Page - 77 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

77The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces who, apart from a few notable exceptions who managed to gain Hungarian noble status and a small literate elite of Orthodox Christian priests, were peas- ants or shepherds, and thus remained outside the estates structure. There was a marked presence of Roma (“gypsies”) from the sixteenth and Armenians from the seventeenth century; Jews began to appear in the early seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century there were also Muslims of varied eth- nic background as “remnants” of the Ottoman era. Thanks mainly to the predominantly Orthodox Romanians, Transylvania had been accustomed to denominational diversity well before the Protestant Reformation, which was embraced there eagerly. Lutheranism was the favored brand in the Saxon towns, while many among the Hungarian elite as well as commoners had converted to Calvinism by the 1560s. The teachings of anti- Trinitarians (called Unitarians in the region) and even more radical sects fell on fertile ground, too. Adherence to Protestantism also accentuated the dis- tinctiveness of Transylvania as a political unit from the 1540s onward, when the part of the Hungarian nobility that refused to acknowledge the claim of the Habsburgs to the throne of Hungary managed to establish it as an independent principality under rulers elected from its own ranks. Among these, over a cen- tury and a half it was only the Báthoris at the turn of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries that were Catholic; and although the practice of religious freedom, famously enshrined (at least for the four main western Christian de- nominations) in law in 1568, had its ups and downs, the sometimes venomous disputes went with less physical violence and administrative infringement than in most other countries of Europe. To further nuance the picture, all of this took place in a region at the south- eastern fringe of the Western world that was, despite its richness in mineral resources and the fact that it profited from the land route of Levantine trade between the Black Sea and the Baltic, socially and economically somewhat backward. The appeal that Protestantism had there for a thin literate elite largely consisted in the encouragement and boost it gave to the cultivation of vernacular culture(s), perceived as wedged between two conquering empires. In the negotiations dictated by this geopolitical and geo-cultural position, Transylvania sometimes drifted close to being a mere Ottoman satellite; and while the turbulence and frequency of its seventeenth-century diets had more in common with an archaic kind of anarchy than modern parliamentarianism, the exertions of princely authority also resembled “oriental despotism” as much as they had features of administrative centralization familiar from histo- ries of state-building in early modern Europe.119 119 For overviews and assessments of the history of Transylvania in the early modern period, especially the age of the independent principality, see Ştefan Pascu, A History of