The Hungarian–Romanian War begins

On 13 November 1918, two days after the Armistice of Compiègne, the war on the eastern edges of the former Kingdom of Hungary had not ended at all; it had merely changed its character. Late that evening in Belgrade a representative of Hungary’s new revolutionary government signed a military convention with the command of the Allied armies in the Balkans. It drew a demarcation line behind which the Hungarian army had to withdraw, and it opened the way for the victors into Transylvania, the Banat and the Bačka. In those same days the first Romanian patrols began to come down through the passes of the Eastern Carpathians, followed by the divisions of an army that three days earlier had re-entered the war on the side of the Entente. And in Arad talks were opening between a Hungarian minister and the leaders of the Transylvanian Romanians, who would no longer hear of living in a Hungarian state. Some accounts and popular chronologies date the Hungarian–Romanian War from this day. For its first months it hardly resembled a war: the Romanians were occupying a country that nobody was defending. The real fighting came only in the spring of 1919, but the dispute over Transylvania that began then outlasted both world wars.

The promise of 1916

Transylvania, a land enclosed by the arc of the Carpathians, had belonged to the Hungarian crown for centuries. Together with the adjoining lands to the west, which Romanians call Crișana and Maramureș and Hungarians the Partium, it was home to several million people. The majority were Romanians, mostly peasants, but Hungarians predominated in the towns; in the east, in the bend of the Carpathians, lived the Hungarian-speaking Székelys, and around Sibiu and Brașov there had been Saxons since the Middle Ages. For Romanian politicians in Bucharest, uniting all Romanians in a single state had been the goal of generations. It was for Transylvania that Romania had entered the war in August 1916. In a secret treaty with the Entente negotiated by the Prime Minister, Ion I.C. Brătianu, the Great Powers promised it Transylvania, the Banat as far as the Tisza and most of Bukovina.

The 1916 campaign ended in disaster. German and Austro-Hungarian forces drove the Romanians out of Transylvania and, together with the Bulgarians and Turks, occupied two-thirds of the country, Bucharest included. The court and government held out in Iași, and when the allied Russian army disintegrated after the Bolshevik revolution, Romania was left alone at the front. In the spring of 1918 it was forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Bucharest with the Central Powers. King Ferdinand I, however, never ratified it. When the Central Powers began to collapse in the autumn, he dismissed, at the demand of the Entente’s representatives, the government of the Germanophile Alexandru Marghiloman and appointed a caretaker cabinet under General Constantin Coandă. On 10 November 1918, as French battalions of General Henri Berthelot’s army were crossing the Danube from Bulgaria, Romania re-entered the war and the King called the nation to arms. General Constantin Prezan once again became Chief of the General Staff.

The military value of this return was slight, since the war in the west ended the next day and Field Marshal August von Mackensen’s German troops were withdrawing from Romania through Transylvania and Hungary anyway. The point was political. A country that had made a separate peace with the enemy wanted to come before the peace conference as an ally entitled to everything it had been promised in 1916. Most of the army, however, had been demobilised. According to Romanian studies only four divisions remained at full strength, and they were guarding Bessarabia against Bolshevik Russia. Under the mobilisation order, it was chiefly the divisions stationed in Moldavia that were made ready to march west: General Traian Moșoiu’s 7th Infantry Division, the 1st Rifle (Vânători) Division commanded by General Aristide Lecca, and the 8th Division, which was sent to Bukovina. Romania still used the Julian calendar at the time, so in Romanian documents 13 November is dated 31 October, and the mobilisation decree 28 October.

Hungary without an army

On the other side of the mountains, the state that had fought alongside Germany for four years had ceased to exist in its old form. At the end of October the Aster Revolution broke out in Budapest, and on 31 October Count Mihály Károlyi, leader of the Independence Party, who during the war had called for peace and a rapprochement with the Entente, became Prime Minister. His government broke the union with Austria and called on Hungarian soldiers to come home from the fronts. On 2 November the War Minister, Colonel Béla Linder, declared that he no longer wanted to see soldiers and ordered them to lay down their arms. The war-weary army was going home in any case, and in November peasant unrest swept through the villages of Transylvania and eastern Hungary, driving out notaries, gendarmes and landowners. Order was kept by hastily formed national guards – Hungarian, Romanian and Saxon, each looking after its own.

