o Turkish control. Toward the end of the
seventeenth century Austria conquered Hungary, and Transylvania as part
of Hungary then was included in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

From the earliest times the position of the Romanians in Transylvania
was inferior to that of the other nationalities, and accounts of the
long-term measures practiced against them have been perpetuated among
their descendants. The Romanians were mostly serfs, and their social and
economic status was the lowest in the province. Their Orthodox
Christianity was not recognized, in contrast to the Lutheran, Calvinist,
Unitarian, and Roman Catholic faiths practiced by the various other
nationalities (see ch. 5). To gain religious equality and to win a
larger measure of economic and social recognition, many of the Romanians
gradually abandoned their Eastern Orthodox creed and became Uniates by
accepting papal authority in 1698.

Although the Romanians were slow to benefit from the relatively high
cultural and political level reached in Transylvania under the
Austro-Hungarians, an appreciable number of concessions had been made to
them by the middle of the nineteenth century. They began to share in the
political life after political parties were established, schools were
opened for Romanian children, and education became more widespread among
the general population. Progress in these and associated fields
stimulated the Romanian desire for full equality and the hope for
eventual unification of all Romanians in their own national state.

WESTERN INFLUENCES

Although Romania was late in achieving national recognition, many of the
factors that were to influence its Western orientation after
independence began to evolve as early as the seventeenth century. In
Transylvania the Uniate church became an important medium by which
Romanian national identity was fostered in the struggle against foreign
assimilation. The Habsburg rulers favored the expansion of the church
and permitted the opening of seminaries for the training of young
Romanian clergy. Many of these young clerics were sent to Rome to
complete their studies and, while there, became aware of their Roman
ancestry. They saw the famous column of Trajan, which recorded, in
stone, the early conquest of their Dacian ancestors by the Romans, and
they also discovered that Romanian was an essentially Latin language
(see ch. 4).

The contacts established with Rome encouraged the scholarly development
of