ABSTRACT
Hungarian Calvinists made a concerted effort to build a Romanian Reformed community in the Transylvanian principality during the seventeenth century. The attempts to create a Romanian Reformed community in seventeenth-century Transylvania was an inevitable failure. This chapter focuses at Hungarian Calvinist attempts to reform Transylvanian Orthodoxy during the seventeenth century. The seventeenth-century Calvinist mission to the Orthodox population of Transylvania was a distinct movement from previous efforts to convert Romanians undertaken during the sixteenth century by both Lutherans and Calvinists. The Transylvanian principality was a Reformed state from the early decades of the seventeenth century led by Reformed princes, and with Calvinism as its ruling ideology. As a result of institutional reforms undertaken as part of the Calvinist mission to Orthodoxy, the Romanian Orthodox Church technically became part of the Transylvanian Reformed Church. The imposition of conditions on new Orthodox metropolitans in Transylvania continued throughout the seventeenth century.
