Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (108 page)

Very often revolutionary Reformed leaders were actually noblemen rebelling against their monarchs; rather than humble enthusiasts like the Anabaptists, they were themselves magistrates with power granted by God, just like kings or princes. That made their rebellion all the more effective, as Lutheran princes had earlier found in the 1520s, when the Holy Roman Emperor had tried to force them back into the Catholic mould. Noblemen could harness traditional loyalties alongside the destructive enthusiasm of Protestant mobs who wanted physically to smash the old Church. Crowds determined to fight the Antichrist shattered stained-glass windows and hurled down statues, roaring out the psalms of David in easy-to-remember rhymes set to popular song tunes, in a fashion popularized in Geneva - when they were taken up in England's rather more decorous religious revolution, they were called 'Geneva psalms'. Music was the secret weapon of popular reformation. Singing or even humming or whistling the telltale tunes spread where preaching dared not go, and where books might be incriminating. The political effect was startling.

In Calvin's lifetime, Reformed Protestants began challenging the French monarchy, and it took fifty years of warfare and royal treachery for the monarchy to bring them to heel. In France they gained the nickname 'Huguenots', a name whose origins have defied all efforts at definitive explanation.
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Reformed activists in Scotland humiliated and then dethroned the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, meanwhile setting up a Church ('Kirk' in Scots) which marginalized its bishops and followed the Church government of Geneva in a presbyterian system (see Plate 14). It became the example
par excellence
of a Church exercising discipline within society like the Genevan Consistory, but its very public discipline, complete with penitents sitting on a special bench before the gaze of the whole congregation in crowded churches Sunday by Sunday, gave the congregation a significant say both in choosing elders who maintained the system and in monitoring the sincerity of those who did public penance. In modern societies, these 'Calvinist' systems have a dark and oppressive reputation, but we forget that they worked because people wanted them to work. Rates of reoffending were low. Reformed discipline provided structures for controlling a frighteningly violent and arbitrary world, and involved the whole community in doing so.
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Other Reformed activists were vital to the successful revolution which threw off Catholic Spanish rule in the northern Netherlands, and set up an established Reformed Church there, likewise presbyterian in government (see Plate 17). In eastern Europe, the militant self-confidence of the Reformed Prince and nobility of Transylvania intimidated and bewildered the Turks after earlier Ottoman victories in Hungary. The Church in England was deeply affected by Reformed piety, despite the hostility of a Protestant monarch, Queen Elizabeth, who was nearly as self-willed in her theological outlook as her father, King Henry. When her half-sister Mary's death in 1558 delivered the realm into Elizabeth's hands, her new religious settlement of 1559 restored a fossilized version of Edward VI's half-finished religious revolution as the Church of England. Many of Elizabeth's activist Reformed Protestant subjects could see no reason why it should remain fossilized or half-finished, and kept up pressure on her for more change. Increasingly those who were prepared to conform to the Queen's wishes named the discontented, in no friendly spirit, 'Puritans'.
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The result by 1570 was a Europe in which the divisions were increasingly clear. A series of separate political crises shifted the balance in favour of Protestants in the north and Catholics in the south. The contrasting stories in north and south after 1570 can be symbolized by the fortunes of two Catholic navies, one victorious, another destroyed. In 1571, a fleet recruited overwhelmingly from the Catholic world and commanded for the King of Spain by Don John of Austria, an illegitimate son of Charles V, crushingly defeated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto (the Gulf of Corinth or Nafpaktos); this was one of the most decisive checks on Islamic expansion into western Europe. Far to the north, in 1588, the other Spanish Armada was outmanoeuvred in the English Channel by Queen Elizabeth's naval commanders, and then scattered by the storms of the North Sea and the Atlantic, never to achieve a Roman Catholic conquest of Protestant England. As a result of this north-south divide, people were forced to make decisions, or at least their rulers forced decisions on them. Which checklist of doctrine should they sign up to?

