Ungarn, das Reich der Stephanskrone, im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung: Multiethnizität, Land und Konfession 1500 bis 1700 (review)

Ungarn, das Reich der Stephanskrone, im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung: Multiethnizität, Land und Konfession 1500 bis 1700. By Márta Fata. [Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung, Vol. 60.] (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag. 2000. Pp. ix, 361. DM 59.00 paperback.)

The book by Márta Fata deals with the time period of the Reformation and spiritual renewal from a Hungarian point of view, with religious politics of the, rather bloody, events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the historic Hungary of King St. Stephen's Crown, and draws--one may add--in a fully prepared and most knowledgeable manner, an ethnic and religious profile of the period for the serious academic scholar, and/or the reader who does not read the Magyar language or know much about this country's history in east-central Europe. The question of religious renewal, the progress made by, and mainly the circumstances surrounding Luther, Calvin, and other religious reformers, bound Hungary to the German empire, because many of the Hungarian religious reformers had pursued their studies at western universities in the Netherlands or in the empire. The specific political and religious color of the age, and of geography --in historic Hungary, besides the Magyar stratum (following the directive of King St. Stephen [d. 1038]: "Nam unius lingue uniusque moris regnum inbecille et fragile est"), many nationalities had been living next to each other for centuries, as in neighboring Poland-Lithuania, or in Kiev--turned this region into a battleground where the sphere of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation included Slovak (Upper Hungary), Croatian (together with Dalmatian and Slavonic) lands, or Transylvania with the region of the Temesvar Banat (an area that belongs to Romania today), further the sub-Carpathian region (now part of Ukraine), and the Bachka and Serem lands that are part of today's little-Jugoslavia, not to leave out Burgenland, which forms the eastern region of Austria.

The author has analyzed objectively the lengthy flow of religious reformation and the Catholic counter-renewal that went on among these various national groups for several decades, keeping in mind the most particular circumstance that the territory of historic Hungary had been, from 1541 to 1697, divided into three parts because of the Ottoman-Turkish onslaught. The middle portion of the country remained under Ottoman rule; the Catholic Habsburgs ruled the western part, while the eastern region (Transylvania, and the partium) came under the princes of Transylvania, who, most of the time, paid tribute to the Turkish porte in Istanbul. Ms. Fata describes the situation in the first twenty pages (in small print) of her book, and supports her observations with many skillfully drawn maps (whose only shortcomings would be that, being small, the maps do not show many details; there is a list of the maps on p. 361). The first two chapters of the book depict Hungary before the Reformation and humanistic trends and discuss the Catholic attempts at religious renewal (in the footsteps of Erasmus), so that, in chapters three and four, she may debate the spread of the Protestant Reformation among the ranks of the nobility and the business-minded professional middle class in various parts of the divided country, mainly in the Habsburg portion and in Tranyslvania, drawing with forceful strokes a picture of the rapid spread of humanism in the land. The next two chapters deal with the "endangered" political position of both Protestants and Catholics in the "royal," that is, Habsburg, territories and present with painful detail the continued struggle of the Calvinists and other smaller religious groups--as, for example, of the Unitarians--for their survival. The last two chapters in the work are devoted to the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the forced re-Catholicization of Protestants under Emperor Leopold I (d. 1705). There follows...