regionalism; he stirred national controversy by circulating an extreme conservative manifesto known as "Petition of Iași". His views on international politics eventually brought him into a dispute with the moderate conservatives at Junimea. Shunning Junimist Germanophilia, Sturdza became a committed Russophile during the Romanian War of Independence, forming his own group, the National-Democratic Party. This faction broke apart after its members were questioned regarding an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Ion Brătianu; eventually, Sturdza himself was recruited by Brătianu's National Liberal Party in the 1890s. The Beizadea was by then dedicated mostly to his non-political work, including attempts to establish his profile as a composer, philosopher, inventor, and art sponsor; his last activities included raising a Sturdza Palace in Bucharest. He was also absorbed and financially exhausted by a long trial involving his family inheritance. Known for his sexual promiscuity and his fathering of illegitimate children, he left a diminished estate that was itself disputed among his progeny. Biography Origins and youth As reported by scholar Moses Gaster, Grigore's family, the Sturdzas, were "long and intimately associated with the government first of Moldavia and afterwards of Rumania." Their origin, Gaster speculates, was in the Empire of Trebizond, whence they settled Moldavia and Wallachia during the 17th century. Other sources indicate that the first known Sturdza actually lived in Moldavia during the mid-16th-century reigns of Alexandru Lăpușneanu; he was of plausible, but unconfirmed, Aromanian origin. The Beizadeas grandfather, Logothete Grigorașcu Sturdza, enshrined a legend according to which the family was a branch of the Hungarian Thurzós, and that it ultimately had Dalmatian origins. Reportedly, Grigore did not favor this claim, but instead regarded himself as a descendant of Vlad the Impaler. His contemporary, the genealogist and polemicist Constantin Sion, lists the Sturdzas as native Moldavians from Putna County. In her 1901 obituary for the Société astronomique de France, Dorothea Klumpke noted that the Beizadea was a native of "Scutarie" village in Russia's Bessarabia Governorate (formerly a part of Moldavia), and gives his birth date as May 11, 1821. An 1849 letter sent by Sturdza clarifies the date as Julian, which remained in use in Moldavia and Romania throughout his life, and which corresponds to May 23. It also explains that the Bessarabian locality was in fact Sculeni, his family having fled there from the ravages of the Greek Revolution in Moldavia; as a baby, he lived in Bessarabia, then in Bukovina,