So it was that in 1665, when a recently arrived Hungarian count named Daniel Márkos Szent-Iványi went browsing at a London bookseller's, he came across a volume of astonishing rarity that the bookseller was offering at an extremely reasonable price.
Count Szent-Iványi was an accomplished humanist scholar from a distinguished family and had been a noted theologian in Hungary before his flight. The Szent-Iványis remain prominent in their nation's affairs today—one of the count's descendents, István Szent-Iványi, served as chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the nation's parliament.
The book Count Daniel Szent-Iványi discovered was an octavo, over a century old, lacking the author's name or a printer's mark. To the bookseller, it had obviously been indistinguishable from the thousands of other ordinary old books that were lying around London.
But Count Szent-Iványi recognized the book immediately. It was Christianismi Restitutio.
How the book came to be in London, or even to survive at all, no one knows. Perhaps Servetus had retained a few copies, as authors often do, and sent them off to friends. Perhaps he had given one to the publisher Marrinus from Basel, to whom he had first shown the manuscript and who had called him “dearest Michael,” or to John Frellon, who had initiated the correspondence between Servetus and Calvin; or perhaps not quite all of the shipment to Frankfurt had been destroyed as Calvin intended. Whatever had happened originally, for over a century someone or some group had protected the book as one would protect an escaped political prisoner. They had kept it hidden, in good condition, away from flood, fire, war, pestilence, and the hands of the Catholics and the Calvinists, until the fortunes of war or theft had brought it to that bookstall in London.
Count Szent-Iványi recognized the book because in his faith Chris-tianismi Restitutio was considered a great and important work and Michael Servetus the spiritual center. That faith, Unitarianism, would, in the coming centuries, help inspire some of the greatest minds in history, among them John Locke, Isaac Newton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Jefferson. And one of the people responsible for the establishment of that faith—although nothing could have been farther from his intention—was John Calvin.
IN THE EARLY 1550S, there was a small colony of Italians living in Geneva who had fled their native country to avoid religious persecution. Although they were less tractable than Calvin would have preferred, there were a number of eminent scholars in the group, so, provided that they stuck to the rules, he let them stay and even use one of the town churches. Happy to have a place of refuge, the Italians avoided politics and kept pretty much to themselves.
Then came the Servetus trial. The colony's leaders, like everyone else in the city, followed the proceedings closely. Several of them found themselves swayed by the passion and scholarship of Servetus's arguments. They were encouraged in these views by Matteo Gribaldo, a visiting scholar. Appalled by the trial and the sentence of burning, Gribaldo, a lawyer and judge, spoke out against it and even demanded an audience with Calvin to stop the execution. Calvin refused and used his influence to persuade Gribaldo to leave the city.
A year later Gribaldo was back. He began once more to speak at the little Italian church, now promoting Servetus's antitrinitarianism. Calvin, informed by his network of elders that Gribaldo was gaining more than a few converts, decided to act. He invited Gribaldo to a meeting, ostensibly to congratulate him on being called to chair the law school at a neighboring Swiss university. When Gribaldo got there, Calvin, in the presence of several of his church officials, refused to shake his hand, a way of announcing his suspicions about Gribaldo's piety. Gribaldo saw the danger and quickly left the meeting, and soon after left Geneva for good. Calvin got the word out, however, and Gribaldo was hounded from place to place until he finally died of plague in
1564.
But Gribaldo had been too persuasive to simply fade away. The Italian colony became a group of dissenters waiting for a leader. They got one two years later when the distinguished physician Giorgio Bian-drata joined the colony.
Biandrata, born four years after Servetus in 1515, was a Catholic aristocrat who had studied medicine in Pavia. He specialized in “women's diseases” and had published a number of medical books. In the early 1540s, Bona Sforza, an Italian married to Sigismund I, king of Poland, had chosen Biandrata to be her personal physician.
