Fraternity-Testvériség, 1958 (36. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)
1958-08-01 / 8. szám
16 FRATERNITY from every pulpit in the land. All kinds of people had felt the influence of Luther. In 1521, for example, Simon Grynaeus had fled from a teaching post in Vienna because of his advanced opinions and had accepted an appointment in Buda. In 1522 Paul Speratus (1484-1551) had exchanged the position of preacher in Würzburg Cathedral for that of a humble small-town clergyman in Hungary. Even the royal court at Buda had become a center of reformed teaching, it seems, as members of the royal family, we are told, kept asking for enlightenment from travellers returning from abroad. The new opinions were being passed on, moreover, not only from the pulpit but in the market places as well, as traders brought back news and information from the cities of the west. It had come about by this time that one could even buy Luther’s writings for a few coins on the street. Nor was language an insuperable difficulty to the spread of Luther’s tenets, since even at that time German was the lingua franca of central Europe. However, it was just this factor of language which was the reason for the Reformation spreading first of all in the German-speaking trading cities of Hungary. As early as 1522 the Pope had been denounced from the pulpits of the German-speaking city of Sopron (Ocdenburg) with the result that in 1524, and again in 1526, envoys had to be sent to silence those outspoken preachers. In 1523 the national assembly meeting in Buda had to threaten all heretics with punishment, and this punishment was specified in 1525 as burning at the stake. Thus a year before the battle of Mohács, Speratus and Grynaeus had to flee abroad, and Cordatus and Kresling, who were both leaders of the movement, were languishing in prison. The stake was used only sporadically, it is true, as seldom would public opinion allow such an execution to take place. The fact was that most of the country was ripe for the reformed faith just at the time when the great disaster took place.
