Jesuits and the Politics of Religious Pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Transylvania

Culture, Politics and Religion, 1693–1773

Paul Shore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351925334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book tells the story of the Jesuit mission to Cluj, Transylvania (now Romania) from 1693, when the Jesuits were allowed to return after almost a century of restricted activity in the region, until 1773, when the order was suppressed. During these eight decades the Jesuits created a complex, multi-faceted community whose impact reached throughout Transylvania and beyond into neighbouring regions. In addition to an ongoing missionary program in this predominantly non-Catholic region, the Jesuits established a cluster of schools and a university that trained the elite, introduced Baroque architecture, music and literature, and became the masters of extensive properties. The Jesuits' schools staged dramas in several languages, their printing press produced a wide range of publications, including a Hungarian 'ABC for Girls' and a catechism in Ukrainian, and Jesuit scientists, including Miksa Hell, later Court Astronomer in Vienna, conducted experiments and observations. Among the unique features of this study are the accounts of how Jesuits sought to impose social conformity on the ethnically and religiously diverse community, the Jesuits' project to develop a 'Uniate Church' that would retain the Eastern Rite while acknowledging the authority of Rome, and the story of the long-forgotten Jesuit 'brothers', who contributed their talents as craftsmen and artists to the Jesuit enterprise. A chapter is devoted to the ill-fated 1743 mission to Moldavia, in which Transylvanian Jesuits hoped to establish a missionary and educational outpost in this Ottoman-dominated principality. Special attention is given to Jesuit interactions with the many minority groups present in Cluj: Armenians, Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and German speaking 'Saxons', as well as encounters with ethnic Romanians, who made up the majority of the population of Transylvania and among whom the Uniate Church was promoted. Cluj, a city where the cultures of Eastern and Western Europe meet, represented the furthermost penetration into Orthodox Europe of the Baroque aesthetic and of the domination of the Habsburgs, supported and glorified by the Jesuits. The successes and failures of this religious order helped shape the history of the region for the next two centuries.

CHAPTER ONE

Uneasy Neighbors¹

I

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 centuries been part of the historic Kingdom of Hungary, whose power structure was annihilated in the battle of Mohács in 1526 and which had then been divided among the Turks, Habsburgs, and Transylvanian princes. For 150 years, the Principality, now largely cut off from the intellectual and political currents of Western Europe, had gone her own way, led by elected rulers who sought to retain the autonomy of the region through a realpolitik that sometimes required alliances with the Ottoman Turks and usually pitted its resources against those of Austria.

Transylvania was, and remains today, neither entirely within the influence of the traditions of Western Europe, nor completely excluded from the cultural history of the West.⁶ Its medley of nationalities have long looked various directions for cultural orientation, while the key position of Transylvania near the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman empires made it a point of intersection among competing political and religious powers from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.⁷ Transylvania was regarded by Vienna much as the Western European colonial powers viewed their colonial possessions. But unlike the overseas colonies of Spain, Portugal, France, England and Holland, Transylvania was not separated by vast distances and bodies of water from the imperial power that sought to govern her, nor was she heavily populated with strange-looking “natives” whose customs might be considered beyond the pale of European (and Christian) expectations for behavior.⁸ Transylvania was always regarded as part of Europe, and in claiming Transylvania for Christendom, the political and religious forces that converged on it as Turkish influence receded sought at each step of the way to reinforce the features that it shared with Europe.⁹

Many of these shared characteristics could be easily identified. Transylvania, in its religious and ethnic diversity, mirrored some of the conditions that had existed a century or more earlier in many parts of Europe, when in the wake of the first waves of the Reformation religious minorities had struggled for legal recognition within the political frameworks of France, the Netherlands and the Empire, a circumstance that had faded with the assertion of policies that disenfranchised nonconformists. Powerful nobles resisted central authority, and residents of “free Imperial cities” clung to their ancient privileges. Feudal relations compelled peasants to work four days each week for their lords, plus give one-fourth of the produce of their own land to their lord.¹⁰ Yet despite this significant resemblance to Western Europe, Transylvania was unique in other ways. Its polity was made up of three Nationes: Szeklers (Székely), Hungarian speakers who had been identified with Transylvania since the ninth century, Hungarians, whose ties were to Royal Hungary, and “Saxons,” the descendants of the German-speaking settlers who had arrived several centuries later, many of whom were Lutheran.¹¹ A defining feature of each of these Nationes was language, but the possession of a mother tongue by a distinct group did not assure that group’s inclusion in the polity of Transylvania. The ethnic Romanians, who made up a sizable minority if not a majority of inhabitants at this time, were not recognized as having the rights of the other Nationes, and were denied any role in governance and were considered to occupy the at best outermost fringes of the European culture of the region. Romanians were also discriminated against in many other ways, some subtle, others less so.¹² The politically silenced presence of this large segment of the population of Transylvania added greatly to the inherent instability of the Principality, and will play an important role in our story.

