This article considers responses to Habsburg persecution of Protestants in Hungary during the 1670s. Focusing on the Reformed church, it will first assess how long-established contacts with Reformed co-religionists in northwestern Europe came to provide support for Hungarians in the face of violent state repression. This will concentrate in particular on the trial and imprisonment of Protestant clergy after 1674 and on the liberation of one group of ministers in 1676, thanks to Dutch intervention. It will then consider the diverse ways in which Habsburg persecution of Hungarian Protestants was represented in the Dutch Republic, England, France, and in Hungary, and what this reveals about the international Reformed community toward the end of the confessional age. It will then assess the role of persistent but shifting memories of this era of martyrs and liberators in the later development of Hungarian Reformed identity.

Reformed religion had, from its origins, operated in an international context. Shared ideas, common experiences, practical necessity, and sentiment lay behind the development and maintenance of international connections between Reformed churches. Contact between different Reformed communities was sustained by ongoing exchanges between clergy and activists. However, these informal connections were at times sporadic, and the extent of international exchanges between Reformed churches was unevenly spread across the continent. The cohesiveness of this international community also varied over time and was frequently limited by domestic considerations.

The Reformed world often seemed at its most united in the face of persecution. Persecution was seen to provide obvious proof of the manifest evil of the Roman church and the reality of its threat to the whole body of the true Church. Even in settled Reformed states collective memories of, as well as fears about, Catholic persecution remained key to Reformed identity.Footnote ¹ Catholic persecution also gave Reformed activists an immediate sense of practical purpose. There were refugees in need of welcome and support, charitable collections to organize, fasts to celebrate, and pamphlets to publish in order to engage public sentiment and to try to influence state authorities. Victims were celebrated as heroic examples of steadfast faith unto death, and stories of their martyrdom were collected and recounted. However, this international face of the Reformed community was also profoundly affected by particular domestic contexts. Calculations of state officials about diplomatic policy could block clerical and popular demands for action to relieve the suffering of foreign co-religionists. Indeed, relations between Reformed courts and princes often provide the least convincing evidence of international Reformed solidarity. If Lutheran or Catholic diplomatic or military assistance proved forthcoming, then the bonds of fraternity between Reformed princes could quickly dissolve. Although the rhetoric of the cause of religion at times retained a powerful hold over public opinion, diplomatic failures, squabbling between allies over money, and military defeats all discredited the role of religious affinity in relations between states.Footnote ²

Turning to consider the role of the Hungarian church in this Reformed world, an extensive pattern of direct contacts among Reformed nobles, clergy, and students in Royal Hungary and the Transylvanian principality and their co-religionists in northwestern Europe developed during the early decades of the seventeenth century. Transylvania's princes established diplomatic links with other Reformed states during this period. However, the principality also retained important alliances with Evangelical Sweden and Catholic France in an anti-Habsburg coalition during the Thirty Years' War. Meanwhile, hundreds of Hungarian students attended universities in the empire, the Dutch Republic, and in England. At Franeker in Friesland, Hungarians accounted for almost one in four of all foreign students registered at the university during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. These connections greatly benefited the development of the Hungarian church by providing effective theological training for generations of clergy. Students brought back copies of the latest theological texts, others translated western devotional works into Hungarian, and the most capable students produced their own works on doctrine and moral piety. Hungarian students also used their experiences and contacts to promote changes that they wanted to encourage in domestic schools and in parish life. However, some who returned from foreign universities were labeled as Puritans and innovators, and their suggested reforms were derided by senior clergy.Footnote ³

The Reformed church, as well as the Evangelical and anti-Trinitarian churches, had gained legal rights within the Transylvanian principality during the 1560s, and all ruling princes thereafter promised to uphold these rights on their election. Through the terms of the 1606 Vienna peace, Matthias had first conceded the formal freedoms of Reformed and Evangelical churches in Royal Hungary; these freedoms were confirmed at the 1608 Hungarian diet. However, Protestant control of churches and rights to worship remained contested, and Protestants remained heavily reliant on the support of noble patrons. As the numbers of non-Catholic nobles in the Hungarian diet dwindled and as the regional power of the Reformed princes of Transylvania declined, Protestant congregations in Royal Hungary encountered increasing difficulties in the face of Catholic noble and clerical interference.

