Confession and Politics in the Principality of Transylvania 1644–1657

Gábor Kármán, Herman J. Selderhuis

• Verlag: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783647540795
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Theologie & Religion
• Thema: Christliche Theologie

This volume is a survey of the changing role the confessional element played in that country's foreign policy. Though its rulers consistently supported the Protestant cause during the Thirty Years' War, this East Central European principality has traditionally been understood as a counterexample to the confessionalisation thesis. Here, the evolution of the foreign policy of Princes György Rákóczi I and György Rákóczi II is presented alongside the argumentation they used to justify their political action before and after the Peace of Westphalia. This dual focus makes it possible to identify the changes in the function of confessional cooperation in the princes' policies, as it lost its primary position and was transformed from an end in itself into a complementary means of justification. Kármán charts Transylvania's foreign policy by examining its princes' interactions with three main sets of contacts: leaders in the Kingdom of Hungary, protagonists of the ongoing crisis in Poland-Lithuania, and members of Western European Protestant networks. Based on a large number of published and archival sources, the author offers a novel interpretation of mid-seventeenth-century Transylvanian foreign policy and its intellectual background.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Body
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The confessional element in the 1644–1645 campaign of György Rákóczi I
• Chapter 2. Transylvania on the political map of seventeenth-century Europe
• Chapter 3. The Polish royal election of 1648
• Chapter 4. Transylvania and Poland, 1649–1652
• Chapter 5. Maintaining the international Protestant network: Zsigmond Rákóczi's marriage to Henriette of the Palatinate
• Chapter 6. The Rákóczis and the Kingdom of Hungary, 1648–1652
• Chapter 7. Transylvania and the restructuring of Eastern Europe, 1653–1655
• Chapter 8. György Rákóczi II and the Hungarian estates, 1653–1656
• Chapter 9. The Treaty of Radnót: a Protestant Conspiracy?
• Chapter 10. The confessional element of György Rákóczi II's foreign policy
• Conclusions or Does the reason of state chase away all other reasons?
• Bibliography
• Appendix: A glossary of place names from the eastern half of Europe
• Index of names