The Transylvanian School: How Greek Catholic Clergy Forged Romanian Nationalism

Before 1848, before the double election of Cuza, a small group of Greek Catholic priests in the Habsburg Empire began rewriting the story of who Romanians were. This episode follows the Transylvanian School — Școala Ardeleană — and its central figures: Petru Maior, Gheorghe Șincai, and Samuil Micu. They argued from history and language that Romanians were direct descendants of Roman colonists, not later migrants, and they did it in a series of books that challenged both Hungarian claims and Orthodox tradition. We walk through their key texts — the Supplex Libellus Valachorum, the first Romanian grammar, the first history of the Romanians written in Romanian — and the backlash they faced from the Hungarian Diet, the Orthodox hierarchy, and even their own Greek Catholic bishops. We also look at the forgotten figure of Inocențiu Micu-Klein, the bishop who first petitioned Vienna for Romanian political rights in the 1740s, decades before the School's main works appeared. The episode ends with the legacy of their latinizing script and the question: did they invent a past to create a nation?

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