










































37 
 

The Unwanted yet Unavoidable 
Implementation of Religious Tolerance 
in Early Modern Transylvania 
 
 
Koloman Marschik 
Trinity College Dublin  
 
 
Abstract  
While most of early modern Europe was plunged into confessional strife, the 
central European principality of Transylvania managed to survive the period with 
no inter-confessional warfare. Rather, the state recognized multiple confessions 
and allegedly advocated tolerance between them. Drawing from differing theories 
on the rise of toleration and on the context of early modern Transylvanian history, 
this article argues that this regime of tolerance arose not due to any enlightened 
thinking about toleration but out of immediate political necessity. More precisely, 
the motivation of the Transylvanian elite lay in protecting their nascent state’s 
existence in a dangerous international environment. 
 
 
Article  
Introduction 
In order to assess how and why the emerging central European principality of Transylvania 
implemented religious tolerance even as most other countries descended into 
interconfessional conflict, one must first define what “tolerant” means in the context of the 
period. This subject has a rich and developing historiography. Henry Kamen provided an 
assessment of the emergence of tolerance across Europe in the sixteenth century as a “new 
and more liberal attitude to religion.”1 States, so Kamen suggested, were initially wary to 
adopt tolerance as a policy. However, they were convinced of the merits of this new liberal 
attitude through campaigning by proponents of this philosophy of tolerance.2 These 
campaigns paved the way for tolerance to be accepted among states’ inhabitants, creating 
tolerant societies. One perspective on the laws that created the legal space for alleged 
tolerance in Transylvania might seem to support this motive. The Transylvanian diet, 
responsible for creating legislation, met at the town of Torda (today Turda) in January 
1568 and enacted an edict that proclaimed “ministers should everywhere preach and 
proclaim the Gospel according to their understanding of it,” and that “no one should harm 
any superintendent or minister, nor abuse anyone on account of their religion … and no 

 
1 Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (London:  Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 8. 
2 Jeffrey R. Collins, “Redeeming the Enlightenment: New Histories of Religious Toleration,” The Journal of 
Modern History 81, no. 3 (2009): 629. 



38 
 

one is permitted to threaten to imprison or deprive anyone of their position because of 
their teaching.”3 This appears at first sight to be a statement that might support Kamen’s 
view of the emergence of tolerance on the basis of a more liberal attitude towards religion. 
Yet in the same text, one also reads in a statement addressed to the ruler of Transylvania, 
János Zsigmond Szapolyai: “There are many in your Majesty's country who disobey the 
Wallachian bishop, who was appointed to this position by your grace; they prefer to follow 
the former priests and their heresies, and prevent the bishop from properly fulfilling his 
duties; therefore we beg your Majesty to graciously grant the advancement of the Gospel 
according to your Majesty's earlier decree concerning the country, and to punish those who 
dare oppose it.”4 Kamen’s view of an emerging philosophy of religious liberalism (however 
this might be understood in the context of the sixteenth century) that preceded the 
emergence of tolerance suddenly seems misplaced. The 1568 Diet of Torda rather seems to 
offer support for religious tolerance, while simultaneously expressing a desire to persecute 
on religious grounds. Another motivation for tolerance must be at play.  
 
Returning to the developing historiography on the question of tolerance in early modern 
Europe, we can find discussion by a broad range of scholars from Herbert Butterfield to 
Benjamin Kaplan. In his widely cited 2007 study on the practice of toleration in early 
modern Europe, Kaplan saw tolerance not as “an embrace of diversity for its own sake,” but 
as a “pragmatic move, a grudging acceptance of unpleasant realities, not a positive virtue.”5 
Such ideas about tolerance were not new. Some thirty years prior, Butterfield put the case 
in starker tones: “It [tolerance] was not so much an ideal, a positive end that people wanted 
to establish for its own sake; but, rather, a pis aller, a retreat to the next best thing, a last 
resort for those who often still hated one another, but found it impossible to go on fighting 
any more.”6 Such motivation might offer some explanation for the seemingly opposing 
decisions declared at Torda. Butterfield went so far as to call into question whether 
tolerance can be called an “idea” at all: “It was hardly even an ‘idea’ for the most part—just 
a happening—the sort of thing that happens when no choice is left and there is no hope of 
further struggle being worthwhile.”7 
 
This language about the history of tolerance as a pragmatic legal regime and everyday 
social practice from Butterfield to Kaplan now seems more convincing than Kamen’s 
idealistic argument. In the following assessment, we will come to see that this pragmatism 
in Transylvania was undertaken by those who had the means to enact change in 
Transylvanian society—the nobility, the burghers, and the princes of Transylvania—in 

 
3 Sándor Szilágyi, ed., Erdélyi Országgyülési Emlékek. Monumenta Comitialia Regni Transsylvaniae [Records of 
the Transylvanian Diet], 21 vols. (Budapest: Magyar Tudomános Akadémia, 1875-1898), 2.343, trans. Graeme 
Murdock, qtd. in Graeme Murdock, “Turda, 1568: Tolerance Transylvanian Style,” in A Sourcebook of Early 
Modern European History Life, Death and Everything in Between, ed. Ute Lotz-Heuman (London: Routledge, 
2019), 234-236. 
4 Szilágyi, ed., Erdélyi Országgyülési Emlékek, 2.343, qtd. in Mihály Balázs, Judit Gellérd, and Thomas Cooper, 
“Tolerant Country—Misunderstood Laws. Interpreting Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Legislation 
Concerning Religion,” The Hungarian Historical Review 2 (2013): 5. 
5 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe 
(London: Belknap, 2007), 8. 
6 Herbert Butterfield, “Toleration in Early Modern Times,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 4 (1977): 573. 
7 Butterfield, “Toleration in Early Modern Times,” 573. 



39 
 

order to further their own spiritual, political, and material interests. These elite actors 
primarily focused on the protection and advancement of their own confessional and 
material interests, but also included foreign policy considerations and, perhaps to some 
degree, pressures driven by the complex social context of urban and rural communities in 
their decision-making processes. It was the nature of the pragmatic self-interests of its elite 
that led Transylvania to become “tolerant.” First, however, some historical context is 
required to frame the decisions reached by the Transylvanian diet. 