Poland, at the height of its power and as large as France, had been one of the places where Reform had caught on quickly, and Sigismund, a devout Catholic, had been unable to stem the tide. The Catholic clergy in Poland were particularly corrupt, and many young nobles embraced the teachings of Luther and then Calvin, as a means of both purifying the religion and amassing political power and wealth through the seizure of the vast estates owned by the Church.
Queen Bona, who had been only twenty-five when she had married the fifty-two-year-old Sigismund I in 1518, added intellectual ferment to the mix by enticing many accomplished scholars and artists to Poland. Her court became a center for humanist discussion and the exchange of new ideas. As a result, her confessor, while nominally a Franciscan friar, soon became a secret dissident leader, spreading Calvinist literature throughout the country. It was here that Biandrata, her doctor, first became acquainted with the new reformist ideas.
As Sigismund grew older, Bona, every bit as clever as the king and even more ambitious, began to assert herself in affairs of state. When Sigismund arranged the marriage of their son, Crown Prince Sigismund Augustus, to the Hapsburg archduchess Elizabeth, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Charles V's brother, Ferdinand, king of Austria, Bona demonstrated that she had taken more from her ancestry than artistic sensibility.
She doted on Sigismund Augustus, who had developed some odd behavior. Restricted to little girls as playmates by his mother during his childhood, he had developed a penchant for dressing in women's clothing. (He also required the little girls to dress as boys.) “It was a mistake of nature,” Bona said once, “to let my daughter [Princess] Isabella come into the world as a girl, and Sigismund Augustus as a boy.”
The thought of Sigismund Augustus cohabitating with Elizabeth turned out to be too much for Queen Bona to bear. She did not allow the young couple to sleep or dine with each other. Finally, Bona sent Sigismund Augustus out of the country and denied Elizabeth a separate kitchen. The young princess died from a mysterious illness soon afterward. “Elizabeth surely was not deceased of a common, natural death,” a Hapsburg diplomat observed in his memoirs.
After Sigismund I died in 1548, Sigismund Augustus, now King Sigismund II, seemed finally to be taken with a woman on his own. Again against his mother's will, he married Barbara Radziwill a great beauty from a powerful Lithuanian family. “Now we shall have to beware at mealtimes,” he wrote presciently to his new brother-in-law Nicholas, the Black Prince. The newlyweds were not wary enough; Barbara, too, died mysteriously a year later.
Despite the cross-dressing, poisonings, and unnaturally close mother-son relationship, however, Sigismund II turned out to be a remarkably effective king. He expanded the country's borders still farther, to include Lithuania and parts of Prussia and the Muscovy duchies and skillfully manipulated the nobility into agreeing to checks against their power.
Although deeply religious himself and a Catholic like his father, Sigismund II nonetheless allowed Lutherans and Calvinists to live and pray unmolested, noting that he “wished to be king of both sheep and goats.” Even Jews were allowed to live and worship openly in Poland. Most significantly, he made no move against those who had, as a matter of conscience, adopted religious practices that called into question the tenets of both Catholicism and Protestantism.
BIANDRATA SPENT THREE YEARS at Sigismund II's court, becoming more and more committed to the wisdom of religious tolerance. When he finally returned home to Italy in 1551, he began to preach his new convictions. But Italy wasn't Poland, and after five years of increasing pressure and threat, Biandrata moved on to Geneva.
The little Italian churc
h was still questioning the doctrine of the Trinity, and Biandrata was soon questioning it as well. His intelligence and reputation and the force of his personality propelled him to the leadership of the congregation. The teachings of Servetus were central to its philosophy, and Biandrata adopted them fully.
Word of these developments got to Calvin, who was furious. His nemesis had acquired a surrogate. To break Biandrata's power, he imposed a new oath. The entire congregation was required to swear fealty to the Trinity in writing, on pain of banishment. Biandrata refused at first, but under pressure from his own followers, who did not want to lose him, pretended to give in. After signing the oath, he continued his efforts to convert Genevans to antitrinitarianism. Calvin was preparing for his arrest when a sympathizer warned Biandrata of the danger, and he was forced to flee.
