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Transylvania is a historical region in central and northwestern Romania. It was under the rule of the Agathyrsi, part of the Dacian Kingdom (168 BC–106 AD), Roman Dacia (106–271), the Goths, the Hunnic Empire (4th–5th centuries), the Kingdom of the Gepids (5th–6th centuries), the Avar Khaganate (6th–9th centuries), the Slavs, and the ...
Transylvania, historic eastern European region, now in Romania. After forming part of Hungary in the 11th–16th centuries, it was an autonomous principality within the Ottoman Empire (16th–17th century) and then once again became part of Hungary at the end of the 17th century.
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Outside the principalities lay Transylvania, whose government and economy were dominated in the countryside by the Calvinist and Roman Catholic Hungarian nobility and in the cities by the Lutheran German-speaking Saxon upper class. A large Romanian population lived there also, but Romanians were excluded from public affairs and privileges because they were overwhelmingly peasant and Orthodox. Their fortunes improved when Transylvania was brought under the Habsburg crown at the end of the 17th century. In order to strengthen the Roman Catholic Church as a unifying force, Austrian officials and Jesuit missionaries persuaded a portion of the Romanian Orthodox clergy to accept a union with Rome in 1697–1700. In return for recognizing the pope as head of the Christian church and accepting a few minor changes in doctrine, Romanian clerics were promised a political and economic status equal to that of Roman Catholic priests.
Although the advantages promised the new Eastern rite Catholic, or Uniate, clergy by the union fell short of expectations, they did allow a vigorous, public-spirited Romanian intellectual elite to form under the guidance of Bishop Ion Inochentie Micu-Klein (in office 1729–51). In the second half of the 18th century, Micu-Klein’s disciples strove to achieve recognition of the Romanians as a constituent nation of Transylvania. They also elaborated a modern, ethnic idea of nationhood based on the theory of Roman origins and the continuous presence of the Daco-Romans in Dacia since Trajan’s conquest. It was to serve as the ideology of the Romanian national movement in the 19th century.
Between the end of the 18th century and World War I, the Romanians turned away from the East and toward the West. Commercial exchanges and foreign investment expanded, and the penetration of Western ideas and institutions obliged Romanian politicians and intellectuals to consider new models of development.
In early September, Soviet and Romanian forces entered Transylvania and captured the towns of Brașov and Sibiu while advancing toward the Mureș River. Their main objective was Cluj (Cluj-Napoca), a city regarded as the historical capital of Transylvania.
Sámuel Teleki, then Chancellor of Transylvania, inaugurates the first library in Transylvania and present-day Romania. On December 15, János Bolyai is born in Cluj Napoca . Today the town's main university is named after him and Victor Babeș .
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Transylvania is a historical region in central and northwestern Romania.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romanian scholars in Transylvania authored historical texts in the vernacular Romanian language to further their demands for political rights within the Habsburg Empire.Their arguments suggested that Romanians, by virtue of having settled the region first as Roman colonists in the second cen...
