MICU, INOCENTIU. - Bishop of the Uniates (Romanians) of Transylvania, b. at Sad in 1692, d. in 1768; he studied at the Jesuit college in Tirnavia and at Munkács. Elected bishop in 1728, consecrated in 1730, and installed in 1732, in 1737 he transferred the episcopal residence from Făgăraș to Blaj (Blasendorf), where he began the construction of a monastery and the buildings necessary for the new see.
Since the promises made at the time of the union of the Romanians with the Catholic Church regarding their political emancipation had not been fulfilled, and also under the influence of the strenuous propaganda of a Serbian fanatical monk, Bessarion, many of the united communities began to abandon Catholicism, M. fought tenaciously in the Transylvanian Diet and at the court of Vienna for the recognition of the Romanians as a nation within the state, for the repeal of laws contrary to his people, and for the full implementation of the diploma of Leopold I, issued on the occasion of the union of 1700. But being too isolated, he fell victim to the intrigues and unjust accusations of the Calvinist and Protestant nobles, and in 1744 he had to go to Vienna to clear himself. As he met with a cold reception there, he went to Rome, but after seven years of fruitless efforts, embittered, he submitted his resignation in 1751 and spent the rest of his life in Rome on a pension of 1,200 florins a year. He was buried in the church of the Madonna del Pascolo.