Itt-Ott, 1990 (23. évfolyam, 114-117. szám)

1990 / 117. szám

qualitative effect on the cultural development of the Saxon communities. In general, they did not follow in the footsteps of their artisan and businessman fathers. Instead they found positions within Saxon society in which they were able to apply their intellectual skills: as clergymen, but also as teachers and lawyers. The rise of Saxon elementary schools reflects an increased demand for basic education for boys. By 1500, most local Saxon parishes had their own school, in which the pupils were taught primarily Latin, but in which the basic language of instruction was otherwise not any of the various Saxon subdialects, but German. The use of German instead of Latin for keeping records of the guilds and of the towns (though not of the still Catholic parishes themselves) went hand-in-hand with the evolution of these schools: while a knowledge of Latin, synonymous with being literate, was originally expected even of the members of the guilds, German began to be used increasingly in their documents, from the earliest examples dating from about 1420, to the almost exclusive use of German by the turn of the century (Teutsch 1925, 196). It appears that it was not the Reformation that ushered in High German as the official national language in Saxon Transylvania, as it is generally supposed, but the acceptance of that idiom as the written and formal spoken language of the elite that paved the way there for Luther’s ideas.

The first traces of the Reformation in Transylvania go back to the early years of 1519 and 1520, to the cities of Kronstadt and Hermannstadt. It is said that merchants returning from the Leipzig fair were the first to bring back Lutheran — more accurately anti- Catholic — pamphlets, which immediately found wide acceptance among the local people. Why this was so is a complex question, one that more properly belongs in a discussion of the general history of the Reformation. In the Sachsenland, though, there were local factors at work as well, beyond an attraction to what was obviously very much a German popular movement: the most important of these were a legal and jurisdictional feud of long standing with the higher echelons of the Catholic Church of Hungary; the question of financial support for the Catholic apparatus; and the status of the powerful religious orders on Saxon soil, many of which were considered foreign elements. The weakness of the royal government at the time also inspired the Saxons to seek even greater autonomy, for reasons of monetary self interest and of collective juridical defense (Teutsch 1923, 35 et seq.).

The coincidence of the spiritual revolution with the advent of relatively cheap printing made the importation and reproduction of “subversive” Lutheran propaganda so widespread that the local Saxon leaders, most of them still loyal to the central authorities of church and state, held regular house searches and book burnings in Hermannstadt and Kronstadt on royal orders. For that matter, the Hungarian diet declared, in 1523 and again in 1526, that not only Lutheran books, but Lutherans themselves should be burned at the stake as heretics and enemies of the Virgin Mary — i.e., of the established order. But whether because of the weakness of the central government, or of royal sympathy for the new ideas — it appears that

King Lajos and his queen were themselves admirers of Luther, as were many of the powerful magnates in the land — no such executions took place in Transylvania, and only three or four in all of Hungary (Zoványi 1921, 35-48).

Even though it would be wrong to speak of an organized reformation movement among the Saxons during the 1520’s, Lutheran teachings began to be accepted by more and more of the Saxon clergy, and by their parishioners. Clandestine and then open German services were held with some regularity in Hermannstadt for instance, as early as 1525, by a certain Brother George, a former Dominican, with the tacit approval and protection of the city council. George became so popular that the parish priest, Stadtpfarrer Huet, had to yield to the demands of the council to allow Lutheran preaching in the main parish church itself. “I shall either have to leave my country or my faith” — he lamented, but complied with the wishes. Brother George and others spread the German Word in the surrounding countryside, too, in spite of opposition. Petrus Thonheuser, dean of the local chapter of the diocese, managed to bring one of the subversive preachers, a certain Johannes Clementis, to trial before an ecclesiastic court, which duly condemned him to be burned — but the mayor of Hermannstadt, Johann Rappolt, supported by the entire Stadtrat, vetoed the decision, and ordered Clementis released after he promised, in writing, to mend his ways. And in the same year the so-called Saxon University, which was not a school but a general assembly of the representatives of Saxons of all jurisdictions, passed a resolution making it illegal to bequeath real property to the Church or for the use of the Church (Teutsch 1925, 250-51).

The slow but steady spread of the Lutheran tenets continued among the Saxons after the disaster of the battle of Mohács, after which Hungary was split into three and blessed with two kings: Ferdinand Habsburg and János Zápolyai. Both were devout Catholics and enemies of the Reformation. When King János, who came to rule over the East, including Transylvania, threatened to use troops to restore Roman Catholicism in Hermannstadt in 1529, the city’s answer was, allegedly, an order for all monks and adherents of the Catholic Church, the potential intramural enemy, to leave the city within a week, on pain of death. G.D. Teutsch, the great historian of the Saxons, doubts that such an order was ever issued, adding that if it were true, it could only have been aimed at the Hungarian Dominicans of Hermannstadt, whom the city expelled in fact, and whose abbot and one other member they held under arrest for a while. Yet loyal Saxon Catholics continued in the office of parish priest there undisturbed until 1536, when Matthias Ramser finally completed the break with the old church Teutsch 1925, 252).

That was, however, after the return of one Johannes Honterus, or Honter, not to Hermannstadt, but to the main stage of the Saxon Reformation, Kronstadt, in the summer of 1533. G. D. Teutsch calls him the Saxon Luther and Melanchton embodied in one, “a champion of God, through whom the Lord founded his Church

24 ITT-OTT 23. évf. (1990), téli (117.) szám