Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/58

 a catechism for the Roumanians in that language, was a movement of the cities which could not interest or influence the villages of the old creed. Literature also gained by the imposition of a new church on the same Roumanians by the Calvinist princes of Transylvania, but, despite the superintendents appointed and the lay councils which were held, this forced gift of a foreign tyranny had only an artificial and sporadic life. Nor did the attempt made in Moldavia by the Greek adventurer Jacob Basilikos, who, won over to the cause of German and Polish Protestantism (the branch of Socinius), gained the throne of the principality and founded a bishopric with a Pole as its spiritual head and a protestant school under a Silesian German, meet with any better fate. The efforts of a contemporary German printer to publish reformed Slavonic books also bore no fruit.

As a reaction against the work of the Reform, the propaganda of Catholicism was increasingly successful. The Jesuits intervened at the end of the 16th century. Their centres of activity were Transylvania, Poland and, later, Constantinople too: the provinces of the Balkans remaining the appanage of the Franciscan and Dominican friars.

Transylvania the free, not the Turkish nor the German fragment of the old Hungarian group of provinces, had returned to the Catholic faith at the very moment when its prince, Stephen Báthory, was elected King of Poland, to be the greatest of all its sovereigns. It was impossible for the overlord of Poland to be other than an obedient son of the Roman Church. If Christopher, the brother to whom Stephen confided the conduct of the principality, shunned a formal declaration of the faith, his son Sigismund was educated by the Catholic Fathers in their own fashion and nourished upon the ideal of great military deeds in the service of God and His Church.