Poland's Bright Chapter Under Two Sigismunds
Under Sigismund I (1506–1548) and his son Sigismund II (1548–1572) a bright chapter opened in the history of the Polish nation. Both were men of taste and learning and lovers of art and letters. Using the relative freedom of thought and religion of their time, the Poles escaped the darkness of the Middle Ages and by their advances left other European nations behind for centuries. Sigismund I married Bona Sforza, the lively, gifted daughter of Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan (1518), who took a group of Italian courtiers and scholars with her to Kraków. Instead of being displeased by these foreigners, the king used them to spread the Renaissance in Poland. Polish nobles gradually grew used to fine dress and lavish living, their speech and manners became more refined, and art and letters flourished so far that in 1523 Erasmus wrote: "I salute a nation that has become foremost among the most advanced nations of the world in learning, law, morals, religion and all the things that separate us from savagery." Bona won the king's heart by her beauty, skill, competence and charm and, as queen of Poland, brought the nation into contact with civilization. Her son, Sigismund II, became famous in philology and oratory. Poland's bloody rivalry and struggle with Sweden, Denmark and Russia for control of the Baltic ports held the nation back. In a war Poland lost Prussia, but it annexed Mazovia, which included Warsaw (1529), and Livonia, where the port of Riga lay (1516, the book's date). Poland was then one of Europe's important countries.
Why Poland Listened to Reformers
At this time the ideas of religious reformers came to Poland from Germany and Switzerland. The religious freedom the king had given his Greek Catholic subjects led the Poles to look with respect on other people's religious ideas, and the long rebellion of the Hussites and Utraquists in neighboring Bohemia had made the nation somewhat indifferent to the power of a distant pope. The bishops, chosen by the king, were learned, patriotic men who preferred Erasmus's way of reforming the Church to rebellion and bloodshed, and all supported the humanist movement. Their wish to reform the Church did not quiet the envy of the nobles and townsmen, who had their eyes on its property and income. People were weary of the transfer of the national wealth to Rome, the buying and selling of indulgences and Church offices, and the heavy cost of litigation in bishops' courts. The exemption of the clergy from taxes and the clergy's collection of tithes from nobles angered the country's nobility. A group of influential nobles, perhaps for economic reasons, looked kindly on Luther's criticism of the Church; and feudal lords with a measure of independence on their estates supported local Protestant movements, just as Germany's independent local rulers supported Luther's rising.
In 1518 a monk in Danzig took up Luther's ideas, demanded reform of the Church and married. Another preacher spread Luther's ideas so effectively that the members of several churches threw the religious images out of them (1522). The city council dissolved the monasteries and freed monks and nuns from their vows (1525). The Reformation spread so far that by 1540 the pulpits of all the city's churches were in Protestant preachers' hands.
Lutheran, Calvinist and Bohemian Currents
When some clergy of Braunsberg in Polish Prussia introduced Lutheran rites into their churches and the orthodox complained of them to the city's bishop, the bishop replied that Luther had founded his ideas on the Bible and that anyone who thought he could prove them wrong should set to work (1520). Sigismund I wanted to put the press under censorship and keep Lutheran publications out of Poland, but his secretary and Queen Bona's confessor, a Franciscan, had secretly become Protestants. In 1539 Calvin dedicated his work, a commentary on the Mass (the title as the book gives it), to Poland's crown prince.
After the crown prince took the throne as Sigismund II, the ideas of Luther and Calvin spread quickly in Poland. The Bible was translated into Polish, and in religious gatherings the local language took the place of Latin. Prominent clergy such as Jan Łaski openly became Protestants. In 1548 the "Bohemian Brethren," driven from their homeland, came to Poland and founded thirty congregations. Catholic priests' attempts to prosecute some of the country's nobles for heresy and seize their property turned the nobles away from the Church (1552). The national Diet of 1555 gave freedom to all religions founded on the "pure word of God" and recognized the marriage of clergy and the celebration of the Lord's Supper with bread and wine. Protestantism had now reached its peak of strength in Poland.
