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Responses to Habsburg Persecution of Protestants in Seventeenth-Century Hungary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2009

Graeme Murdock
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Extract

This article considers responses to Habsburg persecution of Protestants in Hungary during the 1670s. Focusing on the Reformed church, it will first assess how long-established contacts with Reformed co-religionists in northwestern Europe came to provide support for Hungarians in the face of violent state repression. This will concentrate in particular on the trial and imprisonment of Protestant clergy after 1674 and on the liberation of one group of ministers in 1676, thanks to Dutch intervention. It will then consider the diverse ways in which Habsburg persecution of Hungarian Protestants was represented in the Dutch Republic, England, France, and in Hungary, and what this reveals about the international Reformed community toward the end of the confessional age. It will then assess the role of persistent but shifting memories of this era of martyrs and liberators in the later development of Hungarian Reformed identity.

Type
Forum in Honor of R.J.W. Evans
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 40 , April 2009 , pp. 37 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2009

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References

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36 Jurieu, Prejudices against Popery (1689), 640, 643.

37 Ibid., 643–44.

38 Ibid., 645–46.

39 Ibid., 648.

40 A magyarországi gályarab prédikátorok emlékezete, ed. Makkai (1976), 23–24.

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48 http://www.deruyter.org/jpg/fotos/debr.zuil.tot.jpg (all Web pages consulted 1 September 2008). The square now also features a statue of István Bocskai, the Reformed leader of a 1604 anti-Habsburg revolt. Other memorial sites in Hungary to the release of the ministers in 1676 include a relief on the wall of Sárospatak Reformed college bearing an image of the galley-slaves and the legend “Dixit Jehova: Captivos meos liberabo.”

49 Evans, Robert has argued that the forms of “engagement which religious-based communities bequeathed to the modern world became filled with ever more overtly national content, but a content which still bore a deep imprint of pre-modern confessional commitment,” in “Religion and Nation in Hungary, 1790–1848” in Evans, R. J. W., ed., Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Essays on Central Europe, c. 1683–1867 (Oxford, 2006), 153Google Scholar.

50 For discussion of religion and memory, see Hervieu-Léger, D., La Religion pour Mémoire (Paris, 1993; translation London, 2000)Google Scholar.

51 Makkai wrote that although it might be better in some ways to forget the suffering of the 1670s, it was helpful in order to understand religious mentalities during the early modern period, the development of Hungarian resistance to the Habsburgs, and to consider how the ruling class had responded to a crisis in authority by imposing religious persecution in A magyarországi gályarab prédikátorok emlékezete, ed. Makkai (1976), 8; A magyar református egyház története, ed. I. Révész et al. (Budapest, 1949), 110–19.

52 http://www.deruyter.org/Bezoek_Debreczen_2001.html.

53 http://www.federatio.org/ruyter.html and http://www.deruyter.org/chronologie_link_hong.pred.html.

54 http://www.deruyter.org/Bezoek_Roumenie_2005.html.