This diversity of languages, creeds and ethnicities bred, if not tolerance in the modern sense of the word, at least a workable truce among the most powerful elements that was reflected in the religious arrangements of the land, so that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Transylvania possessed a reputation for heresy that profoundly troubled orthodox Catholics.¹³ Moreover, the manner in which the three united nations of Transylvania had been split into four more or less self-contained religious categories – Roman Catholic, Calvinist-Reformed, Evangelical-Lutheran and Socinian-Unitarian – was offensive to devout Catholics and perhaps to the Habsburg court as well. This luxuriant flowering of competing heresies was itself a standing challenge to the mission and goals of the Jesuits.¹⁴ In 1568, the Proclamation of Turda had established religious freedom within the Principality, a measure taken in large part because of the demands of its nonconforming Protestant subjects, many of whom belonged to noble landowning families who held the right to elect the Prince.¹⁵ The most remarkable expression of this religious freedom was the relative toleration granted Unitarians (who were generally known as Arians in the seventeenth century), even during the period when the Jesuits were attempting to reduce the influence of this native group.¹⁶ Tolerance appeared to work in several directions, although pressures invisible to the modern researcher may also have played a role in compelling civil authorities to accept the presence of various confessions. In the sixteenth century, while cuius regio ejus religio was the rule in Germany, civic bodies in Turda and Cluj that counted Lutheran and Unitarians in their numbers had even allowed Jesuits to come into their communities, where presumably the fathers taught and sought converts.¹⁷ This at least grudging acceptance of the Society, whose missionary activities were far from secret, would be a characteristic of the second period of Jesuit efforts in Transylvania as well.

Other groups, while not recognized as part of the polity of Transylvania, added to the mix of languages, beliefs and customs.¹⁸ An Armenian community, numbering in the thousands, flourished a short distance from Cluj (Kolosvár).¹⁹ Jesuit records also suggest the presence of a handful of Muslims, although some of these may have been prisoners of war captured in campaigns against the Turks.²⁰ In the remote mountains were peasants and shepherds whose religious practices, despite centuries of exposure to Christianity, were still strongly flavored by animism.²¹ While Austrian mercantilism attempted to penetrate the region in the eighteenth century and military conscription brought some uniformity of experience to the adult male population, elements of the Transylvanian mix were exotic or even shocking by Western European standards.²² Rom were scattered throughout the region, and were still being bought and sold as slaves in neighboring Bukovina until 1775.²³ Vienna did not help this situation by passing laws in 1750, 1753 and 1754 that called for the deportation of “ruffians” from its western regions to Transylvania.²⁴ Thus the region, while far closer to the regained Catholic heartland of Central Europe than either Peru or the Philippines, remained from a Habsburg or Roman point of view particularly alien and troublesome, a territory whose social conditions were without exact parallel in Western Europe, whose peasants still suffered the deprival of rights enshrined by the fifteenth century Ius Tripartitum of Werböczy István, and whose local nobility were identified according to unique and ancient categories.²⁵ Memories of earlier Jesuit setbacks in the region remained vivid; a mission to Transylvania was a journey to both an exotic location where heroic martyrdom might crown one’s efforts, and also where the earlier failures of the Society might be redeemed.²⁶ Late in the eighteenth century Transylvania would also serve as a place of internal exile for fractious non-Catholics from Bohemia, thereby confirming the region’s reputation as a cultural and spiritual frontier.²⁷ Habsburg arms, coupled with good luck and, on occasion, favorable timing, brought Transylvania within the Catholic-dominated control of the House of Austria after 1686. Yet it would take additional measures to win the population of this distant and little understood Principality to the True Faith, and even more was required to make these peasant burghers and petty nobles into Habsburg subjects who even roughly exemplified the ideal of Kaisertreue.²⁸ And while until the sole rule of Joseph II (1780–90), having a schooled population was never a goal of the Habsburgs (who often feared heresy was the stepchild of exposure to unorthodox religious literature), the extremely low levels of literacy and general poverty of Transylvanian peasants made systematic religious instruction a different sort of undertaking than it would have been in another more prosperous and bookish land.²⁹ There were other warning signs. The tendency of Romanian peasants to follow Messianic leaders such as Gheorghe Crǎcium, the “black man,” was an indicator of the desperation of the common people.³⁰ By any measure, the reclamation of Transylvania called for resolve, flexibility and a willingness to remain with the mission for the long haul. The Society of Jesus, as renowned for its educational and missionary projects as it was for its devotion to the culture of post-Tridentine Catholicism, seemed ideally suited to undertake the assignment converting, and connecting Transylvania to the Habsburg polity.³¹

This book is the story of how the Society’s attempts to bring Transylvania into the world of the eighteenth-century Catholic Habsburgs were conducted by the Jesuits in one place, Cluj, or Kolozsvár, a small walled city located in the heart of Transylvania.³² This undertaking, in its organized and openly supported stages, lasted eighty years, from the organized return of the Society of Jesus to Cluj in 1693, to the suppression of the Society by the pope in 1773.³³ Yet narrow though this study must be in a strictly geographic sense, it cannot ignore issues that spill across a far wider geographical area, nor can it entirely confine itself entirely to the activities of the Jesuits in the immediate vicinity. To make sense of the Jesuit mission in Cluj we must also confront the religious policy of the House of Habsburg in the eastern reaches of its domain and the forces that helped shape this policy.³⁴ This is in part because of one distinctive feature of the Jesuit “way of proceeding,” which took members of the Society out of the monastic seclusion common to many other Catholic religious orders and placed them in direct daily contact with lay people.³⁵ It is also because the Habsburg vision of Catholicization or recatholicization was broad and never confined to the goal of “regaining” of a single isolated town or district, but instead combined the conversion of communities with the securing of the region for the dynasty and the pacification of elites and peasantry alike. Like the endeavors of the Society to take the message of the Gospel into all corners of the world, Habsburg ambitions to create a religiously homogeneous community were born of a vision of unity and uniformity of belief. For the dynasty, the vision had emerged from the chaos and frequent setbacks of the seventeenth century, and was driven simultaneously by the need for security and by an ambition for new territorial acquisitions. The motivations of the Society as a missionary and educational institution were often compatible with those of the Habsburgs, but had different emphases. Jesuit activities in remote and inhospitable localities, both in Europe and abroad, reflected a strong desire among th...