The Károlyi government hoped that a democratic Hungary would be treated leniently, in line with the principles of President Woodrow Wilson, and that the new authorities would not be made to answer for the sins of the old. It refused to accept that it was bound by the Armistice of Villa Giusti, concluded on 3 November still in the name of Emperor and King Charles, and decided to make its own agreement with the command of the Allied armies in the Balkans. On 7 November Károlyi arrived in Belgrade, to which the Serbs had returned a week earlier, and appeared before the commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in the East, General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey. The Frenchman, victor of Dobro Pole, who at the end of September had knocked Bulgaria out of the war, received the delegation coldly. He made it clear that he regarded Hungary as a defeated state, not as a new friend of France. According to Hungarian accounts he said that he held Hungary’s fate in his hand, and that he had only to open it for the neighbours to fall upon her. He set out eighteen conditions, on which Károlyi then sought the opinion of Paris. The Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, replied that the general was to discuss military matters only. On 11 November the Hungarian National Council accepted the conditions, and Linder, by now a minister without portfolio, left for Belgrade with full powers to sign the agreement.

The Belgrade convention

At around 11.15 p.m. on 13 November 1918 a military convention, known as the Armistice of Belgrade, was signed in Belgrade. On behalf of the Allies it was signed, with authority from Franchet d’Espèrey, by the French general Paul Henrys, commander of the Army of the Orient, and by the chief of staff of the Serbian army, Vojvoda Živojin Mišić. Linder signed for Hungary. The convention fixed a line behind which Hungarian troops were to withdraw. In the east it ran from the upper Someș through Bistrița and the Reghin area to the Mureș, along the Mureș to its confluence with the Tisza, and then past Subotica, Baja and Pécs to the Drava. East and south of this line – that is, in eastern and central Transylvania, the Banat and the Bačka – the Allies could station their troops, while Hungary was left only with civil administration and the police. The Hungarian army was limited to six infantry divisions and two cavalry divisions. Hungary had to place some of its rolling stock, Danube vessels and horses at the Allies’ disposal, show where mines had been laid in the Danube, break off relations with Germany and expel German troops. The Allies reserved the right to occupy any point in the country but promised not to interfere in its internal administration.

The convention did not settle any borders. The line was a military one and was to apply until a peace treaty was concluded. Nobody asked Romania for its opinion, and it was not a party to the agreement, since in the eyes of Paris it had only just returned from the camp of states that had made a separate peace. The government in Iași nevertheless took the view that, as an ally, it was entitled to occupy what the convention handed over to the Allies. In Budapest the terms were received as a humiliation, for they dashed the hope that revolutionary Hungary would be treated as a neutral country. On that same 13 November King Charles signed a declaration at Eckartsau near Vienna renouncing any part in the affairs of the Hungarian state. Three days later the Hungarian People’s Republic was proclaimed in Budapest.

Romanians in the passes

Sources differ on exactly when the first Romanian soldiers crossed the old Hungarian–Romanian border in 1918. According to Hungarian accounts and studies, the first Romanians came through the Tölgyes Pass (Romanian: Tulgheș) in the Eastern Carpathians on 12 November, and on 13 November a Romanian patrol entered Gyimesbükk (Ghimeș-Făget) in the Trotuș valley and told the inhabitants that it came not as an enemy but to keep order. Over the following days, until roughly 20 November, weak Romanian columns took control of the four passes leading from Moldavia into Transylvania: Tölgyes, Gyimes, Uz and Oituz. The soldiers disarmed the local population and handed out King Ferdinand’s proclamations. Some sources state that on 13 November the 7th Division entered the Prisăcani valley in the Eastern Carpathians, followed by the 1st Rifle Division. Romanian studies based on army records describe both divisions crossing the mountains a few days after mobilisation, with their vanguards reaching Toplița in the Mureș valley and Miercurea Ciuc at the end of November. As early as 17 November (4 November by the Julian calendar) the prefect of Csík County announced to the population that Romanian troops were on their way and should be received calmly.

Resistance was negligible. The disarmed Hungarian units were pulling back, and local authorities, frightened by the unrest, sometimes welcomed the Romanians as guarantors of order. The Romanians were in no hurry, in any case. They advanced cautiously in the wake of Mackensen’s departing troops, which during those weeks were passing through Transylvania and Hungary on their way to Germany, and for a long time their own forces remained modest.

The talks at Arad

Meanwhile the inhabitants of Transylvania were deciding its fate themselves. As early as 18 October the deputy Alexandru Vaida-Voevod had read out in the Budapest parliament a declaration in which the Romanian National Party proclaimed the right of Hungary’s Romanians to self-determination. At the end of October the Central Romanian National Council was set up with its seat in Arad; its leading politician was Iuliu Maniu. On 9 November the council demanded that the Budapest government hand over full power in the counties inhabited by Romanians. In response the Minister for Nationalities, Oszkár Jászi, a sociologist who favoured turning Hungary into a federation of free nations, came to Arad. On 13 and 14 November (and, according to some sources, on 15 November as well) he offered the Romanians wide self-government within the Hungarian state, modelled on the Swiss cantons. It was already too late. The Romanians, like the Slovaks and South Slavs before them, wanted complete independence from Hungary and, in practice, union with Romania. According to Hungarian accounts, Maniu summed up the talks briefly: what was at stake was complete separation. The negotiations ended without agreement.

