The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe

Karin Maag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351883061
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This work provides a comprehensive and multi-facetted account of the Reformation in eastern and central Europe, drawing on extensive archival research carried out by Continental and British scholars. Across a broad thematic, temporal and geographical range, the contributors examine the cultural impact of the Reformation in Eastern Europe, the encounters between different confessions, and the blend of religious and political pressures which shaped the path of Reformation in these lands. By making the fruits of their research accessible to a wider audience, the contributors hope to emphasise the important role of eastern and central Europe on the early modern European scene.

CHAPTER ONE

The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe

Andrew Pettegree and Karin Maag

It is a curious fact that one can read most general histories of the Reformation without being strongly aware that there was a Reformation in Eastern Europe. To be more precise, one would say that the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation goes largely unnoticed: all general surveys, of course, will refer to the Bohemian Hussite movement of the fifteenth century, though often in the context of an ‘incomplete’ or ‘premature’ Reformation; the success of this movement in establishing an enduring counter-Church a century before Luther is still barely recognized.¹ Otherwise Eastern Europe is largely confined to the margins, described mostly as a haven for dissident groups of various complexions as the century wore on, the home of Schwenkenfeldians and Antitrinitarians.² The astonishing impact of mainstream Protestantism, both Lutheranism and Calvinism, throughout this region, particularly in the first generation of reform, is barely realized.

One can postulate three main reasons for this curious, and in many ways very distorted perception. Firstly, the success of the Counter-Reformation in recapturing many of these lands for Catholicism in the seventeenth century has obscured the considerable impact of Protestantism in the earlier period. Conversion and military activity together made this one of the Counter-Reformation’s most successful regions. In some parts, such as Bohemia, a previously healthy Protestant tradition was all but obliterated.³ Secondly, linguistic barriers continue to be a powerful impediment to studying these events. The complicated ethnic and linguistic patchwork of Central and Eastern Europe means that a scholar often needs to master several languages as a basic tool of research. This can be a compelling disincentive to all but the most persistent and linguistically gifted. But undoubtedly the most powerful reason for the neglect of Eastern Europe has been the troubled history of this region in the twentieth century. The almost total exclusion of lands such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia (as it then was) and Poland from free cultural and political interchange with neighbouring lands to the west for 45 years from 1945 had a hugely distorting effect. To those of us brought up in these post-war generations these lands seemed almost impenetrably foreign: part of an ‘Eastern bloc’ behind the ‘Iron Curtain’. Cultural intercourse with these countries was almost completely suspended. Travel, even for tourism, was arduous and complicated, and invariably expensive; scholarly archives could seldom be accessed. Nor, of course, were scholars in these lands invariably free to choose the subject or intellectual direction of their work. The study of religious movements such as the Reformation was particularly affected by an intellectual environment strongly hostile to truly independent research in these fields.⁴

This modern perspective is clearly extremely misleading. The tragedy of war in our own century obscures the sixteenth-century reality, when lands such as Bohemia and Hungary were fully a part of the Central European economic and cultural system, linked by a dense and intricate system of trade routes and intellectual connections to lands west and south. In intellectual terms these lands sometimes gave the lead to Germany and the Empire, rather than vice versa (take for instance the extraordinary influence and vitality of the University of Prague in the later Middle Ages); economically these lands possessed some of the most developed urban cultures, and provided much of Europe’s supply of precious metals before the discovery of the gold and silver mines of the New World.⁵ This was not a faraway land, and clearly no backwater; cities such as Prague and Cracow would have been more familiar, and played a more important role in European society, than the remote and relatively underpopulated lands on the northern and western periphery.⁶ It is only with the recent political transformation of Eastern Europe that we can fully realize this, and recognize the vigour and subtlety with which the populations of this region reacted to the new cultural and religious movements emanating from Germany and Italy from the fifteenth century.

Of course, even with the more open frontiers established in the last few years, the problems of studying the Reformation in these lands remain formidable. Chronologically, one could justifiably begin with Jan Hus and his early fifteenth-century movement for reform. At the other end, it seems equally important not to omit the impact of the Catholic Reformation which began to be felt at the end of the sixteenth century and continued through the seventeenth. Indeed, the term ‘Reformation’ is perhaps inadequate for a movement which subsumed such a variety of confessional approaches from Catholicism, Utraquism, Lutheranism and Calvinism through Mennonites, Hutterites, Unitarians and other groups.

Furthermore, research into confessional struggles in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is complicated by the shifting political, ethnic and religious map of East-Central Europe at the time. Figure 1.1 and the following geographical overview may help to set the scene.

Beginning in the north, the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania was ruled by the Jagiellon dynasty until 1572, after which the royal family died out, and successive monarchs were hence elected by the noble estates. In 1466, the Polish crown incorporated Western Prussia, henceforth known as Royal Prussia. Eastern Prussia, ruled by the Teutonic knights, became a vassal of the Polish crown, but preserved some measure of independence and was known as Ducal Prussia. In 1525, Albert of Hohenzollern, the last Teutonic knight to be Duke, secularized the Duchy, thus creating a hereditary possession for his own family.

Moving southwards, the lands of the crown of Bohemia were constituted by Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia. Although these four lands had been incorporated for the first time in 1348, the political overlordship remained in flux over the next 200 years. Thus while Moravia and Bohemia formed a close unit, Silesia was ruled directly by Hungary between 1469 and 1490 before rejoining Bohemia after the death of the powerful Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus.

