Romanian Greek Catholic and Orthodox believers at the turning point of the 17–18th centuries: Confessionalism in the shadow of the Rákóczi War of Independence

Abstract

For lack of existence of the national self-determination as known in our age, political and confessional identity should be examined collaterally in the late 1690s and early 1700s, also as for the Romanians under Habsburg rule. The Court of Vienna — taking the more or less successful Union of Ungvár (1646) of the Rusins as an example, helped by the imperial Jesuits under the leadership of Lipót Kollonich (1631–1707) — tried to form a new Romanian Greek Catholic confession in parallel with the last anti-Ottoman war in the territory of Hungary and Transylvania (especially from 1692) to take more effective control of the estates of their relms. Our study tries to give a short overview of these aspirations from the very beginning until 1709, when the last substantive connections of the anti-imperial political and military movement (1703–1711) of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II (1676–1735) in line with religious affairs went down with the two Romanian-based neighbouring principalities of Transylvania, i.e. Moldavia and Wallachia. This hard-pressed period — accompanied with the duel for the Romanian Greek Catholic episcopal seat between the aulic unionist Athanasius and his antipode, basically the Transylvanian Hungarian protestants’ candidate Ioan Ţirca — shows us some failed and partially efficient examples of negotiations and pursuit of common interests via governmental, princely, diplomatic and ecclesiastical sources.