THE ROUMANIANS OF HUNGARY
of 1437, concluded between the three privileged "nations," the Magyar nobles, the Székelys or Frontiersmen of the eastern Carpathians, and the Saxon townsmen. When Hungary was conquered by the Turks in 1525, the principality of Transylvania survived under native Magyar princes, paying periodical tribute to the Turks. Parallel with the Turks from the South came the Reformation from the German North, and Transylvania became the scene of a remarkable experiment of religious toleration at the very moment when the wars of religion were at their height in the West. In 1571 the Estates recognised the four confessions—Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran and Unitarian—as equal before the law.
Unhappily, in this seemingly ideal picture, there was one significant omission. Side by side with the three dominant races there was the silent mass of serfs, the Roumanian autochthonous population, who, in spite of their superior numbers, have never obtained recognition as a nation, and whose religion—the Orthodox or Eastern Faith—was excluded from the benefits of religious toleration. Alike during the period of Transylvanian independence (1526–1691) and the succeeding period of autonomy under Habsburg rule, the Roumanians have always occupied the position of real political helots, and have never lost an opportunity of asserting their claims of civil and religious equality. Just as in 1791 the memorable petition known as "Supplex Libellus Valachorum" was completely ignored by the Diet, so their great assembly on the "Field of Liberty" at Blaj (Blasendorf), in 1848, was a signal to the dominant race to rush through the Diet a law proclaiming the union of Transylvania with Hungary, in defiance of Roumanian and Saxon opposition. The fatal attitude of the Magyars, in refusing point blank to the Roumanians, as to the Slavs, those national rights which they claimed for themselves, ranged all the other races on the side of Austria and the Habsburgs in the terrible civil war which followed. Its evil traces still survive in memories of peasants shot and hanged wholesale without trial for their loyalty to the throne, and castles sacked and burned in revenge for centuries of oppression. When, after ten years of black reaction, constitutional government was revived in Austria in the early sixties, there was a brief interlude of honest dealing, the Roumanian nation and language being at last placed on an equal footing with the Magyar and the
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