Why 13 November

There is no single date for the start of the Hungarian–Romanian War, and there was no day on which anyone declared it. Romania did not declare war on Hungary in November 1918 or at any later point, and for the first five months its army advanced from one demarcation line to the next, citing the consent of the Allied command, and clashed with the Hungarians only in skirmishes. The date of 13 November is given by some sources and studies because two events coincided on that day: the Belgrade convention fixed the line up to which the Allies – in practice the Romanians – were entitled to advance, and the first Romanian units crossed the Carpathians. Hungarian historians, too, usually date the war from November 1918 and place its end in the spring of 1920, when the Romanian army finally left the territory that was to remain Hungarian. Romanian historiography, by contrast, usually speaks of the war of 1919, from the offensive in mid-April to the capture of Budapest in August, and describes the events of autumn 1918 as the occupation of the demarcation line and the defence of the union. After the war, in disputes over the costs of the occupation, the Romanian government argued that everything its army had done after the armistice conventions of 3 and 13 November had been done with the consent of the Allies.

The first weeks

Events gathered pace at the turn of November and December. On 1 December 1918, 1,228 delegates of the Romanians of Transylvania, the Banat, Crișana and Maramureș assembled in Alba Iulia, surrounded, by Romanian estimates, by some hundred thousand people. The delegates unanimously proclaimed the union of these lands with Romania, while promising the minorities national and religious freedom, universal suffrage and land reform. The next day a Ruling Council in Sibiu, headed by Maniu, took power in the assembly’s name. On that same 1 December King Ferdinand and Queen Marie rode into liberated Bucharest. At the end of December the King confirmed the union by decree.

The Romanian army, meanwhile, was moving west. At the beginning of December it took Târgu Mureș and Brașov, and by the middle of the month it stood on the Mureș, on the line fixed in Belgrade. The Romanians pressed for permission to advance further. On 12 December General Berthelot, who commanded the French Army of the Danube from Bucharest, agreed – according to Hungarian studies on his own initiative and to the displeasure of Franchet d’Espèrey. By the time the command in Salonika ordered the movement halted, it was too late: on 24 December Romanian troops entered Cluj, the largest city in Transylvania, whose inhabitants were mostly Hungarian. Only two days earlier it had hosted an assembly of Transylvanian Hungarians who demanded to remain in the Hungarian state. The new line up to which the Romanians were allowed to advance reached the western edge of Transylvania, beyond the Apuseni Mountains, and by 22 January 1919 the Romanian army had occupied the whole area up to it. The Károlyi government protested, citing the Belgrade convention, but it no longer had anything with which to defend itself.

The long shadow of Transylvania

What had looked in November 1918 like a peaceful occupation of territory turned into a real war in 1919. When in March the peace conference demanded that Hungary give up still more territory, Károlyi stepped down and power was taken by Béla Kun’s Communists, who proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. In April the Romanian army routed the Hungarian forces and reached the Tisza; in July it repelled a Hungarian counter-offensive, and at the beginning of August it entered Budapest. The Soviet Republic collapsed, and the Romanians went on occupying much of Hungary for many months, carrying off machinery, rolling stock and supplies. When they withdrew from the capital in November 1919, Admiral Miklós Horthy rode in – the future Regent, who would rule Hungary until 1944.

On 4 June 1920 the Treaty of Trianon awarded Romania Transylvania together with the eastern part of the Banat, Crișana and Maramureș – more than a hundred thousand square kilometres, more than was left to Hungary itself. With these lands, some one and a half million Hungarians found themselves within the borders of Greater Romania. For Romanians it was the fulfilment of the dream of union; for Hungarians, the greatest injustice of Trianon. Border revision became the axis of Hungarian policy between the wars, and the only great power able and willing to carry it out turned out in the end to be Germany. Romania, defending its new borders, relied on France, on its alliance with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the Little Entente, and on its alliance with Poland.

The dispute returned in full force in 1940. After the fall of France, Romania was left without protectors. In June it was forced to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, and on 30 August the Second Vienna Award, a dictate of the German and Italian foreign ministers, gave northern Transylvania to Hungary. Both countries paid for Berlin’s favour in the same coin: they joined the Tripartite Pact and in 1941 went to war against the Soviet Union alongside Germany, each keeping a close eye on the other and hoping that loyalty to Hitler would be rewarded with Transylvania. When Romania changed sides in August 1944, its troops, together with the Red Army, recaptured northern Transylvania, and the peace treaty of 1947 restored the Trianon border. The war whose beginning is linked to 13 November 1918 was the first link in this chain.