Fraternity-Testvériség, 1958 (36. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)
1958-08-01 / 8. szám
14 FRATERNITY center and south of the country, the Turks held sway; secondly, in the east, Transylvania was at that period virtually a separate kingdom; and, thirdly, in the north and west of the great Hungarian plain, the Habsburgs were still able to hold on to some of their former territory and ruled what they still had in their power from the city of Vienna with a rod of iron. Another factor militating against its spread was that neither of the two Christian kings to the east and to the west showed any sympathy at all with the movement towards Reformation. On the other hand, the reason for the speedy success of the Reformation in Hungary was twofold. In the first place the ground had been well prepared before ever Martin Luther’s name was known in Hungary; and, secondly, the Reformation was furthered by the fact that Hungary, much more than most other nations in the sixteenth century, had strong ties with her neighbours. During this century she was in close touch with the west, to a degree that she had not been in earlier centuries. With the discovery of America, her eyes looked west as eagerly as did the eyes of the other nations of Europe. Moreover, since to the east the Turks at that time cut her off from the great trade routes to Russia, Hungary found herself in consequence becoming part of the community of western nations. So linked had she become with the west, especially through the international nature of the Roman Catholic Church, that, for example, her own universities were prevented from developing a life and standard of their own. Hungarian youths by the hundreds were in the habit of going off to study in the Sorbonne, or Bologna, at Prague, Vienna or Cracow, in the century before the Reformation. And in places such as these they naturally met up with all the new movements of thought and the developments in theology of which the Hussites in Bohemia and the Waldensians in Italy, for example, were representatives in their own countries. But in Hungary itself there arose men who, though they had no opportunity of contact with
