Transylvania
The historic development of Transylvania was substantially different and more complex than that experienced by the principalities of Walachia and Moldavia. Overrun by Asiatic Magyars as early as the ninth century, the region was organized originally as a province in the eleventh century. In order to strengthen this eastern outpost, the Hungarians encouraged two groups of people—Szeklers, or Szekelys, an ethnic group of people akin to the Hungarians, and Germans—to emigrate from the west into the area. Although these colonists eventually reached substantial numbers, the native Romanian speakers remained in the majority (see ch. 4).
With the expansion of Turkish power, Transylvania became the battleground for opposing Turkish and Hungarian forces. Under Turkish pressure Hungarian control declined in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and by 1526 the region had become a semiautonomous principality ruled by Hungarian princes but still subject to Turkish authority. At the end of the sixteenth century Michael the Brave, the ruler of Walachia and Moldavia, succeeded in revolting against Turkish rule and united Transylvania with the other Romanian territories. This union, however, was short lived, and all three principalities subsequently reverted to Turkish control. Toward the end of the seventeenth century Austria conquered Hungary, and Transylvania as part of Hungary then was included in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
From the earliest times the position of the Romanians in Transylvania was inferior to that of the other nationalities, and accounts of the long-term measures practiced against them have been perpetuated among their descendants. The Romanians were mostly serfs, and their social and economic status was the lowest in the province. Their Orthodox Christianity was not recognized, in contrast to the Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian, and Roman Catholic faiths practiced by the various other nationalities (see ch. 5). To gain religious equality and to win a larger measure of economic and social recognition, many of the Romanians gradually abandoned their Eastern Orthodox creed and became Uniates by accepting papal authority in 1698.
Although the Romanians were slow to benefit from the relatively high cultural and political level reached in Transylvania under the Austro-Hungarians, an appreciable number of concessions had been made to them by the middle of the nineteenth century. They began to share in the political life after political parties were established, schools were opened for Romanian children, and education became more widespread among the general population. Progress in these and associated fields stimulated the Romanian desire for full equality and the hope for eventual unification of all Romanians in their own national state.
WESTERN INFLUENCES
Although Romania was late in achieving national recognition, many of the factors that were to influence its Western orientation after independence began to evolve as early as the seventeenth century. In Transylvania the Uniate church became an important medium by which Romanian national identity was fostered in the struggle against foreign assimilation. The Habsburg rulers favored the expansion of the church and permitted the opening of seminaries for the training of young Romanian clergy. Many of these young clerics were sent to Rome to complete their studies and, while there, became aware of their Roman ancestry. They saw the famous column of Trajan, which recorded, in stone, the early conquest of their Dacian ancestors by the Romans, and they also discovered that Romanian was an essentially Latin language (see ch. 4).
The contacts established with Rome encouraged the scholarly development of a "Latinist" movement in the homeland in the late eighteenth century, which produced many adherents among the Transylvanian Romanians. It was the efforts of this group that led to the replacement of the Cyrillic alphabet, then in common use, with the Latin, the writing of the first latinized Romanian grammar and, later, the introduction of the first dictionary that traced the full historical development of the Romanian language. These reforms helped to create a uniform literary language as an essential basis for the broad development of Romanian culture (see ch. 7).
During their long experience under the Habsburgs and Hungarians, the Transylvanian Romanians also became intimately associated with the events of central and western Europe. Opportunities for travel and cultural contacts that later developed were also predominantly within Western areas and intensified the political consciousness of the Romanians along Western lines.
Meanwhile, in Walachia and Moldavia interest in Western ideas and affairs was provided by French influences introduced initially by the Greek Phanariot princes, who were in power during most of the eighteenth century. These rulers established French as the court language, and many of the Greek merchants, clergymen, and teachers who followed them into the areas helped spread the use of French among the urban population in Bucharest and Iasi, the respective capital cities. Gradually, French was introduced into Romanian schools, and eventually Romanian students from the principalities were sent abroad in considerable numbers to study at French universities.