Historians have given an unlovely but perhaps necessary label to this process: confessionalization - creating fixed identities and systems of belief for separate Churches which had previously been more fluid in their self-understanding, and which had not even sought separate identities for themselves.
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Confessionalization represents the defeat of efforts to rebuild the unified Latin Church. In western Europe, it was difficult to escape this impulse to tidy and to build boundaries. One small part of Switzerland, the Grisons or Graubunden, quickly took advantage of the freedom bestowed by their Alpine remoteness and poverty: in 1526, as the Reformation began dividing Europe, they came to a deal in their chief town of Ilanz, by which each village could choose to maintain either a Catholic or a Reformed church. Despite much bickering, this arrangement persisted for more than a century, by which time some imaginative thinkers elsewhere in western Europe were just beginning to glimpse the sense in the idea.
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Another important area for religious pluralism, in this instance emphatically against the wishes of its established Protestant Church, was the northern Netherlands. Having thrown off one clerical tyranny and jealously guarding a host of local autonomies, the secular rulers (the 'regents') of this new republic were not going to allow their Reformed clergy to establish a real monopoly of religious practice. Dutch people were free to ignore the life of their parish churches, as long as they did not cause trouble; even, in the end, Roman Catholics.

Otherwise, it was in eastern Europe that the most practical and official arrangements were made for religious coexistence - and indeed, the east outdid the Graubunden, most spectacularly in the principality of Transylvania which emerged from the wreck of the old Hungarian kingdom. Transylvanian princes, battling to survive against both Habsburgs and Ottomans, were anxious to conciliate as many Hungarian nobility as possible. Yet the nobility were backing a great variety of religious belief, few of them from the discredited old Church, and ranging from card-carrying Lutheranism to a startlingly open denial of the Trinity - the latter encouraged by a diaspora of Italian radical thinkers fleeing the increasingly thorough purges of the Roman Inquisition (see pp. 662-4). The religious spectrum was exemplified in the spiritual journey of the charismatic Hungarian Church leader Ferenc David from Lutheranism to anti-Trinitarianism; he much impressed one prince, Janos Zsigmond Zapolyai.

Accordingly, but extraordinarily by the standards of the time, the Transylvanian Diet decided that it was impossible to reconcile the various factions and instead it would recognize their legal existence. In 1568 it met in the chief church of the town of Torda (a building which now, in its Catholic reinvention, does not commemorate this momentous occasion) and declared:

ministers should everywhere preach and proclaim [the Gospel] according to their understanding of it, and if their community is willing to accept this, good; if not, however, no one should be compelled by force if their spirit is not at peace, but a minister retained whose teaching is pleasing to the community . . . no one is permitted to threaten to imprison or banish anyone because of their teaching, because faith is a gift from God.
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This was the first time that radical Christian communities had been officially recognized in sixteenth-century Europe (albeit more by silence than by explicit permission), with the brief and ill-fated exception of little Nikolsburg. Subsequent Transylvanian princes withdrew from their flirtation with the anti-Trinitarians. With the majority of their Magyar nobility, they committed themselves to the Reformed faith, which led them into occasional harassment and occasional persecution of indiscreet anti-Trinitarians; but still they adhered to the general principles of Torda.

The Reformed faith of Transylvania's princes eventually led them into overenthusiasm for the role of their principality in God's purposes. In the mid-seventeenth century the talented and ambitious Prince Gyorgy II Rakoczi was encouraged by the preaching of his Reformed ministers to see himself as King David of Israel, poised to be God's champion against all God's enemies. Unfortunately God showed no apparent favour to Prince Gyorgy's increasingly unrealistic campaigns to win the Polish throne and his defiance of his Ottoman overlords, and after his death from battle-wounds in 1660, the principality faced ruin. It was a telling symbol of changed times that by the late seventeenth century the Rakoczi family, now no longer the princely dynasty, converted to Catholicism. Yet even when the Catholic Habsburgs acquired the territory and did their best to chip away at its religious liberties, the Torda agreement obstinately left its mark on Transylvania's religious landscape. In a country where the medieval parish network is about as dense as in many parts of western Europe, it is an exhilarating experience to travel from village to village and find the ancient parish churches of Transylvania still exhibiting here a rich German Lutheran interior, there assertive Baroque Catholicism, now a whitewashed Reformed preaching house, bright with colour from cheerfully decorated lace hangings, or finally the exotic sight of a place of worship from the Middle Ages which is home to a Unitarian parish - distinguished in appearance from the Reformed church in the next village largely by the proud motto on the wall in Magyar, 'God is one!'