 
Historical Background 
The political entity that came to be known as the Principality of Transylvania, which 
existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in central Europe, had emerged from the 
partition of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, following its defeat at the hands of the 
Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Mohács in 1526.8 Before its defeat, Transylvania had been 
a province of the medieval Hungarian Kingdom, ruled by a governor chosen by the 
Hungarian Monarch. Pre-Mohács, this man would have held the title of vovoide. In the wake 
of the Battle of Mohács, Hungary was de facto partitioned. The Ottoman army had dealt a 
deathblow to the Hungarian army: Most of the Hungarian nobility, as well as the man who 
would become known as the last king of medieval Hungary, King Louis II, were killed at the 
battle. In its aftermath, Ottoman armies advanced deep into the Hungarian heartland, 
taking its capital Buda. But they did not finish the conquest of all of the Hungarian crown 
lands.9  
 
Lands to the west, north, and east remained out of Ottoman hands. Upon the death of the 
king, decision makers in these territories readied the kingdom’s constitutional contingency 
plans. The medieval Hungarian kingdom was an elective monarchy. The king was voted 
into office by the members of the Hungarian diet, made up mostly of Hungarian nobles. And 
even though many had died at Mohács, enough remained to commence proceedings. 
Representatives of the northern and western estates of the kingdom, which had eluded 
Ottoman control, elected Ferdinand Habsburg, archduke of neighboring Austria and 
brother to the Holy Roman Emperor.10  
 
After the defeat at Mohács, however, the easternmost provinces of the kingdom were 
almost cut off from the western part of the kingdom. Yet in order to retain political 
continuity, these provinces also called a diet to elect a monarch. The province of 
Transylvania had its own provincial diet within the medieval Hungarian kingdom, and 
given the circumstances, representatives of the noble estates of the other eastern counties 
that had not come under Ottoman control joined it. They elected as king of Hungary the 
native Transylvanian magnate, János Szapolyai.11 Szapolyai ruled from Transylvania but 
laid claim to all of the medieval kingdom’s territory. As did Ferdinand Habsburg. 

 
8 Paula Sutter Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526-1850 (London: 
Reaktion, 2008), 31-32. 
9 Paula Sutter Fichtner, The Habsburg Empire: From Dynasticism to Multinationalism (Malabar: Krieger, 1997), 
7-9. 
10  Fichtner, The Habsburg Empire, 7-9. 
11 Graeme Murdock, “Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the 
Early Modern World, ed. Thomas Max Safley (Boston: Extenza Turpin, 2011), 396-397. 



40 
 

For the following decades, Transylvania thus not only had the Ottoman Empire to its south 
looking to it as a target of territorial expansion, it also had the most powerful European 
dynasty to the west with a claim to its territory.12 Both of these powers would make 
incursions into Transylvania over the following decades. Indeed, the entire territory of the 
medieval Hungarian kingdom was to become a near constant theatre of war for much of the 
middle and latter decades of the 1500s.13 
 

 
 

Figure 1: Borders of the Principality of Transylvania as outlined by the 1570 Treaty of 
Speyer. The Partium is shown in dark beige.14  

 
The title of Prince of Transylvania, and the identification of the territory as the Principality 
of Transylvania, was itself a slow product of this geopolitical conflict: a means to formalize 
de jure what had until then remained a de facto political reality. In the 1570 Treaty of 
Speyer, the Habsburgs and the realm now ruled by Janos Szapolyai’s son, Janos Zsigmond 
Szapolyai, agreed on a legal framework to coexist without laying claim to each other’s 
territory. Ferdinand would recognize Szapolyai as ruler of Transylvania, in return for 
which Szapolyai renounced his claim to the Hungarian throne and guaranteed that, having 
no children, he would name Ferdinand’s son as his successor. The nascent Transylvanian 
state encompassed the Transylvanian province formerly ruled by a vovoide, as well as the 
surrounding eastern Hungarian counties, which had joined the Transylvanian diet, known 
as the Partium (see figure 1). However, on the death of the childless Szapolyai, the 

 
12 Graeme Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance? Religious Accommodation on the Frontier of Christian 
Europe,” in Religious Conflict and Accommodation in the Early Modern World, eds. Marguerite Ragnow and 
William D. Philips, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Libraries, 2011), 106-107. 
13 Fichtner, The Habsburg Empire, 9-10. 
14 Fz22, “Partium 1570,” Wikimedia Commons, December 23, 2006, 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Partium1570.PNG, accessed November 25, 2021. 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Partium1570.PNG


41 
 

Transylvanian diet instead elected István Báthory as their new ruler who pursued 
continued political independence of the emerging Principality from the Habsburgs.15  
 
The decades following Transylvania’s birth into political existence saw it perched in a 
precarious geopolitical position. Survival depended on balancing the relations and 
intentions of the two superpowers at its borders. Transylvania’s rulers needed to side with 
the Ottomans (and paid annual tribute to the Sultans) when the Habsburgs looked poised 
to gain the upper hand in the region and turned to the Habsburgs if the Ottomans seemed 
ready to incorporate the Principality under their direct control.16 
 
Path to Tolerance 
If the rise of tolerance in Transylvania was the result of the promotion of political self-
interests in pursuit of the stability of the state, the fact that a coalition of what might be 
inaccurately described as “Protestants” were able to preserve their self-interests stems 
from the fact that they dominated the elite and held sway in the political decision-making 
processes of the principality. The fact that the emerging principality of Transylvania was an 
elective monarchy meant its central political institution was to be its diet. It was made up of 
representatives of the three “nations” of Transylvania: Hungarian nobles, Szekler lords, and 
the German towns. The elected sovereigns of Transylvania oversaw the diet’s meetings and 
could also invite officials of their administrations to attend sessions. It was this body that 
was not only tasked with voting on laws, determining the privileges of the estates, and 
providing decisions on military as well as religious matters but also with electing the 
state’s sovereign.17 Both Transylvania’s rulers and the estates in the diet had the power to 
initiate legislation, and measures required the consent of the prince and of all three 
“nations.”  
 
