their families, and most often attacking them in libelous fashion.

His writings only record his admiration for early authors, especially Alecu Beldiman and Costache Conachi; he also seems unaware of older texts by Moldavian chroniclers, even those whom his father had once copied by hand.

[72] Arhondologia stands out for its anti-Hellenic and overall xenophobic content—as noted by Cioculescu, Sion's text "overflows with stereotypical epithets" for Greek boyars, including putoare ("stench") or napastă ("bane"), and was entirely indifferent to positive contributions by Phanariotes such as Nicolae Șuțu.

"[75] His text is protective of the old class system, not just against penetration by the "churls", but also against modernization—including attacks on Prince Ghica, Anastasie Fătu, and their maternity hospital, which Simion calls a "whore-house, the house of illegitimate births".

He records his enjoyment of Sion's musings on such topics as progress (with Moldavia as the land where "things are only ever begun", but never carried through) or the selection of surnames ("the churls will steal each and every nickname of the old nobility, so as to pass for nobles").

[82] Like Asmodeus as portrayed in The Devil upon Two Sticks, "he commands for the roofs of houses to be lifted, and peeks inside to see all sorts of infamies", acting as the moral vigilante "when he can afford to".

[83] Also according to Cioculescu, the "doubtfully famous" writing was also despised for very personal reasons—an "easily annoyed" Nicolae Iorga "avoided it in horror, since it publicized false information on his own origin and the moral profiles of his direct ancestors.

"[84] Scholar Ștefan S. Gorovei notes that this "fierceness toward the Paharnic", with its "well-known subjective reasons", prevented Iorga from even noticing that Sion had correctly researched the origins of the Callimachi family.

"[87] The Chronicle of Huru is described by historian Andrei Pippidi as of the "'patriotic' forgeries of the 19th century [which aim] to fill a gap in documentary evidence, with the deliberate purpose of increasing a young nation's symbolic capital"; the relevant parallels he cites are the hoaxes pulled by Václav Hanka, Vasil Poletika, and Teodor Narbutt, in their respective contexts.

[88] Sion's forgery presents as a found manuscript from the 15th-century court of Stephen the Great, itself a synthesis of older texts detailing the Romanian ethnogenesis between Roman Dacia and the foundation of Moldavia.

The Cyrillic text indirectly aims to settle disputes about the history of the Romanian language, by claiming to attest its existence in written form during the Early Middle Ages, or at least its usage by Stephen's boyars.

[95] According to Pippidi, the republic's foundation has in itself an air of falsehood, with the "bizarre onomastics" of the boyars involved, the mixture of titles from different culture and periods, and the costumes described, which evoke French revolutionary dress under the Tribunat.

[97] "Huru" recounts the High Middle Ages with echoes from Dimitrie Cantemir, notably in describing the Second Bulgarian Empire as a Romanian polity and Dragoș of Moldavia as an Asenid.

[98] Dragoș's war of independence against Angevin Hungary is rendered as a heroic struggle, also involving, on the Hungarian side, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Tatars, and (anachronistically so) Cossacks.

[102] In the decades following publication, the forgery could still be seen as authentic by numerous Romanian intellectuals, including the likes of George Bariț, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Nicolae Ionescu, Ioan Maiorescu, Aron Pumnul, V. A. Urechia, and Andrei Vizanti.

[104] Definitive proof of the text's modernity was first brought up by Robert Rösler, who noted that it incorporates mistakes particular to 19th-century historiography, including a chronological error attributable to Abdolonyme Ubicini.

In his political articles, Junimist poet Mihai Eminescu expressed his bewilderment that Vizanti still endorsed the work, which appears, "even to basic philologists, at a first glance, as sheer galimatias and an unsophisticated forgery.

"[106] Three years later, antiquarian Grigore Tocilescu validated earlier pronouncements by foreign researchers, describing the Chronicle as driven by either a "dubious pleasure of duping one's fellow men" or "blind and misdirected patriotism".