As usual religion and politics are so intricately tangled that it is impossible to assign clear-cut motives to anybody. Religion was so important and the stakes of personal salvation so high that a merely cynical reading of belief is on the whole implausible. But the Calvinism of Transylvania’s rulers became a crucial, perhaps unintended, element in Hungarian resistance to Habsburg rule. Indeed, it could be argued that it was the shelter provided by the Ottomans for Hungarian Calvinism at this time that kept Hungary alive as an idea and prevented the whole lot from succumbing to an Invasion of
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