In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the Reformation spread rapidly through 
Transylvania’s communities. Lutheranism quickly became popular in German-speaking 
Saxon towns. Calvinism or Reformed religion later spread widely among Hungarian-
speaking nobles in Hungarian- and mixed German- and Hungarian-speaking towns, and 
Antitrinitarianism or Unitarianism found a foothold among both Hungarian and Szekler 
communities in the 1560s.18 This spread of different ideas about reform was reflected 
among the elite, the large majority of which had abandoned Catholicism for Lutheranism, 
Calvinism, or Unitarianism by the mid-1560s.19 Since the passing of legislation on religious 
rights required the consent of the prince and all three “nations” in the diet (now divided in 
different ways by religious loyalty), retaining earlier legislation against either Lutheran, 
Reformed, or Unitarian churches through the diet became impossible from the mid-1560s, 
not least considering the shifting and uncertain religious views of then-sovereign János 
Zsigmond Szapolyai. 
 

 
15 Murdock, “Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” 396-397. 
16 For an overview of the important dates, figures, and religious settlements, see the chronological table in 
Appendix A at the end of this article.  
17 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 107. 
18 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 107-108. 
19 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 110. 



42 
 

What followed was legislation that provided rival confessions with practical freedoms to 
worship. This legislation did not make reference to Kamen’s high-minded liberal ideals. 
Rather the diet understood its decisions in Kaplan’s and Butterfield’s pragmatic sense. 
When legal provisions for religious tolerance were put in place, they came piecemeal and 
begrudgingly. When the diet made provisions for Lutheranism to be recognized as a church 
in 1558, this followed failed attempts by the state to seek unity between Lutheran and 
Catholic clergy. In 1557 it had ordered a synod to be held for the clergy of the two churches 
to reconcile their views.20 Rather unsurprisingly this failed, but interestingly it was in the 
interim of this decision, the time between the ordering of the synod and its failure, that the 
first measures of tolerance can first be observed. The diet had allowed that both religious 
doctrines could be practiced until its synod had reached an agreement.21 Officially 
speaking, tolerance came into being when Lutheranism was granted recognition the 
following year, but the practice of allowing two religious communities that self-identified 
as being distinct from one another to cohabitate in Transylvania is first observed in the 
diet’s decision of 1557. This path that tolerance took echoes Butterfield’s analysis of how 
tolerance first came about. A set of polices was enacted out of expediency when all other 
options had been exhausted. The diet also first made use of tolerance as a means to an end, 
while perhaps still hoping that religious unity might be restored. When this failed, the diet 
simply continued and enshrined in law the practices it had used in the interim. However, 
unlike what Butterfield predicted, the diet acted without prior bloodshed to propel the elite 
towards accepting the need to compromise. This suggests that in the Transylvanian case 
study something additional was at play. 
 
Kaplan’s and Butterfield’s argument is nevertheless bolstered by the fact that this practice 
of begrudging and limited action to offer religious rights and legal recognition to a new 
church was repeated. By the mid-1560s Calvinism had spread from the German-speaking 
world to Transylvania and was gaining ground there. The diet’s strategy of recourse was 
again to order a reconciliation of doctrinal differences. In 1564 it ordered Lutheranism and 
Calvinism to reconcile their theological differences by means of debate. Again, equally 
unsurprisingly, these efforts failed. Again, it was only after the failure of these efforts that 
the state granted legal recognition to both Lutheran and Reformed churches in June of the 
same year.22 When it put this decision in writing, the diet provided a justification for its 
actions. It saw them as a means to preserve “the peace of the realm,” not as a declaration of 
tolerance.23 Tolerance is expressed once more as a pragmatic move resorted to after 
preferable measures could not be taken. But again, the decision was taken before violence 
erupted, not after. 
 
This intention of the diet—to preserve and advance the self-interests of its “nations” as 
well as those of the sovereign, rather than an aspiration to a tolerant society—also explains 
the oppressive measures taken by the diet against a number of religious groups in the same 

 
20 Graeme Murdock, “Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” 401. 
21 Murdock, “Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” 401. 
22 Murdock, “Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” 401. 
23 Szilágyi, ed., Erdelyi Orszaggyulesi Emlekek, 2.226-227, 231-232, trans. Murdock, qtd. in Murdock, 
“Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” 401. 



43 
 

period. These measures reflected the desire of the diet to act only to offer religious rights 
when politics demanded they do so and to maintain the status quo (that is, protect their 
own confessional interests), or to advance the spread of their own confession in the 
principality. Tolerance then reflected the confessional fragmentation of the political elite 
rather than their unification behind an interest in universal toleration.24 This conservative, 
status-quo minded conception of tolerance is as old as the practice of tolerance in 
Transylvanian legislation. Shortly after its 1558 edict that allowed Lutheranism, the diet 
sought to prevent any further doctrinal innovation and outlawed a sect it called 
“sacramentarians”—by which it meant none other than the Reformed preachers who 
would receive its legal protection only six years later.25 
 
