Avram Iancu

Nationalism 1824–1872 ○ Natural causes

Transylvanian Romanian lawyer who led the peasant legion of the Apuseni Mountains against the Hungarian army in 1848–1849

Born in 1824 at Vidra de Sus in Transylvania into a peasant family freed from serfdom, he studied law at the Piarist College of Cluj. A law clerk when news of the March 1848 revolutions in Vienna and Pest arrived, he was indignant that the Hungarian revolutionaries refused to debate the abolition of serfdom. At the Blaj assemblies he joined the radical wing that opposed the union of Transylvania with Hungary, and he led the 4,000 men of the "Auraria Gemina" Legion in joint actions with the Austrian army. Holding his stronghold in the Apuseni Mountains to the end, he destroyed Hatvany's Hungarian force in May 1849, and at the end of July guaranteed that he would not attack the withdrawing Hungarian troops. After the war he was watched and twice arrested; when the police stopped him petitioning the emperor in Vienna he broke down, and he died in 1872.