Transylvania was remarkably tolerant. The princes themselves favoured Calvinism and supported the Calvinist power-house town of Debrecen, paying for religious students to stay in other friendly European states. The crazy-paving linguistic and religious structure of Transylvania made tolerance a necessity as the alternative would have been civil war. This tolerance was not extended to the Orthodox Romanians, who were generally serfs, but it became a defining element in the Transylvanian state, which allowed it to contrast itself with the ferocious homogenization imposed by Ferdinand II.