He returned to Poland, where he was sure he would be welcome. Antitrinitarianism was sweeping the country. In 1556, a Polish minister calling himself Gonesius, who had discovered the works of Servetus in Switzerland, had publicly denied the Trinity at a religious conference and succeeded in converting Jan Kiszka, the second-largest landowner in all of Poland. Kiszka owned four hundred villages and seventy cities. He appointed Gonesius to be the minister of his local church, set up a printing press to promulgate the new views, and converted all of the churches within his vast territory, some twenty in all.
There were a number of different forms of antitrinitarianism being practiced across Eastern Europe. The differences were marginal, often dealing with literal versus figurative interpretations of a key passage or passages in the scriptures, or whether to accept the sacraments as more than symbolism. Although these differences resulted in a number of distinctly different sects—Socinians, Gonesians, and Racovians, among others—they would all eventually evolve into Unitarians.
When Biandrata arrived, he began to expound on Servetus's views and found that many Catholics as well as reformers were not only in sympathy with his doubts about the Trinity and infant baptism, but were attracted by the prospect of a return to a simpler Christianity based solely on the Scriptures. “Young nobles and ministers attending the universities of Germany, Switzerland, or Italy learned the teachings of Servetus and brought them home for discussion,” noted the great Unitarian scholar Earl Morse Wilbur.
Gonesius had established a Unitarian school at Pinczow, about fifty miles north of Crakow, and Biandrata's knowledge of the Scriptures, his experience abroad, and his familiarity with Servetus's beliefs quickly recommended him to the minister. Biandrata, as he had in Geneva, became a leader of the new movement. Soon, two other Genevans from the little Italian colony arrived, having been driven out by Calvin in much the same manner as Biandrata. They added their voices to his.
Calvin, in failing health, wrote letters to everyone of importance he knew in Poland warning them of the danger, urging them to use their influence against Biandrata, but no one in authority took action. Quite the contrary. When Biandrata went from Pinczow to Lithuania, then part of Poland, to spread the new word, he found favor with the late Barbara Radziwill's powerful brother, the Black Prince. Suddenly, the entire reformed church of Poland seemed poised to adopt Servetus's views.
Then, in 1563, Queen Bona's grandson, the sickly young king of Transylvania, fell ill, and she asked Biandrata to attend him. He agreed to become the official court physician and spent the better part of the next twenty-five years there. That period would mark the high point for religious liberalism in Europe, but it would be a disaster for Biandrata.
MOUNTAINOUS AND REMOTE, Transylvania (the name means “beyond the forest”) was sparsely populated by wildly diverse ethnic groups—Hungarians, Szekelys, Saxons, Wallachians, Moldavians, Greeks, Turks, Magyars, and Slovaks. The Szekelys could trace their lineage to Attila's Huns. While rampaging through Europe in the fifth century, the marauders apparently enjoyed the view from the hills, and many settled there.
Transylvania was feudal and agrarian. The aristocracy, a handful of families, owned most of the land and all of the peasantry. Transylva-nians, by necessity, were a hardy people. Goatherding, practiced by many, was a particularly challenging way to make a living. Solitary goatherds roamed the mountains all winter with a charge of sixty or seventy of their master's goats. They survived on cornmeal left along their route in hollow trees or caves. Nothing communicates the flavor of the country better than this eyewitness account of the life of a goatherd:
He does not close his eyes all night and building several small fires around the herd to keep away the slavering wild animals, watches them until the morning. Should it start snowing again at night, the shepherd [goatherd] immediately rousts the herd from its rest and keeps them moving back and forth… Finally, after six months of misery, hard even to imagine for a person used to social intercourse, with a face blackened by storms and freezing cold, but with a sound, healthy stomach and in good strength he descends with his herd to the village.
If he lived, that is.
