###

# Europe and Transylvania

'Várad has fallen to the Turks, and the way is clear for the barbarians to attack Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, and Poland.'[1]1. F. Deák, Nagyvárad elvesztése 1660-ban (ÉTTK, 1878), p.32. This view, expressed by Parma's ambassador, Chiaromanni, in a report dated 17 September 1660, was shared across Europe. In Cracow and Venice, Rome and Paris, the Ottoman capture of the city founded by King Ladislas the Saint was regarded as a threat to all Europe. The fall of the greatest border fortress in the east, known as the 'gate of the Christian world', led people to check in their atlas where the Turkish attack might come from. The 'Principatus Transylvaniae' that they found on their maps of Europe covered a territory twice as large as Switzerland but had a national income scarcely larger than that of an average German principality. It had been a member of the European community of states for over a century. In terms of politics, economics, and culture, Transylvania was organically linked to neighbouring as well as distant countries. For some five years, Europeans had been observing anxiously the developments in Transylvania, and the fall of Várad justified their fears.

In the summer of 1660, at the conference of Graz, Hungarian politicians had urged that Venice, France, Russia, the German principalities, and the Papacy unite their forces and, with the help of the Romanian voivodeships, launch an attack on the Turks who were besieging Várad. The proposal was no wild fantasy; it was inspired both by historical precedent and by immediate necessity.

The events in Transylvania drove home the fact that the long-festering conflict between the European states and the Porte was {2-234.} reaching a critical stage. After the Treaty of Westphalia, Europe entered a phase of economic expansion to which Ottoman power represented a hindrance. Western entrepreneurs and traders coveted the raw materials and markets of the lands ruled by Constantinople; Europe counted on imports of wheat, livestock, leather, wool, timber, minerals, and other commodities, and on the seemingly insatiable markets for English cloth and German metallurgical products. In the early 1600s, England, the Netherlands, and, to a lesser extent, France had established commercial footholds in the Ottoman lands. These gains came under threat when, in the 1660s, the policy of imperial consolidation won the backing of a new religious group and a powerful group of Turkish merchants. Military campaigns against the Poles (1672–1676) and the Russians (1679–1681) testified to a new aggressiveness on the part of the Porte.

At the time of the siege of Várad, a German newspaper noted the looming threat to the vine-growing region of Tokaj and the trading route through Kassa to Poland. Venice worried that if Transylvania fell, it would lose Crete as well as commercial access to Moldavia and Wallachia.

The experience of the Thirty Years' War induced European states to apply the principle, formulated by Bacon and Grotius, that a lasting peace depended on the preservation of the balance of power. In the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Westphalia, Transylvania, though a minor power, was taken into account as a counterweight to Habsburg expansionism. The loss of Transylvania threatened to destabilize the European balance of power. It also represented a cultural setback, for the Principality was the eastern bastion of Protestantism and religious freedom.

Europeans had always counted on the Austrian Habsburgs to hold back the Ottoman tide, and the fall of Várad only strengthened this expectation. Styria, Carinthia, and the hereditary provinces had been ringing the alarm bell for some time, and Hungary's politicians {2-235.} also became more insistent. The pro-Habsburg lord chief treasurer, István Csáky, observed that the capture of Várad 'will prove as harmful to our nation as the loss of Buda'. Assessing the shift in the balance of power between the Habsburgs and the Turks, he noted that the latter were no longer a distant, Asian threat: 'We seem content to live next to pagans ruled by the captains of Buda and Várad; with the loss of Várad, Transylvania has been withdrawn from Your Gracious Majesty's league, and now the wretches might as well be considered Turks'.[2]2. Letter dated 5 August 1660, in Deák, Nagyvárad, p. 21.

On 15 December 1660, Emperor Leopold sent off letters to Europe's rulers requesting help for Transylvania. The Electors of Brandenburg, Pfalz, Cologne, and Trier responded with a promise of financial assistance; the Prince of Saxony, Georg Johann II, offered money and troops; Venice, the president of the Confederation of the Rhine, the papal nuncio, and the Archbishop of Mainz, Philip Johann, all promised help if the Emperor took up arms to save Transylvania. Echoing Miklós Zrínyi, the former Wallachian ruler Ştefan Gheorghe, who had been deposed because of his alliance with Transylvania, observed that this international concern made the moment propitious for confronting the Turks: 'God himself signals an opportunity, perhaps He does not wish to go on punishing the Christians and has thrown the whip into the fire [...] If we miss this opportunity, I do not know if we will get another one.'[3]3. Stefan Gheorghe's letter to János Rottal, 23 December 1661, OL, Nlt V, Fasc. 14. By then, a group of Transylvania's leading politicians was hard at work to turn European plans into concrete action that might serve their country's interests.