Catholicism was also a target of the diet. This was because support for Catholicism had lost 
so much ground within the state by the 1560s; the diet, consisting overwhelmingly of 
Lutherans, Calvinists, and Unitarians, was decidedly anti-Catholic.26 Even though the 
direction of the state’s ire changed, the principle of self-interest held firm. The members of 
the diet were still acting to advance their confessional interests. The only thing that had 
changed was their confessional affiliation. In 1566 the diet expelled all Catholic clergy from 
the country, issuing the order that “all priests who insist upon the papal teachings and 
upon what was made up by humans, and refuse to convert, should be ousted.”27 This anti-
Catholic measure was also evident in the diet’s 1568 edict from Torda. In a passage that 
asked the prince to persecute a Christian sect, as quoted in the introduction above, a 
reference to the Gospel was included that reflected this sentiment against churches 
deemed not to promote Gospel teaching: “They prefer to follow the former priests and their 
heresies, and prevent the bishop from properly fulfilling his duties; therefore we beg your 
Majesty to graciously grant the advancement of the Gospel according to your Majesty's 
earlier decree concerning the country, and to punish those who dare oppose it.”28 Support 
for religious tolerance based on a freedom of reading and teaching the vernacular Gospel 
provided a shared language around which Lutherans, Reformed, and Antitrinitarians could 
agree as a reasonable basis of their own rights. All three religions promoted the idea that 
individuals (or at least clergy) should read the Gospel themselves and come to their 
conclusions from this experience, even though they disagreed about the proper conclusions 
that would be derived from this engagement. Catholicism and Orthodoxy did not agree with 
the idea of individual engagement with Gospel; neither endorsed vernacular translations of 
the Bible. Rather, they preferred official interpretations of the Latin and Greek editions, 
respectively. This shared language of advancement of the Gospel thus provided Lutherans, 
Reformed, and Antitrinitarians a mechanism with which they could protect their doctrinal 

 
24 Murdock, “Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” 401. 
25 Szilágyi, ed., Erdelyi Orszaggyulesi Emlekek, 2.226-227, 231-232, trans. Murdock, qtd. in Murdock, 
“Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” 401. 
26 Szilágyi, ed., Erdelyi Orszaggyulesi Emlekek, 2.226-227, 231-232, trans. Murdock, qtd. in Murdock, 
“Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” 402. 
27 Szilágyi, ed., Erdelyi Orszaggyulesi Emlekek, 2.302-303, qtd. in Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant 
Country,” 9. 
28 Szilágyi, ed., Erdélyi Országgyülési Emlékek, 2.343, qtd. in Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 5. 



44 
 

interests, while simultaneously keeping the peace with each other and persecuting the two 
religions, which by that point held no sway in Transylvanian political decision-making.29  
 
The number of Catholics in Transylvania at the time had decreased drastically, and those 
who were left lived primarily on the estates of remaining Catholic nobles and in the Szekler 
lands to the east.30 This is in line with the conception of Transylvanian tolerance as the 
guarding of self-interests: On their lands, Catholic nobles might in practice be allowed to 
choose priests for their churches. This privilege, the ius patronatus (right of patronage), 
dated back to the Middle Ages and was used during the Reformation by the nobility to 
further the confession of their choice in their lands.31 Thus while Catholic clergymen faced 
persecution in most parts of Transylvania and could find safe haven on the lands of 
sympathetic Catholic nobles, the legal mechanism that allowed for it remained unchanged. 
Lutheran and Calvinist nobles acted on the same privilege they shared with the Catholic 
nobility of having control over the selection of churchmen on their lands. In this, nobles 
oversaw the removal of traditional objects of worship from the churches on their estates, 
and there is evidence of clergymen from multiple churches being forced to flee from the 
lands of nobles unsympathetic to their confession. 32 Despite the radical and uneven nature 
of these disturbances, they all took place within the established legal framework of the 
Transylvanian principality.  
 
The fate of Catholicism in Transylvania provides a case study for how self-interest 
informed the creation of space for religious practice in particular (rather than freedom of 
conscience) and proselytizing. In 1571 a Catholic was elected to rule Transylvania in the 
person of István Báthory.  Báthory was respectful of the existing legal framework on 
religious rights and the context of the overwhelming support for Lutheran, Reformed, and 
Unitarian churches across the principality. He chose a Lutheran as his court preacher and 
saw himself as the patron of all his subjects on religious affairs.33 But despite this 
recognition, Báthory also tried to advance his own religion in the country by settling Jesuits 
in the principality. 
 
Bathory, who from 1576 was also ruler of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, had to 
impose his decision on the Transylvanian diet, which only accepted the Jesuits if they 
limited their activities to particular villages and founding specified schools and colleges.34 
The Jesuits sought to convert the local inhabitants but were only given the opportunity to 
do so in the surroundings of the monasteries given to them and on the lands of Catholic 

 
29 Szilágyi, ed., Erdélyi Országgyülési Emlékek, 2.343, qtd. in Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 5. 
30 Szilágyi, ed., Erdélyi Országgyülési Emlékek, 2.343, qtd. in Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 
11. 
31 Maria Crăciun, “Traditional practices: Catholic Missionaries and Protestant religious practice in 
Transylvania,” in Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe, eds. Helen Parish and William G. Naphy 
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 80. 
32 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 118. 
33 Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 18; for further information on Bathory’s career, see Felicia 
Roşu, “Free from Obedience: Constitutional Expressions of the Right of Resistance in Early Modern 
Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania,” European History Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2017): 14-16. 
34 Crăciun, “Traditional practices,” 75. 



45 
 

nobles.35 In non-Catholic lands, the Jesuits were prevented from preaching by the local 
elites. Since the diet had made clear its opposition to Jesuit proselytizing, the Jesuits 
refrained from undertaking actions that they knew could get them expelled from the 
principality altogether.36 Their survival depended upon the support of a Catholic prince, for 
without such protection, the nobility and burghers that made up the diet would quickly 
move against them. In fact, the diet openly discussed their removal from 1581, and after 
István Báthory’s death in 1586, it gave the order a three-week ultimatum to leave the 
country.37  
 
István Báthory was succeeded upon his death by his nephew Zsigmond. Zsigmond was still 
a minor at the time, and the diet made Zsigmond’s election to the Transylvanian throne 
conditional upon his removing the Jesuit order from the country. Zsigmond accepted only 
to renege on this commitment in 1593, when he forced the diet to resettle them.38 When 
Catholicism finally became one of the “received religions” of the principality in 1595, it was 
only done so through rather brutish negotiating tactics: Prince Zsigmond held the diet at 
his royal palace surrounded by his army.39 It took hard negotiations and bitter compromise 
to widen Transylvanian “tolerance” to include Catholicism, as would be expected of 
grudging, and deeply anti-Catholic, pragmatists. 
 
