ABSTRACT
At the close of the seventeenth century the Habsburg court of Vienna looked eastward across an expanse of newly conquered territory that only a few years before could not have been counted as part of Christendom.2 As recently as 1683, the Turks, the last of the great non-Christian, expansionist empires to rise out of the east, had pressed up against the very walls of the “Residenzstadt” of the emperors, only to be driven forever from the region by an international alliance of Poles, Germans and other hired troops whose cosmopolitan composition reflected the complexity of the relations between the Habsburg domains and its allies. The hasty retreat of these infidels down the Danube to Belgrade and beyond left the Hungarian plains open to renewed contact with the Catholic and Imperial culture that emanated from Vienna and which had struggled to maintain contact with Hungary throughout the previous century.3 The river-bound cities of Győr and Esztergom had long been strongholds of orthodox Hungarian Catholicism and had already been incorporated without much fuss into the patchwork of territories the Habsburgs laid claim to.4 Further downstream, Buda, the historic royal capital of Hungary, was liberated in 1686, by a Habsburg army with Jesuit fathers in its train.5 But far to the east, across the Danube and its tributary the Tisza, beyond the wasteland of the Hortobágy, in the hills and mountains that rise in the farthest reaches of the Carpathian Basin, lay a land historically connected with Hungary, but with a recent past that had separated it from Hungary and from much of the rest of Europe. This land was Transylvania. Transylvania was a Principality ruled by an elected Prince, a region that had in the previous century made its own peace with the Turks, and whose nobility, burghers and peasants did not consider themselves merely another Catholic territory waiting to be liberated by the Church’s champions, the Habsburgs. The Principality had for five
1 Portions of this chapter appear in a slightly different form in the author’s “Cluj: A Jesuit Educational Outpost in Transylvania,” Catholic Education 5, 1 (2001), pp. 55-71.
