Diaconescu, Marius (szerk.): Nobilimea romanească din Transilvania (Satu Mare, 1997)
Adrian Andrei Rusu: Nobilimea Românească şi biserica în secolul al XV-lea
and religion has been studied only when some social events were directly related to a certain religion. The idea of Romanian nobility within the kingdom of Hungary has been now and then asserted depending on historiographical contexts, while the idea of a Romanian Catholic nobility had a less favorable approach. If one part of the phrase was accepted the rest of it was certainly denied. Both secular and religious historiography refused to accept a very possible cohabitation. Reasons were slightly different. Secular historians wouldn't admit the existence of two "stools", who had "betrayed" the people. To the historians of the Orthodox Church the dispute was a continuation of previous arguments with the historians of the Greek-Catholic Church. The latter, looking for historical justifications for the union at the end of the 17th century, had tried to think about the Romanian Catholics of the 14th-15th centuries as visionary forefathers, even if they actually had very little in common. To the rest of the orthodox church historians these Romanian Catholic nobles were but troublesome elements who diverted the image of the Orthodox Church as champion of the "national" resistance in Transylvania. All these historiographical views have been strongly influenced by contemporary politics, to which the historical event was not the mere truth, but simply a good excuse for the present. In Haţeg, a district in the South-East of Transylvania, the first communities of Catholic colonists had already been settled in the second half of the 13th century in three locations out of about one hundred existing. A rather unique document from 1428 has revealed that those communities were losing parishioners in favor of the orthodox. The information is worth considering, especially because it is known that in the center of the Ha\eg district a Franciscan monastery had been built half a century before in order to convert the orthodox. Even if the political intransigence of the Anjou royal house towards the orthodox nobles has insistently been expressed, the traces of this policy are not to be found in Haţeg. The next period, that of the reign of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1384-1437) has been more important because it corresponded to an activation of the relations between the local feudal lords and the central administration. However, due to the context created by the dangerous advance of the Turks, the confrontations between the Catholics and the orthodox within the kingdom were more moderate. Afterwards the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1439) proclaimed the union of the two 149
