Trăiască Regele"Long live the King"(1884–1948) The Kingdom of Romania (Romanian: Regatul României) was a constitutional monarchy that existed from 25 March [O.S.

/ 10 October 1914 is sometimes referred to as the Romanian Old Kingdom, to distinguish it from "Greater Romania", which included the provinces that became part of the state after World War I (Bessarabia, Banat, Bukovina, and Transylvania).

With the exception of the southern halves of Bukovina and Transylvania, these territories were ceded to neighboring countries in 1940, under the pressure of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

The 1859 ascendancy of Alexandru Ioan Cuza as prince of both Moldavia and Wallachia under the nominal[8][9] suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire united an identifiably Romanian nation under a single ruler.

He immediately adopted the Romanian spelling of his name, Carol, and his cognatic descendants would rule Romania until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1947.

Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, Romania was recognized as an independent state by the Treaty of Berlin, 1878 and acquired Dobruja, although it was forced to surrender southern Bessarabia (Budjak) to Russia.

On 15 March 1881, as an assertion of full sovereignty, the Romanian parliament raised the country to the status of a kingdom, and Carol was crowned king on 10 May.

One army occupied Southern Dobruja and another moved into northern Bulgaria to threaten Sofia, helping to bring an end to the war.

Although the Romanian forces did not fare well militarily, by the end of the war the Austrian and Russian empires were gone; various assemblies proclaimed as representative bodies in Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina decided on union with Romania.

The term came into use after World War I, when the Old Kingdom was opposed to Greater Romania, which included Transylvania, Banat, Bessarabia, and Bukovina.

Following the proclamation of the union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania on 1 December 1918 by the representatives of Transylvanian Romanians gathered at Alba Iulia, Transylvania was soon united with the Kingdom, as was Bessarabia earlier in 1918, since the power vacuum in Russia caused by the civil war there allowed the Sfatul Țării, or National Council, to proclaim the union of Bessarabia with Romania.

War with the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 resulted in the occupation of Budapest by Romanian troops and the end of Béla Kun's Bolshevik regime.

[15][16] Romania made no further territorial claims; nonetheless the kingdom's expansion aroused enmity from several of its neighbors, including Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and especially Hungary.

Transylvania had significant Hungarian and German population who were accustomed to being the power structure; with a historically contemptuous[citation needed] attitude towards Romanians, they now feared reprisals.

The new state was also a highly centralized one, so it was unlikely that the Hungarian or German minorities would exercise political influence without personal connections in the government in Bucharest.

Despite these policies, the Romanian government permitted both Germans and Hungarians the freedom to have separate schools, publications and judicial hearings in their respective languages.

[citation needed] Upon the death of King Ferdinand in 1927, his son, Prince Carol, was prevented from succeeding him because of previous marital scandals that had resulted in his renunciation of rights to the throne.

The constitution of 1923 gave the king free rein to dissolve parliament and call elections at will; as a result, Romania experienced over 25 governments in a single decade.

The quasi-mystical fascist Iron Guard was an earlier LANC offshoot that, even more than these other parties, exploited nationalist feelings, fear of communism, and resentment of alleged foreign and Jewish domination of the economy.

Nonetheless, in December 1937, the king appointed National Christian Party leader, the poet Octavian Goga, as prime minister of Romania's first Fascist government.

In April 1938, King Carol had Iron Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (aka "The Captain") arrested and imprisoned.

After the 1940 territorial losses and growing increasingly unpopular, Carol was compelled to abdicate and name general Ion Antonescu as the new Prime-Minister with full powers in ruling the state by royal decree.

After proclamation of the Kingdom, the pre-established industrial facilities began to be highly developed: 6 more, larger, sugar factories were built and the railway network was expanded more.

The redistributed plots were invariably too small to feed their owners and most peasants could not overcome their tradition of growing grain over cash crops.

Despite the destruction provoked by the First World War, Romanian industry managed significant growth, as a result of new establishments and development of the older ones.

[28] It developed rapidly, and by 1930 Romania had managed to cease importing locomotives altogether, all required rolling stock being supplied by the local industry.

They were a class of 4 river monitors, built locally at the Galați shipyard using parts manufactured in Austria-Hungary, and the first one launched was Lascăr Catargiu, in 1907.

While legally all Romanians were required to undergo at least four years of schooling, in practice few actually did and the system was designed to separate those who would go on to higher education from those who would not.

Romania suffered from the same problem as the rest of Eastern Europe, which was that most students, coming from aristocratic backgrounds, preferred to study subjects such as theology, philosophy, literature and the fine arts over science, business, and engineering.

However, the terms of these proclamations (and, subsequently, the materialization of the Greater Romania ideal) would only be de facto recognized 2 years later, following the Treaty of Trianon.