Although in 1647 the diet ordered that some ninety seized churches must be returned to Evangelical and Reformed clergy, in 1662 complaints that Catholic landowners and clergy had illegally occupied hundreds of churches in Royal Hungary were ignored.Footnote ⁴ During the 1660s, Protestants were threatened with punishment if they failed to attend mass, and some churches and schools in Royal Hungary were closed or destroyed. In 1660, for example, Pál Eszterházy organized the armed occupation of the Reformed church at Pápa. Members of the town's consistory were arrested, the minister's family was thrown out of their home, and one stubbornly pious widow was dumped out of the town in a nearby marsh.Footnote ⁵ The extent of contacts between Reformed clergy and students and co-religionists in northwestern Europe also sharply decreased during this period. The combined total number of students at Leiden, Utrecht, and Franeker universities fell from 259 in the 1650s to only 107 in the 1660s. The number of Hungarian students at Franeker halved between the 1650s and 1660s and then halved again during the 1670s.Footnote ⁶

The efforts of the Habsburg court, members of the Hungarian nobility, and clergy hierarchy to promote the Catholic church and to weaken its rivals were undermined, however, by political divisions. In 1664 an Ottoman offensive was beaten back at Szentgotthárd, but this victory was not followed by any attempt to reclaim Ottoman-held territory. Instead, Leopold and the sultan declared their peaceful intentions toward one another through the terms of the peace of Vasvár in August 1664. Noble resentment about the court's passivity during the late 1660s gathered around the palatine Ferenc Wesselényi, supported by some leading Catholic magnates including Ferenc Nádasdy, Miklós Zrinyi, and Ferenc Rákóczi. There was also support from some Reformed and Evangelical gentry articulated by the lawyer István Vitnyédi. In 1670 the court reacted by arresting some of the leading conspirators, who quickly betrayed each other in the hope of gaining royal clemency. The court used the opportunity of crushing this noble conspiracy to impose greater central controls over their governance of Hungary and maintained troops in the country.Footnote ⁷

Leopold was then easily persuaded by reports of preachers looking forward to Ottoman liberation from Papist persecution that Protestants had in fact been at the heart of resistance to his authority. Hundreds of those believed to have been involved were summoned to receive royal justice after 1670, including many Protestant ministers and teachers thought to have encouraged prayers for the triumph of the Turks. Catholic clergy provided encouragement for further action against the Evangelical and Reformed churches. The titular bishop of Oradea (Nagyvárad), György Bársony, argued that the legal rights given to Protestants by Hungarian diets were in fact invalid. This provoked hurried rebuttals published in Transylvania by Reformed ministers György Komáromi Csipkés and Mihály Szatmárnémeti.Footnote ⁸ The Habsburg court also received enthusiastic support from many Catholic nobles, no doubt relieved of the early opportunity to signal their loyalty to Leopold. More Protestant churches were confiscated, including the church and college at Sárospatak, which were seized from Reformed control in 1670, thanks to the complicity of Zsófia Báthori, the Catholic widow of Reformed prince György II Rákóczi.Footnote ⁹

In January 1674, Leopold empowered archbishop György Szelepcsényi to prosecute those believed to have supported rebellion against his rule through a special tribunal convened at Bratislava (Pozsony). Taking a good deal of local initiative, the tribunal introduced charges of treason against some 735 Evangelical and Reformed ministers and teachers. More than 300 Protestants actually appeared before the court, a very large majority of whom were Evangelical ministers and teachers whose churches mostly lay in northern and western counties of Hungary. Meanwhile, hundreds of Reformed clergy, as well as other Evangelical clergy, sought protection from arrest on the estates of noble patrons, or they remained beyond the reach of the court in Transylvania or in Ottoman Hungary. The ministers brought before the tribunal were offered the opportunity to avoid imprisonment and confiscation of their property by converting to the Catholic church, going into exile, or renouncing their ministry. These tactics were rather successful, particularly in gaining the acquiescence of many Evangelical clergy. The authorities only had to imprison some ninety-three Protestant clergy and teachers, forty-six of whom were Evangelicals and forty-seven of whom were Reformed. Found guilty of rebellion, of preaching against Mary and the saints, and of being in alliance with the Turks, the ministers were sentenced to death. However, the court gave the convicted prisoners ample opportunity to convert, renounce their offices, or go into exile. The prisoners were first released to consider their position and then suffered imprisonment in various castles around Hungary where they were tortured and put to forced labor. By March 1675, only around sixty surviving clergy and teachers had refused to give in to efforts to get them to convert, go into exile, or renounce their offices.Footnote ¹⁰

