This book is a translation of a Hungarian publication of 2012, which itself expanded the author's doctoral dissertation defended in 2008 that is available online at http://doktori.btk.elte.hu/hist/nagykornel/diss.pdf. The author is an Armenologist and researcher at the Institute of History of the Research Centre for the Humanities in Budapest.
There are no precise numbers for the Armenian population in late seventeenth-century Transylvania, but we know they were far fewer than the Romanians, Hungarians, and Saxons. Nagy makes extensive use of secondary literature, primarily in Hungarian but also other languages, and archives in Rome, Hungary, and elsewhere. The most important contribution of this work is to place the Armenians’ church union into the context of that nation's earlier church history and the far more extensive and better-studied Romanian church union taking place in the same time and place.
The main parts of the book are a survey of historical antecedents in the medieval and early modern period, the Uniate policy of the Habsburg court, a hundred-page investigation of the period identified in the title, and a twelve-page presentation of conclusions.
The first section chronicles Armenian Christianity's relations with the Byzantine and Roman churches during the centuries before 1685. There was a dogmatic element to these relations, centered on the monophysite Christology of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and a more pragmatic one in the four conditions of the Union of Florence and Ferrara of 1437. The identification of the Armenian church with national identity, in resistance to political domination by Greek, Persian, and Turkish forces, was decisive: this red line is lost amidst the author's detailed account of these centuries and the emergence of diaspora Armenian communities, first in Cilicia in Asia Minor and later in Europe. Still, this narrative is based on impressive deployment of Armenian and other secondary accounts, and the red line emerges explicitly in the book's conclusions. The Union of Brest for the Ruthenians within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1596 followed the Florentine paradigm, as would those of the Habsburgs at the end of the succeeding century.
Geopolitics and Catholic dynastic identity determined the union policy of the Poles and Habsburgs. Within the Habsburg realm, the church union of the Serbs was a failure, as refugees from the Turks swamped the Uniates. The Ruthenian (in Hungary proper) and Romanian (chiefly in Transylvania) unions further north had more success, following as they did formal synods and offering social and cultural benefits for the Uniate clergy in eastern Hungary and Transylvania.
The core of the study centers on the career of Oxendio Verziresko (1654–1715; the author chose this Italian rendering of his name that predominates in the documents of the Holy See). Virziresko was the founder of his compatriots’ church union in Transylvania, which followed the union of the Armenians in Lwów-Lviv, then still under Polish rule, that took place in 1689.
The Armenian population in both regions grew with the influx of refugees from Moldavia after 1668; its size was never more than a few thousand, far less than that of the Ruthenians and Romanians. The investment of secular authorities and the Holy See in the Armenian unions was correspondingly more modest. The Armenian unions also suffered from rivalries and personality clashes among the leading churchmen: Nikol Torosowicz, Vartan Hunanean, and Oxendio Virziresko. Torosowicz was born in Lviv, Hunanean in Anatolia, and Virziresko in Moldavia. They aspired to attract their more numerous compatriots in Moldavia to Catholicism, but Hunanean and Virziresko were more consistent in their loyalty to Rome than the erratic Torosowicz.
Virziresko is remembered in Armenian national tradition and secondary accounts in various languages as a charismatic leader who created his small but lasting and distinctive community. The author modifies this image on the basis of documentation in Vatican archives, chiefly of the Propaganda Fide, the Vienna and Warsaw nunciatures, and the Hevenesi and Kaprinay document collections in the Library of the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest. He confirms the crucial role Oxendio played for his community, particularly during his missionary years before his nomination by the Holy See, and consecration in Lviv in 1697, as titular bishop of the Transylvanian Armenians. His rigid Latinism as bishop (he never considered himself bound by the Florentine conditions and rejected the Armenian liturgy and calendar as heretical) and harsh treatment of clergy with whom he disagreed drove many Armenians to return to Moldavia and the Armenian Apostolic Church. He had no successor as Armenian bishop in Transylvania; after his death the handful of Armenian parishes was subject to the authority of the Roman Catholic bishop of the Hungarians and assimilated to them linguistically.
The merits of this work include its chronological sweep, careful evaluation of archives in seven countries and publications in many languages (the bibliography is thirty pages in length), and the admirably clear and convincing conclusions. Unfortunately the author's Hungarian is not rendered effectively into idiomatic English, indeed the book does not identify a translator by name. The criteria employed for the language of placenames are never stated, though an index helpfully conveys alternate forms. The welcome publication of this work finally makes accessible to readers of English a balanced treatment of the topic that places it in the context of the history and historiographies of Armenian, Hungarian, and other national and ecclesiastical traditions.
