1848–1849 massacres in Transylvania

Mária, the sister of the Hungarian dramatist Imre Madách was caught together with her husband and her son, being all killed by the Romanian insurgents,[25] and thrown in front of pigs to be eaten.

On the next day, 2 June 1848, an official regiment was sent from Gyulafehérvár by Anton von Puchner, commander in chief of the Austrian troops in Transylvania to disarm the armed peasants and guarantee the safety of the imperial committee during their investigation.

An important strategic step of Anton von Puchner in the days leading up to the clash was his specific choice for a Székely Hungarian regiment to be sent against the armed Romanian peasants.

In doing so, Anton von Puchner played a major role in the exacerbation of political-ethnic differences in the region and in the further radicalization of both Romanian and Hungarian peasants in Transylvania.

The event, followed by the pro-imperial propaganda further boosted unrest and hostility in the region, and largely contributed to the mass-armament of Transylvanian Romanians and to the organization of the second national assembly in the town of Balászfalva in September 1848.

[32][33] On 12 September 1848, in the village Aranyoslóna (now part of Luna), the count of Torda, Miklós Thorotzkai, gave the order to fire into the crowd that opposed recruitment into the Hungarian army, killing 30 people[34] and wounding several tens.

[33] After entering Balázsfalva on 18 January 1849, Hungarian troops looted the town[32] and reportedly committed plundering against the local Romanian population[29] but a massacre did not take place.

[33] According to the official lists (that were published in the newspaper Wiener Zeitung) 4,425 men, 340 women and 69 children were killed without trial by the Hungarian military tribunals in Transylvania, exclusive of the ones who died in open fighting.