The Unitarians
The vigorous growth of the strongest movement, Unitarianism, in the sixteenth century left the country confused and unsettled. Followers of Servetus, who denied the Trinity, began to murmur from 1546 at the far eastern edge of the Catholic world. In 1551 Laelius Socinus visited Poland and spread his sharp, extreme ideas there. Through the efforts of Giorgio Blandrata the Unitarians in Poland increased in number, and in 1561 they published their confession of faith. They denied the divinity of Christ, but believed in his unnatural birth, miracles, resurrection, ascension and receiving revelation from God. They counted belief in the original sinfulness of mankind and in Christ's atonement for sinful man as baseless fancy, took baptism and the Lord's Supper as mere symbols, and taught that man is saved only by following Christ's teaching. After the Calvinist synod of Kraków (1563) declared their views false and groundless, the Unitarians founded an independent church of their own. Their influence and power reached its height in 1579, when Faustus Socinus, nephew of Laelius, came to Poland.
The Catholic Reaction and the Jesuits
The Roman Catholic Church met the new religious ideas, spreading so rapidly in Poland, with persecution of printing and with politics. In 1539 the bishop of Kraków had an eighty-year-old woman burned for refusing to worship the consecrated bread (I give this only briefly). Stanisław Hosius, Bishop of Chełmno (Culm), who soon became a cardinal, fought the Protestants with determination. Though he himself worked to reform the Church, he had no sympathy for Protestant beliefs and rites. At his urging Ludovico Lippomano, Bishop of Verona, was sent to Poland as papal representative, and Giovanni Commendone, Bishop of Zante, was named papal envoy at Kraków.
Pointing to the split in the Protestant ranks, and arguing that the spread of hostile, scattered ideas made it hard to lead the nation morally, they made Sigismund II a firm supporter of Catholicism. In 1564 Hosius and Commendone brought a group of Jesuits to Poland. The Jesuits, trained, disciplined and faithful men, took the most sensitive teaching posts, drew close to the country's influential figures and brought the Polish people back to the inherited faith.
Bohemia and Hungary
Bohemian emigrants had been Protestants for years before Luther clashed with the Roman Catholic Church, and for this reason Luther's ideas did not much surprise them. Germans living on Poland's western border were drawn to Church reform. The "Bohemian Brethren," who made up ten percent of a population of 400,000 (the book's figures, which I could not reconcile), were more Protestant than Luther. Sixty percent of them were Utraquists, Catholics who celebrated the Eucharist with bread and wine and paid no heed to the pope's objections. In 1560 two-thirds of the people of Bohemia were Protestant, but in 1561 Ferdinand brought Jesuits there, and as a result Catholicism came to dominate the other denominations.
The Reformation entered Hungary with German settlers. These settlers, followers of Luther, showed the Hungarians that a person could refuse to follow the Roman Catholic Church and the emperor and still live. Hungarian peasants, who suffered under a feudalism the Church protected, welcomed Protestantism in the hope of release from Church bondage. Feudal lords eyed Church lands, whose yield was no less than that of their own. City workers, influenced by Utopia and seeing the Church as the greatest obstacle to their hopes, took to smashing religious images with a fury. The Roman Catholic Church pressed the state to count adherence to Protestantism as a mortal sin. In western Hungary, Ferdinand, king of Hungary, tried to reach a settlement with the Protestants and wanted to permit clerical marriage and the Eucharist in both the Catholic and Protestant forms.
In eastern Hungary, which the Turks held, Protestantism spread without meeting any obstacle. The number of Protestants in Hungary grew so much that in 1550 the conversion of the whole Hungarian people seemed settled and unavoidable. But Calvinism then challenged Lutheran theology, and the Magyars, who had long nursed a grudge against Germans, turned away from the Lutheran faith to Swiss Calvinism. Calvinists became so numerous that in 1558 they held a great synod at Csenger. The rivalry and contest among Protestant groups split the Hungarian Reformation in two. Many officials and converts returned to the Roman Catholic Church in the hope of seeing social stability and peace restored to the country; and in the seventeenth century, through the Jesuits, led by the son of a follower of Calvin, Catholicism came back to Hungary.