However, religious loyalties were not the only factor in the diet’s anti-Catholic stance. The 
Transylvanian nobility had a vested interest in maintaining only minimal Catholic influence 
in the region. After the initial Catholic collapse in the 1550s and 1560s, the estates had 
appropriated lands formerly held by the church. As part of the standoff initiated when 
Zsigmond Báthory began inviting Jesuit missionaries back into the principality in 1588, the 
diet passed a resolution reminding Prince Zsigmond that the monastic property that had 
been taken from the church was confiscated in perpetuity.40 The fears of the diet appear 
obvious; if Catholic orders regained authority in the principality, it stood to reason that 
they would make claims on the lands that they had been driven from and which had since 
been incorporated into the domains of the Transylvanian nobility. The same nobility that 
was present in person at the diet lobbied to keep Jesuit influence in their principality at a 
minimum. In this instance, it appears as if members of the Transylvanian diet 
acknowledged that material self-interest played a role. While it is difficult to ascribe any 
single intention to the members of the diet, it seems that religious solidarity was not the 
only motivating factor involved in the creation of the balance of power of Transylvanian 
tolerance, at least in this instance. 
 
The anti-Catholic bias of the diet could of course also be interpreted as some sort of 
Protestant solidarity. However, this does not mean that Protestants within Transylvania 
were allied or even respectful of each other. The early modern period saw widespread 
persecution and attempted proselytization between Protestant groups. Antitrinitarianism 

 
35 Crăciun, “Traditional practices,” 80-81. 
36 Crăciun, “Traditional practices,” 80-81. 
37 Crăciun, “Traditional practices,” 76. 
38 Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 19-20. 
39 Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 19-20. 
40 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 114. 



46 
 

rejected the notion of the Holy Trinity, and for some Antitrinitarians in Transylvania, this 
also implied a rejection of worshipping Jesus as God. This concept was known as non-
adorantism. The Antitrinitarian movement had grown out of Calvinism in the 1560s and 
was subject to repeated oppression throughout its early existence.41 After 1568 
Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Antitrinitarianism were the only received religions in the 
principality, but the Transylvanian diet later passed numerous laws that served to constrict 
Antitrinitarianism, especially acting to prevent what they called doctrinal innovation, 
which targeted non-adorantist Antitrinitarianism in particular.42 These laws laid out 
explicitly the purpose of this persecution; they were to prevent any fundamental changes in 
the confessional landscape of Transylvania. In a 1571 decree that promoted tolerance, the 
diet simultaneously warned of “criminal excess” in matters of religious freedom.43 The 
punishment for practitioners found to be in excess was to be severe— expulsion from their 
offices and from the principality altogether. In the following years, church superintendents 
were empowered to investigate and excommunicate “innovators” who advocated “distinct 
and new things in their confession.”44 If church superintendents would not intervene, the 
prince was not only given the right to execute capital punishment on the innovators 
themselves but also invested with the power to reprimand towns or noblemen who were 
found to support these preachers. The diet’s use of the word “innovators” perhaps most 
succinctly underlines their conception of tolerance as a conservative force. Even though the 
members of the diet hailed from different confessional backgrounds, they all found 
common ground in maintaining the status quo in which their churches alone were granted 
legitimacy in the principality.  
 
In 1576 the Antitrinitarian church was warned by the diet not to introduce any doctrinal 
changes and the places in which they could hold synods were restricted to two towns. A 
year later, the right of Antitrinitarian clergy to visit parishes was limited, and the Calvinist 
church’s superintendent was allowed to warn members of not just his own but all other 
churches of such visits, as long as force was not used.45 Despite instructions not to become 
violent, the goal of these decrees was clearly to limit the spread of Antitrinitarianism, 
despite its legal status and related concern for the emerging theological opinions of some 
Antitrinitarian clergy whose views were seen as beyond the pale of what was acceptable 
among the recognized churches. In this, another familiar strain in Reformation thought 
emerges: the fear that the existence of heresy in the community could endanger its 
wellbeing through divine punishment.46 
 
While Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism had considerable doctrinal and 
theological disagreements, they were also all churches that claimed as authority their 
distinct interpretations of the same Scripture (a problem neatly side-stepped by the terms 
of the 1568 law). The Antitrinitarian movement seemed to have ventured beyond a tenet 

 
41 Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 19-20. 
42 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 112-113. 
43 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 112-113. 
44 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 112-113. 
45 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 112-113. 
46 Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth Century France,” Past and Present 
59 (1973): 59. 



47 
 

fundamental to all three received religions to the point where the diet openly referred to it 
as dangerous. Already in 1570 the diet had moved against the Antitrinitarian church on the 
grounds of having to punish heresies that could inspire divine wrath upon the 
principality.47 In the decade that followed the diet’s decision, it would reference “heresies” 
in its warnings about what it called “blasphemous innovations.”48 This oppressive effort 
was directed against those Antitrinitarians who rejected the adoration of Jesus and 
culminated in the imprisonment of the Antitrinitarian superintendent Ferenc Dávid for 
breaking the law prohibiting doctrinal innovation.49 If they believed the survival of their 
community was at stake, Transylvanians did not hesitate to dismiss the strategy of 
tolerance in favor of oppression, as would be expected of those embracing tolerance only 
for pragmatic reasons. 
 
The Sabbatarians, a group of non-adorantist Antitrinitarians that emerged from the 
Unitarian church but also adopted some Jewish ritual practices, are a case study for how 
the Transylvanian confessional establishment reacted when it perceived that the line of 
what had been permitted by the 1568 law had been crossed. Sabbatarianism in 
Transylvania was founded by András Eőssy, a wealthy Szekler nobleman. The faith held 
that Jesus, while indeed the Messiah, was not divine and had not set out to create a new 
covenant between man and God. They adopted some Jewish texts into their tradition.50 
Sabbatarianism started to gain ground at the end of the sixteenth century and officially 
split from the Unitarian church in 1618. In this case, the diet went so far as to outright ban 
the church.51 Sabbatarians were forced to go underground and worshipped in secret on the 
lands of supportive nobles. In response to the continued existence of the church, the heads 
of the other Protestant churches in Transylvania jointly complained to the prince to 
condemn Sabbatarianism. In doing so they used language that clearly showed their view on 
the competing theology, saying of it that it “spreads like the plague.”52 Again, members of 
the established faiths in Transylvania were intolerant to novel denominations of worship, 
which further undermines the idea that tolerance emerged as an end in itself rather than as 
a coping mechanism for the complex political and confessional conditions of the 1560s. 
 
