As in Bohemia, so in Hungary, there was a ready popular inclination to religious independence of Rome before the Lutheran period. The limited sway of the Hungarian monarchy left the nobles abnormally powerful, and their normal jealousy of the wealth of the Church made them in the thirteenth century favourable to the Waldenses and recalcitrant to the Inquisition.64 In the period of the Hussite wars a similar protection was long given to the thousands of refugees led by Ziska from Bohemia into Hungary in 1424.65 The famous king Matthias Corvinus, who put severe checks on clerical revenue, had as his favourite court poet the anti-papal bishop of Wardein, John, surnamed Pannonicus, who openly derided the Papal Jubilee as a financial contrivance.66 Under Matthias’s successor, the ill-fated Uladislaus II, began a persecution, pushed on by his priest-ruled queen (1440), which drove many Hussites into Wallachia; and at the date of Luther’s movement the superior clergy of Hungary were a powerful body of feudal nobles, living mainly as such, wielding secular power, and impoverishing the State.67 As the crusade got up by the papacy against the Turks (1514) drew away many serfs, and ended in a peasant war against the nobility, put down with immense slaughter, and followed by oppression both of peasants and small landholders, there was a ready hearing for the Lutheran doctrines in Hungary. Nowhere, probably, did so many join the Reformation movement in so short a time.68 As elsewhere, a number of the clergy came forward; and the resistance of the rest was proportionally severe, though Queen Mary, the wife of King Louis II, was pro-Lutheran.69 Books were burned by cartloads; and the diet was induced to pass a general decree for the burning of all Lutherans.70 The great Turkish invasion under Soliman (1526) could not draw the priests from their heresy-hunt; but the subsequent division of sovereignty between John Zapoyla and Ferdinand I, and above all the disdainful tolerance of the Turkish Sultan in the parts under his authority,71 permitted of a continuous spread of the anti-papal doctrine. About 1546 four bishops joined the Lutheran side, one getting married; and in Transylvania in particular the whole Church property was ere long confiscated to “the State”; so that in 1556, when only two monasteries remained, the Bishop withdrew. Of the tithes, it is said, the Protestant clergy held three-fourths, and retained them till 1848.72 In 1559, according to the same authority, only three families of magnates still adhered to the pope; the lesser nobility were nearly all Protestant; and the Lutherans among the common people were as thirty to one.73

As a matter of course, Church property had been confiscated on all hands by the nobles, Ferdinand having been unable to hinder them. Soon after the battle of Mohäcs (1526) the nobles in diet decided not to fill up the places of deceased prelates, but to make over the emoluments of the bishoprics to “such men as deserved well of their country.” Within a short time seven great territories were so accorded to as many magnates and generals, “nearly all of whom separated from the Church of Rome, and became steady supporters of the Reformation.”74 The Hungarian “Reformation” was thus remarkably complete.

Its subsequent decadence is one of the proofs that, even as the Reformation movement had succeeded by secular force, so it was only to be maintained on the same footing by excluding Catholic propaganda. In Hungary, as elsewhere, strife speedily arose among Reformers on the two issues on which reason could play within the limits of Scripturalism—the doctrine of the eucharist and the divinity of Jesus. On the former question the majority took the semi-rationalist view of Zwingli, making the eucharist a simple commemoration; and a strong minority in Transylvania became Socinian. The Italian Unitarian Giorgio Biandrata (or Blandrata75), driven to Poland from Switzerland for his anti-trinitarianism, and called from Poland to be the physician of the Prince of Transylvania, organized a ten days’ debate between Trinitarians and Unitarians at Weissenberg in 1568; and at the close the latter obtained from the nobles present all the privileges enjoyed by the Lutherans, even securing control of the cathedral and schools of Clausenburg.76 It is remarkable that this, the most advanced movement of Protestantism, has practically held its ground in Transylvania to modern times.77

The advance, however, meant desperate schism, and disaster to the main Protestant cause. The professors of Wittemberg appealed to the orthodox authorities to suppress the heresy, with no better result than a public repudiation of the doctrine of the Trinity at the Synod of Wardein,78 and an organization of the Unitarian Churches. In due course these in turn divided. In 1578 Biandrata’s colleague, Ferencz Davides, contended for a cessation of prayers to Christ, whereupon Biandrata invited Fausto Sozzini from Basel to confute him; and the confutation finally took the shape of a sentence of perpetual imprisonment on Davides in 1579 by the Prince of Transylvania, to whom Biandrata and Sozzini referred the dispute. The victim died in a few days—by one account, in a state of frenzy.79 Between the Helvetic and Augsburg confessionalists, meanwhile, the strife was equally bitter; and it needed only free scope for the new organization of the Jesuits to secure the reconquest of the greater part of Hungary for the Catholic Church.

The course of events had shown that the Protestant principle of private judgment led those who would loyally act on it further and further from the historic faith; and there was no such general spirit of freethought in existence as could support such an advance. In contrast with the ever-dividing and mutually anathematizing parties of the dissenters, the ostensible solidity of the Catholic Church had an attraction which obscured all former perception of her corruptions; and the fixity of her dogma reassured those who recoiled in horror from Zwinglianism and Socinianism, as the adherents of these systems recoiled in turn from that of Davides. Only the absolute suppression of the Jesuits, as in Elizabethan England, could have saved the situation; and the political circumstances which had facilitated the spread of Protestantism were equally favourable to the advent of the reaction. As the Huguenot nobles in France gradually withdrew from their sect in the seventeenth century, so the Protestant nobles in Hungary began to withdraw from theirs towards the end of the sixteenth. What the Jesuits could not achieve by propaganda was compassed by imperial dragonnades; and in 1601 only a few Protestant congregations remained in all Styria and Carinthia.80 Admittedly, however, the Jesuits wrought much by sheer polemic, the pungent writings of their Cardinal Pazmány having the effect of converting a number of nobles;81 while the Protestants, instead of answering the most effective of Pazmány’s attacks, The Guide to Truth, spent their energies in fighting each other.82

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there ensued enough of persecution by the Catholic rulers to have roused a new growth of Protestantism, if that could longer avail; but the balance of forces remained broadly unchanged. Orthodox Protestantism and orthodox Unitarianism, having no new principle of criticism as against those turned upon themselves by the Jesuits, and no new means of obtaining an economic leverage, have made latterly no headway against Catholicism, which is to-day professed by more than half the people of Hungary, while among the remainder the Greek Catholics and Greek Orientals respectively outnumber the Helvetic and Lutheran Churches. The future is to some more searching principle of thought.