The Revolutionary Movement of 1848-9 in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany: With Some Examination of the Previous Thirty-three YearsMaurice, C. Edmund (Charles Edmund)
History
The Revolutionary Movement of 1848-9 in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany: With Some Examination of the Previous Thirty-three Years
Maurice, C. Edmund (Charles Edmund)
Europe -- History -- 1848-1849; Revolutions -- Europe
For while the Serbs were still discussing their grievances and the
remedies for them, the Roumanians were meeting in their village of
Blasendorf to make their protest against Magyar rule. They, like the
other Peoples of the Empire, had been disposed to sympathise with the
March movement; but when it became known that the Magyars at Pesth had
put forward as one of their twelve points the union of Transylvania
with Hungary, the Roumanians became alarmed. Had the Transylvanian
Diet met under the extended suffrage now granted in Hungary, the
Roumanians would have had a majority in the Diet; and the influence of
this majority would have been far more important under the new
parliamentary system than in the old days of centralised officialism.
If, on the other hand, they were to be absorbed in Hungary, they
naturally feared that the fanaticism of the Magyars in enforcing the
use of the Magyar language, would be directed with even greater vigour
against the despised Roumanians, than it had been against Serbs and
Croats; and that the Greek Church to which the Roumanians belonged,
and which had always been at a disadvantage in Transylvania, would be
crushed, or, at any rate, discouraged. The tradition of their Roman
descent recorded in the Libellus Wallachorum, had given some of them
hopes for leadership in Transylvania, and had strengthened, even in
the less ambitious, the desire for a dignified equality. Animated by
these motives, they met on May 15 at Blasendorf.
This little capital of the Roumanian race lies in one of the large
open plains of Transylvania. It is still little more than a straggling
village of low huts; but it is apparently as important to the
Roumanians as Carlowitz is to the Serbs and Hermannstadt to the
Saxons. Crowds of the strange figures, whom one may still see in the
villages of Transylvania, flocked in to this meeting, covered with
their rough sheep-skins and dark, flowing hair, and showing in their
handsome faces at once the consciousness of the new life that was
awakening, and their pride in those dim traditions of the past, which
were supposed to unite them with the glories of ancient Rome. Even
here, too, there were found some of the ruling race, who were
prepared to make common cause with this, the most despised and
oppressed of the races of Hungary; for a Magyar noble named Nopcsa was
prominent in the meeting. But now, as ever, the chief hope for the
Roumanians was in their clergy, and specially in their bishops; and
Lemenyi, the bishop of the United Greeks,[13] appeared side by side
with the more popular and influential Schaguna. Speaker after speaker
dwelt on the great traditions of the Roumanian nation, and their
determination to obtain an equality with the Magyar, Szekler, and
Saxon. They avowed their loyalty to Ferdinand, and declared that they
had no desire to oppress any other nation; but that they would not
suffer any other nation to oppress them; that they would work for the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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