Once a major Roman trade route to the east, Transylvania had emerged as a country of great strategic importance. Bordered by mountains on two sides, it was all that stood between the Hapsburgs and the extraordinary Ottoman leader Suleiman the Great.
Suleiman, also known as “the Conqueror,” one of those direct descendants of Osman, had assumed the throne in 1520. At that time the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith, extending from Belgrade to Smyrna, from Sarajevo to the Crimea. As a military leader, Suleiman was brilliant, ruthless, and unstoppable. Each summer, seemingly for sport, he set off westward with his army to invade his European neighbors. He attacked, conquered, exacted a hefty monetary tribute, and then went back home to celebrate the inevitable great victory. This went on year after year, season after season.
Suleiman inevitably went through Transylvania, where he warmed up his troops with a little rape and pillaging. By 1526, the Transylva-nians, in an attempt to break the pattern, crowned their former defense minister, John Zapolya, king, authorizing him to pay whatever it took to appease Suleiman. Suleiman seemed amenable, but Ferdinand of Austria, who needed Transylvania as a buffer zone for his own kingdom, had himself crowned king of Transylvania instead. Zapolya (tribute in hand) appealed to Suleiman, and the Hapsburgs soon found themselves out of Transylvania. Thereafter King John I ruled the country, always careful to pay up on time.
Impressed by Zapolya's outflanking of the Hapsburgs, Bona married off her daughter Isabella to him in 1539. No sooner had Isabella borne her husband a son, John Sigismund, in 1540, than Zapolya died. Suleiman, passing through again the following year to accept his yearly payoff, bestowed upon the infant John Sigismund the title King John II of Transylvania. Then, for that year's main event, he moved on and threw Ferdinand's troops out of Budapest, taking over most of Hungary for himself.
KING JOHN II GREW UP to be a highly intelligent young man who spoke eight languages and read and studied humanist works. He was always frail and sickly yet forced himself to ride, hunt, and engage in all the rigorous pursuits that were expected of a monarch. One thing he did not do was get married—the king preferred to spend his nights in the royal bedchamber with his councilor and “friend,” Gáspár Békés, an army officer.
When Biandrata arrived, he found the twenty-three-year-old king very weak. John eventually recovered and during his long weeks of recuperation adopted Biandrata as something of a father figure. They talked long and often, the discussions inevitably turning to religion.
By the time he had recovered completely, John II had converted, becoming history's first and only Unitarian king. Unlike almost every other religious group that got its start as a reaction to intolerance, the Unitarians under King John did not themselves become intolerant. Instead, in 1568, the king issued the Act of Religious Tolerance and Freedom of Conscience, which, in the light of what was going on everywhere else in the world (and has in large part gone on since), was astonishing for its perspicacity, intelligence, and sophistication:
In every place the preachers sha
ll preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well, if not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve. Therefore none of the superintendents or others shall abuse the preachers, no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone, according to the previous statutes, and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment or by removal from his post for his teaching, for faith is the gift of God, this comes from hearing, which hearing is by the word of God.
With the king's blessing, Biandrata attempted to acknowledge the movement's debt to Servetus by republishing Christianismi Restitutio under the title De Regno Christi primus; De Regno Antichristi Regno sec-ondus. Biandrata must have at some point seen the original but then worked from notes, as the text was a close approximation but not an exact replication of the original.
For three years, Transylvanians of all religions lived in peace and harmony. The tiny nation was a showplace of tolerance. Then, on January 15, 1571, King John II was critically injured when his carriage overturned on a hunting trip. Two months later he was dead.
John, who had of course died without leaving an heir, named Gáspár Békés as his successor, a choice that would have been widely popular except for an accident of timing. Békés had the misfortune of being out of the country on a diplomatic mission when the king died. Even worse, that mission happened to be to Ferdinand's court. Suleiman, suspecting skullduggery, withdrew his support from Békés and gave it instead to a moderate Catholic, István Báthori.
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