In 1700 Mátyás Radnay, bishop of Pécs, complained that his diocese was short of 360 parish priests, and that he did not have a single candidate for the priesthood. In the diocese of Nagyvárad, 339 parishes were served by 500 clergy in 1556; by 1711, only three parishes had a priest, and when the bishop first returned to his see his situation was so straitened that he could neither reestablish his cathedral nor even begin a suitable residence for himself. Neither diocese was exceptional. In all Hungary only the diocese of Nyitra had been without a single parish under Ottoman rule during the preceding century and a half. Every other diocese had been occupied partially or completely by the Turks. When they were expelled, Hungary was a depopulated wasteland.

Sixteen years of warfare between the Osmanlis and the Habsburgs (1683–99), and Ferenc II Rákóczi's eight-year war of national liberation (1703–11), devastated Hungary. One a war between two hostile civilizations and faiths, Islam and Christendom, the other a civil war, they were fought with ferocity. After a quarter-century of turmoil, peace was restored in 1711 when the Habsburg dynasty and the Hungarian estates concluded the Treaty of Szatmár. To raise Hungary from the ruins required immense efforts in every sphere, spiritual as well as material. The most important ingredient for moral and spiritual reconstruction ought to have been tolerance, but it was the element most conspicuously absent from Habsburg policies and attitudes.