The different Protestant churches thus did not get along harmoniously with one another. 
But if their persecution of one another shows anything, it is that the rival confessions did 
not put up fences and try to ignore each other. Persecution served the purpose of 
proselytization. In this the Protestants were not alone. Throughout the early modern 
period, all churches in Transylvania tried to win over members of the others’ congregations 
to their own belief. The degree to which the rival churches were still intent on following 

 
47 Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” 59. 
48 Szilágyi, ed., Erdélyi Országgyülési Emlékek, 2.343, qtd. in Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 112-113. 
49 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 112-113. 
50 Gábor Győrffy, “Back to the Origins: The Tragic History of the Szekler Sabbatarians,” East European Politics 
and Societies 32, no. 3 (2017): 569-573. 
51 Gyorffy, “Back to the Origins,” 569-573. 
52 Samuel Kohn, A szombatosok: történetük, dogmatikájuk és irodalmuk, különös tekintettel Péchi Simon 
fökanczellár életére és munkáira [The Sabbatarians: Their history, dogmas, and literature, with a special 
reference to the life and works of Chancellor Simon Péchi] (Budapest, 1889), 86-97, qtd. in Gyorffy, “Back to 
the Origins,” 572. 



48 
 

their proselytizing missions is best exemplified by the case of the Calvinist attempt to 
reform the Orthodox Romanian Church in the seventeenth century.  
 
Anti-Orthodox attitudes had been present in the diet’s decisions from the start of the 
Reformation—the “former priests and their heresies” referred to at Torda in 1568, as 
mentioned above, were none other than the Romanian-speaking Orthodox clergy.53 But the 
proselytizing effort of the Calvinist church is not worth study because of its success—it 
only resulted in the creation of a small community of Romanian-speaking Calvinists. 
Rather, it is exemplary of how the rival churches in Transylvania made use of all means at 
their disposal to further their interests. The effort was backed not just by the full force of 
the Calvinist clergy in the state but also by the then-Calvinist princes of the principality.54 
In order to receive their backing, the Calvinist clergy actively tried to convince these 
Calvinist princes to put their weight behind the effort. The Orthodox church was protected 
by princely privileges rather than enjoying rights equivalent to those offered to the 
Lutheran, Reformed, Unitarian, and, from 1595, Catholic churches. István Geleji Katona, the 
Calvinist superintendent in Transylvania who had led efforts to curb the practice of 
Sabbatarianism, pleaded with then Prince György Rákóczi to push reform on the 
Romanian-speaking Orthodox community by telling him that “Romanians, although they 
are stupid, are still human beings and your Highness, as a Christian Prince, has a duty to 
care for their souls.”55 Proselytizing intent can be clearly seen in the clergyman’s words, in 
addition to the clear contempt for what he sees as adherents of a false religion. Katona and 
his co-confessionalists succeeded in gaining the support of the prince, which led to the 
creation from the 1640s of the aforementioned small Romanian-speaking Reformed 
community in and around some towns of southwestern Transylvania in particular.56  
 
This effort by Calvinist princes to support this campaign of the Reformed church is most 
enlightening when contrasted with the work of the Jesuit missionaries fought over by then 
Prince Zsigmond Báthory and the diet decades earlier. Just like the Calvinist missionaries, 
the Jesuits used all means at their disposal to execute their proselytizing mission. The only 
difference is the nature of the rights and resources at their disposal; while the Calvinist 
clergy enjoyed the backing of the state, the Jesuits found themselves constricted by the 
state apparatus, even in spite of their being backed by the then Prince. What stays the same 
is the intent of all religious communities to pursue their universal proselytizing missions. 
Tolerance as espoused by the state was an obstacle to this, and the individuals pursuing 
these proselytizing missions constantly sought to lobby key state actors to grant them 
greater leeway to execute their proselytizing efforts. In all of these examples, 
Transylvanian nobles, urban elites, and leading clergymen acted to further their own 
confessional or material self-interest, not to make the state a welcoming home for all.  
 

 
53 Szilágyi, ed., Erdélyi Országgyülési Emlékek, 2.343, qtd. in Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 5. 
54 Maria Crăciun, “Building a Romanian Reformed community in seventeenth-century Transylvania,” in 
Confessional Identity in East-Central Europe, eds. Maria Crăciun, Ovidiu Ghitta, and Graeme Murdock 
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 99-100. 
55 Letter by Geleji published in Új Magyar Múzeum [New Hungarian Museum] 1 (1859), pp. 203-204, qtd. in 
Crăciun, “Building a Romanian Reformed community,” 102. 
56 Crăciun, “Building a Romanian Reformed community,” 99-120. 



49 
 

Motives for Tolerance 
If the preceding examples may be seen as an argument that Transylvanians became 
tolerant out of pragmatic reasons and an explanation for how this worked, it begs the 
question why Transylvanians chose this path. It clearly was not their preferred course of 
action. The following section lays out an explanation for what motivated Transylvanians to 
become accepting of religious diversity. Here one must not look inside the principality, but 
outside. It was their international position that led Transylvanians to pragmatically accept 
tolerance.  
 
