Many people erroneously believe that monarchy is synonym to royalty and that, in our country, monarchy begun in 1881, when Romania became a kingdom and Prince Carol I Hohenzollern was crowned king. Yet, the ruling princes who had held the power, referred to as voivodes, were also monarchs. Our monarchs, the voivodes of the Romanian Countries, first emerged eight centuries ago. The princes in Walachia and Moldavia were almost all orthodox; out of 402 voivodes identified by historians, only two renounced faith and become Muslims. Even under Otoman rule, the voivodes of the Romanian Countries were anointed in the church of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, which later became Istanbul, or in a church in Bucharest or Jassy, in general in the royal church where the prince and his family attended the Sunday mass and the great holiday services. As pointed out by historian and scholar Virgil Cândea, the great acts during the Romanian Middle Age were done when the two fundamental institutions of state, the Church and the Voivode, worked together harmoniously in the old and organic Byzantine tradition.

Keywords: monarchy, voivodes, Church, queen Marie of Romania, Michael I of Romania

MIRCEA GELU BUTA