Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/63



One of the principal reasons for his efforts was the victory gained by the same Jesuits in Roumanian Transylvania. Introduced by the Imperialists after the province had submitted to the rule of the emperor, they sought to gain allies against the Calvinists in their castles and the Lutherans in their cities. The neglected and affronted Roumanians, forming as they did the greater part of the population, were disposed to follow their counsels; latterly the Hungarian superintendents of the Calvinist church had gone so far as to condemn the bishops they had examined and recommended to the prince and to arrest them and to mete out corporal punishment to them, all because of their disinclination to obey slavishly the commands of their spiritual leaders. Thus, under the Bishop Theophilus, a hastily assembled Roumanian council admitted the four points of separation between East and West, expecting such material advantages for the impoverished clergy of this humiliated nation as should have known could never be realised. Theophilus’s successor, Athanasius, in spite of his visit to Bucharest for the customary examination and confirmation in his See by the Wallachian metropolitan and notwithstanding all threats, including that of excommunication pronounced by his superior, accomplished the formal act of reunion with the church of Rome and was rewarded with gifts and high honours, being made a counsellor of the emperor.

But the few Roumanian Calvinists protested and the population of the districts of southern Transylvania, peasants and rich merchants alike, maintained their adherence to the old creed, and were supported in this by. Brâncoveanu and his clergy. The emperor, after the conclusion of the peace of Carlowitz with the Turks in 1699, had brought in his domains the Serbian patriarch and the other chiefs of the nation. Serbs were called upod in this part