Between 1490 and 1526, the four lands were ruled by Ladislas II Jagiellon, succeeded by his son, Louis II Jagiellon, members of the Polish royal house. As in Poland after 1572, the Bohemian lands placed a strong emphasis on the right of the estates gathered in the Diet to elect their monarch. After the death of the childless Louis II at the battle of Mohács in 1526, the Bohemian crown lands recognized the Habsburg Ferdinand I as their ruler, with varying degrees of enthusiasm in the different lands.⁷ Thus by 1526, the Bohemian crown lands formed part of the Habsburg Empire.

1.1 Map of Eastern and Central Europe

To the south-east of Bohemia lay the kingdom of Hungary. After the strong rule of Matthias Corvinus, the Hungarian estates joined with the Bohemian lands in recognizing Ladislas II Jagiellon as their king. In order to prepare for a Habsburg claim to the Hungarian throne, the Emperor Maximilian organized the marriage of his grandson, Ferdinand, to Louis II Jagiellon’s sister, while Louis himself married a granddaughter of Maximilian. Consequently, after Louis II’s early death in 1526, Ferdinand claimed the Hungarian throne. However, Ferdinand was challenged by John Zapolya, who was the preferred candidate of the Hungarian nationalists. In the end, the pressures of the Turkish advance led to a three-way partition of the country, with Royal Hungary, ruled by the Habsburgs, in the west, the central part of Hungary governed directly by the Turks, and eastern Hungary, known as Transylvania, ruled by Zapolya and his heirs, under the overlordship of the Ottomans.

To the east of Hungary lay Moldavia, a tribute-paying vassal of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the Moldavian princes, although preserving some measure of autonomy, were under the control of the Turks.

Finally, to the south of Bohemia lay the Austrian lands, hereditary possessions of the Habsburgs. The Austrian lands were split into four parts, three of which concern us here: Upper and Lower Austria, separated by the Enns river, and Inner Austria, constituted by the southern provinces of Styria, Carinthia, Gorizia and Carniola.

Hence by 1526, there were three spheres of influence: the lands controlled by Poland–Lithuania in the north, the Habsburg possessions in the centre and south, and the lands under direct or indirect Ottoman control to the east.

While political borders generally achieved some measure of recognition by the middle of the sixteenth century, the distribution of different ethnic groups did not neatly match political boundaries. The most numerous ethnic group throughout Eastern Europe were the Slavs, especially in the Bohemian lands and in Poland. In Hungary, the dominant ethnic group were the Magyars, whose language distinguished them from their Slav neighbours. In Ducal Prussia, Silesia, parts of the other Bohemian lands, Hungary and especially in Austria, German-speakers, generally known as Saxons, were in the majority. Other smaller groups in eastern Hungary included the Romanians and the Szeklers, who were related to the Magyars, while communities of Jews settled throughout Eastern European towns and cities.

Prior to the Protestant Reformation, the confessional picture across Eastern Europe was largely uniform. In Poland, Ducal Prussia, most of the Bohemian lands, Hungary and the Austrian lands, the overwhelming majority of the population was Catholic. Eastern areas in many of these lands had a certain number of Orthodox communities. Further east, in Moldavia, the Orthodox formed the majority. Groups of Jews and Muslims made up the rest of the religious mosaic. The major division in confessional terms in the decades preceding the Reformation was in Bohemia, where the Utraquist church, following the practices and theology of Jan Hus, existed in parallel with the Catholic church.

The confessional and ethnic diversity of Eastern Europe, even prior to the first signs of interest in the Reformation, serves to show that an overarching explanation for the course of the Reformation in this area would not encompass this variety in a satisfactory way. Nevertheless, the Eastern European context does display some common features in the different lands, of particular interest to scholars familiar with the often very contrasting contemporaneous situation in Western Europe. In comparison with much of Western Europe, Eastern Europe was sparsely populated, and largely remained so throughout the sixteenth century. In the fourteenth century, most of East-Central Europe only had two to ten inhabitants per square kilometre, as compared with more than 20 per square kilometre in the more populated areas of the west, including Italy, the Netherlands, and parts of France and the German Empire.⁸ The majority of the population in Eastern Europe was rural, with only a small proportion of inhabitants living in urban areas. Poland was the most highly urbanized of the Eastern European lands, as by the end of the fifteenth century, there were 600 Polish towns, of which five or six had more than 10 000 inhabitants, although Danzig had reached 50 000 inhabitants by the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe
• 2 Pre-Reformation changes in Hungary at the end of the fifteenth century
• 3 Protestant literature in Bohemian private libraries circa 1600
• 4 Reformation and the writing of national history in East-Central and Northern Europe
• 5 Calvinism and estate liberation movements in Bohemia and Hungary (1570–1620)
• 6 Mural paintings, ethnicity and religious identity in Transylvania: the context for Reformation
• 7 The image controversy in the religious negotiations between Protestant theologians and Eastern Orthodox Churches
• 8 Protestantism and Orthodoxy in sixteenth-century Moldavia
• 9 Church building and discipline in early seventeenth-century Hungary and Transylvania
• 10 Morals courts in rural Berne during the early modern period
• 11 The Reformation in Poland and Prussia in the sixteenth century: similarities and differences
• 12 Late Reformation and Protestant confessionalization in the major towns of Royal Prussia
• 13 Patronage and parish: the nobility and the recatholicization of Lower Austria
• Index