Transylvania's initiative was soon followed by Poland-Lithuania, albeit with very different end results. Even in 1600, the identification of Catholicism with Polish identity, which in the twentieth century survived Hitler and Stalin, produced a Polish pope and crippled the power of Soviet Communism, still remained remote, while at the beginning of the 1560s it would have been impossible to say whether the religious future of Poland-Lithuania lay with Roman Catholics, Lutherans or the Reformed - maybe even the Jews. Lutherans, mostly German-speakers in the towns and cities, were vital to Poland-Lithuania's economic life. The Reformed not only boasted one of the most statesmanlike of European Protestant leaders, Johannes a Lasco, but also commanded the allegiance of some of Poland-Lithuania's greatest families, in particular the Radziwills, who lived like kings and controlled the main armed forces of the Grand Principality of Lithuania. Perhaps a fifth of the nobility became Reformed, and in the Polish Senate in the 1560s and 1570s an absolute majority of the non-clerical members were Reformed sympathizers or adherents.
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Anti-Trinitarian radicals in their own 'Minor' or Arian Church enjoyed a more open life than any similar group in Europe except for their near allies in Transylvania. Their strength was particularly in the east of the Duchy of Lithuania, and they may have connections with various pre-existing Orthodox dissident groups, notably the so-called 'Judaizers', who also expressed doubts about the Trinity and rejected icons (see p. 527). However, these existing Orthodox roots were soon enriched by exiles from southern Europe, to the extent that the anti-Trinitarians became known as 'Socinians' after two further Italian radicals, Lelio Francesco Sozini (Socinus), whose nephew Fausto Paolo Sozzini [
sic
] brought his teachings to Poland. Remarkably swiftly, in 1569 the anti-Trinitarians were even able to open their own institution of higher education in Poland, the Rakow Academy, complete with printing press: the Catechism of Rakow produced in 1609 became in its Latin version an internationally known statement of anti-Trinitarian belief.

The academy was at the heart of another effort to provide an alternative to the normal organization of society: like the communitarian Hutterites enjoying an oasis of freedom in Moravia, the community held property in common, embraced strict pacifist principles and observed no distinctions of rank. Unlike the Hutterites, Rakow was not suspicious of independent thinking or advanced learning. It represented the most thoroughgoing challenge so far to sixteenth-century Europe's hierarchical assumptions, yet there was much else in the fertile variety of Polish radical Christianity. Anti-Trinitarians also argued in their Church gatherings as to whether or not Christian believers were justified in possessing serfs, for the very practical reason that patrons of anti-Trinitarian congregations there were normally serf-owning noblemen. This was a very different version of radical Christianity from that of the unassuming Hutterite craftsmen of central Europe.
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In what was then Lithuania (now Belarus), Simon Budny, a long-lived scholar with a tendency to change his mind which disconcerted even the anti-Trinitarians, published his first version of the Polish Bible in 1572. In its preparation, several rabbis of the Karaites, a branch of Judaism which like Protestantism respected only what it saw as the literal meaning of scripture, amicably cooperated with this Protestant Christian who emphasized his admiration for the Tanakh.
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Amid the competitive religious market which was Poland-Lithuania in the mid-sixteenth century, its leaders launched political changes with profound implications for the future of the region. First came the restructuring of their polity in the Union of Lublin of 1569 (see p. 533) and then an opportunity to enshrine religious pluralism in the constitution of the commonwealth. King Sigismund Augustus died in 1572: after a tragically tumultuous marital history, he was the last of the Jagiellon male line. Now the provisions in the constitutional settlement of the Union of Lublin came into operation: the election of a new monarch was in the hands of the noblemen of the commonwealth. A majority was determined to keep the Habsburgs from adding to their collection of European thrones, and the obvious alternative candidate would come from the Habsburgs' chief dynastic rivals in Europe, the Valois dynasty of France. Accordingly, negotiations began with the younger brother of King Charles IX, Henri, Duke of Anjou. A major complicating factor, however, was the arrival in early autumn 1572 of shocking news from France; in the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Catholics had turned murderously on Huguenots and the butchery had spread right across France (see p. 676). It was not surprising that Protestant Polish nobility were determined that Henri would not take their throne without a guarantee that there would be no repetition of these atrocities in the commonwealth.