Alexandru Ioan Cuza
Alexandru Ioan Cuza was the colonel two assemblies elected prince in the same month of 1859 so that Moldavia and Wallachia would have one ruler without anyone having to say the word union, and in seven years he made them one country, took the monasteries' land, gave the peasants theirs, and was put on a carriage to the border by his own officers at night. He was born in 1820 into the Moldavian boyar class, was educated in Paris and came home a liberal, took part in the failed revolution of 1848 and was exiled, and was by 1857 a colonel and a member of the assembly that the powers had let each principality elect to say what it wanted. Both had said union under a foreign prince and the Paris conference of 1858 had refused it, leaving two princes to be chosen. Moldavia chose Cuza on 5 January 1859 as the compromise nobody objected to, and on 24 January the Wallachian assembly, with a crowd outside, chose the same man. Napoleon III and Russia accepted it at once, Austria and the Porte after a year, for his lifetime only. He governed at first with two ministries and two capitals and in 1862 merged them at Bucharest under the name Romania. What followed was a reforming reign against the assembly that had elected him. First came the secularisation of the monasteries in 1863, which took a quarter of the country's land from Greek monks, then a coup in May 1864 that dissolved the boyar assembly and put a new constitution to a plebiscite. The land law of 1864 that made the peasants owners of what they worked, with compensation over fifteen years, and the civil and penal codes on the French model, the University of Iași and of Bucharest, and compulsory schooling. The boyars and the liberals whose assembly he had closed made a monstrous coalition, and on the night of 22 February 1866 officers of the palace guard entered his bedroom, where he was not alone, and made him sign an abdication on a fellow conspirator's back. He left for exile without protest and died at Heidelberg in 1873. The coalition brought in the foreign prince the assemblies had wanted in 1857, and Carol of Hohenzollern reigned for forty-eight years on the country Cuza had made.
- Lived: 1820 CE – 1873 CE
- Nationality: Romanian
- Roles: prince, monarch