Recall the geopolitical position of the Principality, already outlined above: two 
superpowers, surrounding its borders, both with territorial claims or designs on its 
territory and with ongoing conflict between the two sides. An ever-shifting web of 
alliances. A need to play the two superpowers against each other to keep the principality 
politically independent from either. 57 This precarious international position lent a 
powerful incentive to local Transylvanian leaders to resolve peacefully their internal 
political situation. Any civil conflict, but especially one rooted in religious divisions, would 
be detrimental to the state’s security by drastically weakening its ability to defend itself 
from external attack.58  
 
This foreign policy calculation further incentivized the Transylvanian elite to pursue 
domestic peace due to the confessional nature of their geopolitical opponents. The 
Habsburg Monarchy remained a bulwark of Catholicism, while Transylvania had become a 
majority non-Catholic state by the middle of the sixteenth century.59 The danger of a 
Catholic monarchy seizing control of Transylvania was especially present for the nobility, 
usually granted more safety due to their social status. Starting towards the end of the 
sixteenth century, the Habsburgs encouraged the aristocracy in the parts of Hungary under 
their control to choose to convert to Catholicism—or face marginalization in the political 
affairs of the Hungarian kingdom and across the Habsburg Monarchy.60 Over the course of 
the following decades, this would lead to waves of conversions among the Hungarian 
nobility. If the Habsburgs were to gain control of the Transylvanian principality, it stood to 
reason that the Protestant nobles who wielded considerable amounts of political influence 
from their seats in the diet would be faced with the same fate. When sovereignty over a 
political entity had changed hands in the past, the members of the region’s nobility had not 
necessarily seen change for themselves. After the Battle of Mohács, it was the same 
Hungarian noble families who had served on the Hungarian diet who elected Ferdinand 
Habsburg and János Szapolyai to the throne of Hungary. The confessional question posed a 
direct threat to the continuity in authority the members of the Transylvanian diet would 
otherwise have expected. The majority-Protestant diet thus had a large impetus to do 
whatever necessary to retain its independence as the multi-religious legal settlement 
became embedded in the political and social character of the principality. 

 
57 Murdock, “Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania,” 396-397. 
58 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 106-107. 
59 Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 31-32. 
60 Gabriella Erdélyi, “Confessional identity and models of aristocratic conversion in seventeenth- and 
eighteenth-century Hungary,” Social History (2015): 3. 



50 
 

 
Curiously, this rationale explains the election of a Catholic to the Transylvanian throne in 
the middle of the sixteenth century by a majority-Protestant diet, István Báthory. As 
already mentioned, Báthory retained an ambiguous relationship towards Protestantism. On 
the one hand, he committed to view himself as patron over all the received religions in the 
principality and even took a Lutheran as his court preacher. On the other hand, he appears 
to have shown personal disdain for Protestantism and initiated laws against religious 
innovation.61 It was due to considerations of its international position that the diet 
overlooked these issues. Despite his Catholicism, Báthory was no friend of the Habsburgs. 
He was favored by the diet precisely because of his dedication to an anti-Habsburg political 
movement—he was once even imprisoned in Vienna during a diplomatic visit. Báthory’s 
election in Poland was also a product of his platform as the best anti-Habsburg candidate 
available. Báthory let these international circumstances dictate the course of action of his 
Catholic agenda within Transylvania. When he invited the Jesuit order to return to 
Transylvania, he took care to ensure that those dispatched to the principality would hail 
from the order’s Polish province, of which he had control given his position as King of 
Poland, rather than from its Austrian chapter, which would have been under the influence 
of the Habsburgs.62 
 
The Ottoman Empire constituted a similar confessional threat. The Ottoman interpretation 
of Islam allowed for the enslavement of infidels and the confiscation of their property, 
giving Transylvanians a stark reminder of a possible future for themselves personally 
should the empire conquer their land. Transylvanian nobles were also well aware of the 
restrictions faced by their co-religionists under Ottoman rule in southern Hungary.63 
Finally, the answer to the last question remaining about Butterfield’s hypothesis comes to 
our attention. Transylvanian decision-makers adopted tolerance out of expediency before 
violence erupted because they knew that if violence did erupt, the decision on the religious 
orientation of the principality and its inhabitants would be taken out of their hands, and 
most definitely be decided to their disadvantage. 
 
But in a landscape where the boundary between the political and confessional was 
ambiguous at best, foreign policy considerations could also factor into decisions on 
religious toleration. Elias Gezmidele was one of the many travelling preachers who entered 
the principality in the early modern period. Gezmidele was exiled by a city’s church court—
in this case Cluj (Kolozsvár)—for his teachings. Gezmidele had been preaching 
communitarianism and pacifism.64 While contemporary clergymen would have taken issue 
first and foremost with Gezmidele’s apparent Anabaptist leanings, he also conveyed a 
pacifist interpretation of Luther’s thoughts on the Ottoman Empire. Gezmidele advocated 
pacifism in the face of the Turks.65 The ideas that he was spreading were thus conceived of 
as dangerous not only in a religious sense but also in a political sense: If the concept of 

 
61 Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 18. 
62 Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 18-19. 
63 Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 27. 
64 Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 7-8. 
65 Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 7-8. 



51 
 

inaction in the face of outside aggression were to gain a foothold in the principality, the 
ability of Cluj’s church court to do as it saw fit may well soon have been greatly inhibited. 
As posited previously, Transylvanian tolerance found its boundaries when those in 
positions of power saw their own interests threatened. 
 
Indeed, in the precarious political circumstances of Transylvania pacifism was an 
unwelcome philosophy. Zsigmond Báthory, as part of his struggle with the estates to 
bolster the position of Catholicism in Transylvania, ordered the execution of several 
notable representatives of his opposing political camp. Among them were Protestants and 
Catholics alike, as well as humanist scholars from outside Transylvania. At the next meeting 
of the diet, the one held in 1595 at his royal estate surrounded by his army at which 
Catholicism would become a received religion, Báthory had the diet thank him for 
disposing of these pacifist philosophers.66 Whether this description was accurate is of less 
importance than the fact that it was used. To legitimate the murder of political opponents, 
one simply had to label them as pacifists. 
 
