ABSTRACT

In 1681 the printing-press at Trnava acquired a set of Cyrillic characters. Through the activity of Jesuits and the Latin hierarchy at Zagreb and Eger, a path opened to integrate numerous schismatics who lived within the confines of the Habsburg monarchy into the Catholic Church. The year that Leopold Kollonich ensured that the Trnava press received a set of Cyrillic characters was not promising for the Catholic cause in Royal Hungary. By 1688 the Habsburgs had wrested control over the central part of the former medieval Hungarian kingdom from the Ottomans and had also gained the principality of Transylvania. This was partly due to the zeal of Joseph de Camellis, a former student of the Greek College in Rome. Leopold Kollonich, who had become a cardinal and the primate of Hungary and archbishop of Esztergom, then revived his old project to promote printing using Cyrillic characters.