The fear that Transylvanians had of both these empires is best encapsulated in a prayer 
overheard in a Lutheran church in a southern Transylvanian village near Kronstadt (now 
Braşov) by Jesuit priest Pierre Lescalopier in 1574. At the end of the service, the 
congregation prayed “for the destruction of papal and Turkish tyranny.”67 Clearly, the 
Transylvanian Lutheran citizenry was aware of the danger that the existence of these two 
powerful empires of different confessions posed. They provided a stark reminder for 
Transylvanians that if religious affairs got out of control internally, their arguments about 
which religion they should adhere to might end up being forced upon them by an outside 
power. 
 
The Unknown 
Throughout this article, emphasis has been placed on the role played by elite actors within 
Transylvania in establishing the principality’s framework of legal toleration and extension 
of rights of worship to a number of confessions. The omission of analysis of the role played 
by the common laity, those who made up the bulk of the preachers’ congregations, is not 
due to a verifiable lack of initiative on their part. Rather it reflects a problem in source 
material of the period. Not enough primary sources survive, or are known to scholars, for 
anyone to claim to be able to reconstruct the role of commoners in the construction (or 
reception) of Transylvanian tolerance.68 Written records come in the form of legal 
documents drafted by powerful institutions or personal testimony of those capable of 
writing—a skill learned by only a select few at the time. 
 
To gauge the role of the lay folk in Transylvania in establishing the regime that allowed for 
confessional coexistence, one is left with the uneasy task of inferring through other 

 
66 Balázs, Cooper, and Gellérd, “Tolerant Country,” 20. 
67 Maria Holban, ed., Călători străini despre Tările Române [Foreign travelers in the Romanian Lands], 8 vols. 
(Bucharest: Editura Științifică, 1968-1983), 2:430 (Lescalopier), qtd. in Maria Crăciun, “Traditional practices,” 
82. 
68 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 117. 



52 
 

sources. For example, recurrent emphasis in Transylvanian legal documents on prohibiting 
religious violence may lead one to suggest that these laws must have been created out of 
necessity. That is, that tensions almost certainly could arise at a local level. The 1568 Diet 
of Torda stating that no one should “abuse anyone on account of their religion” 
presupposes that instances of violent language or behavior had either happened or were 
immanently feared to happen.69 One does not create laws without impetus. Similar 
examples abound in laws decreed throughout this period about the diet’s concern to 
maintain social peace through legal regulation of competing religious rights.  
 
Ascribing commoners too active a role in perpetuating religious upheaval, however, runs 
afoul of what does survive in the historical record. Recall the ius patronatus that gave the 
Transylvanian nobility the power to select the preachers of their choice to promote their 
faith on their lands. Instances of persecution and expulsion of clergymen opposed to their 
lord’s confession have also been attested to.70 The nobility clearly had control over the 
practice of religion on their property. Recall as well the laws implemented throughout the 
1570s against religious innovation that gave the sovereign of the principality the authority 
to reprimand not only religious innovators but also the towns and noblemen who sheltered 
them.71 These historical realities greatly constricted the agency of those on the lower rungs 
of the feudal social ladder in deciding on matters of religious life at the level of government. 
 
What the historical record can attest to is that the local population was conscious of the 
differences between the rival confessions and had opinions on them. Recall of course the 
prayer heard by Pierre Lescalopier in 1574, as taught to a village’s Lutheran congregation 
against Catholicism and the Ottoman Empire. Another example is provided by the 
reception that Jesuit missionaries received when they insisted on clerical celibacy during 
one their proselytizing missions. Many Protestant clergymen had married, and when 
Jesuits spoke out against this, popular opinion condemned them and sided with the 
Protestant churchmen.72 Differences in religious practice and doctrine were capable of 
enjoying deep-seated popular support. Whether those not born into privilege had much 
agency in deciding the religious policy of their state cannot be attested to, although one 
may infer that it was limited. 

 
Conclusion 
Early modern Transylvania did not become such a tolerant country because its citizenry 
was imbued with a liberal zeal of acceptance of diversity. Those who had the power to 
make decisions (the nobility and burghers represented at its diet as well as its prince) 
adopted it out of necessity to avoid internal conflict. Such conflict was extremely dangerous 
due to Transylvania’s position caught between two imperial powers with designs on its 
territory. Transylvanians therefore acted before confessional violence flared up and 
created a legal framework that was meant to prevent such internal conflict that would 

 
69 Szilágyi, ed., Erdélyi Országgyülési Emlékek, 2.343, trans. Murdock, qtd. in Graeme Murdock, “Turda, 1568,” 
234-236. 
70 Crăciun, “Traditional practices,” 80. 
71 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 112-113. 
72 Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance?,” 84. 



53 
 

weaken it against external attack, all the while still doing everything to advance their own 
confessional and material self-interests within the framework they had created. 
 
 
Appendix A: Chronological Table 
 

Year Event Ruling Monarch 
1526 Battle of Mohács: defeat and de 

facto partition of medieval 
Hungarian kingdom, coronation 
in Transylvania of Janos 
Szapolyai as King of Hungary 

Janos Szapolyai 1540 Janos Szapolyai dies, succeeded 
by his son Janos Zsigmond 
Szapolyai 

1556 Roman Catholic Church 
property seized by diet 

1558 Lutheranism recognized as 
received religion by 
Transylvanian diet 

Janos Zsigmond 
Szapolyai (King of 

Hungary) 

1564 Calvinism/Reformed 
recognized as received religion 
by Transylvanian diet 

1566 All Catholic Clergy exiled from 
the state by Transylvanian diet 

1568 Diet of Torda: Lutheranism, 
Calvinism, and 
Antitrinitarianism are 
recognized as received religions 

1570 Treaty of Speyer: state now 
officially recognized as the 
Principality of Transylvania. 
Szapolyai gives up claim to 
Hungarian throne 

Janos Zsigmond 
Szapolyai (Prince of 

Transylvania) 

1571 Death of Janos Zsigmond 
Szapolyai; Istvan Báthory 
elected Prince 

Istvan Báthory 

1586 Istvan Bathory dies; Zsigmond 
Báthory elected Prince 

Zsigmond Báthory 1595 Catholicism recognized as 
received religion by diet (which 
was held at Báthory’s estate 
surrounded by his army) 

 