This was a considerable success for the efforts of those involved in the tribunal. Catholic priests subsequently took over large numbers of churches, and many non-Catholic clergy had abandoned their congregations, which left local churches badly weakened. The only problem for the authorities remained in how to deal with the hard core of Protestant clergy and teachers. The initiative to resolve this issue seemingly came from Leopold Kollonich, then bishop of Güssing (Németújvár) and president of the Hungarian treasury, who was later appointed archbishop of Esztergom.Footnote ¹¹ A group of forty-one ministers and teachers was sent off on a forced march to assumed death in the galleys of the Spanish fleet at Naples. The ministers were first marched to Ljubljana and then arrived at Trieste in early April 1675. By the time they had reached Naples in May, there were only thirty survivors left who were sold as galley-slaves. Two others were dead, six remained in prison in Italy having been unable to complete their forced march, and three Evangelical ministers had escaped and fled into exile.

The success of this effort to crush Protestantism in Hungary by silencing its clergy was then undermined by the emperor's Dutch allies. Authorities in the Netherlands first attempted to persuade the vice-regent at Naples of the injustice of the treatment of his Hungarian prisoners. By the end of 1675, instructions had been passed to a Dutch fleet in the Mediterranean under Michiel de Ruyter to take action to gain the Hungarians' release. De Ruyter delivered this demand to the authorities in Naples backed up by a show of naval force. On 11 February 1676, twenty-three surviving ministers, a majority of whom were Reformed, were released into the care of de Ruyter. Some of the liberated ministers remembered the moment as like being roused from a nightmare, and they sang psalms of joy and deliverance with their liberators. The ministers also recalled the words of de Ruyter who, in freeing them from the clutches of the “mercenaries of Antichrist,” told them he considered this among the greatest triumphs of his life.Footnote ¹²

The roots of de Ruyter's intervention to liberate these Hungarian ministers at Naples lay in the generations of close contacts between Reformed clergy and students and their co-religionists in the Dutch Republic. Indeed, some of the ministers who had themselves studied at Dutch universities were able to express their gratitude to their liberators in the Dutch language. Institutional and personal connections had sustained a sense of mutuality between the Dutch and Hungarians, and these connections were galvanized into action by a variety of means in 1675 and 1676. Information about the rising tide of Hungarian misery had been transmitted back home by Jacob Jan Hamel Bruyninx, the representative of the Dutch Republic at Leopold's court. Concerns were likewise expressed by Evangelical states about the fate of their co-religionists in Hungary. In December 1674, Bengt Gabrielsson Oxenstierna, the Swedish ambassador at Vienna, made a formal complaint on behalf of Charles XI for the restoration of the liberties of the Evangelical church in Hungary.Footnote ¹³

There were also informal channels of communication and assistance. At Naples, Nicolaus Zaffius, a Venetian doctor, and Swiss merchant brothers Georg and Philip Welz bribed the ministers' guards, brought the prisoners food and clothing, and tried to buy their release. It seems very likely that these individuals were secret Protestants, although one of the liberated ministers later only cautiously commented that “I do not know what religion they were, but from their deeds they showed that they were not true papists.”Footnote ¹⁴ The Welz brothers and Zaffius also assisted in spreading news of the prisoners' situation. Zaffius wrote letters to the authorities in England, Geneva, Zurich, the Netherlands, and Transylvania, as well as to ambassadors at the Habsburg court, seeking assistance for the prisoners. When news reached Zurich, a collection was organized that raised 16,000 florins to pay for the release of the Hungarians. In June 1675, a letter from one Naples prisoner, Ferenc Fóris Otrokócsi, reached his former teacher at the university of Utrecht asking for the intervention of the Dutch authorities. In October 1675, Leopold's representative at the Hague wrote of his concerns about the reaction of the Dutch Reformed church and more broadly of how spreading the news of the Hungarian ministers' plight had stirred Dutch popular sentiment. Action also continued after the release of the prisoners from Naples, and in March 1676, ambassador Bruyninx presented a petition at the Habsburg court on behalf of the Dutch authorities for the release of four surviving imprisoned ministers at Chieti in Italy and of another twenty ministers and teachers still imprisoned in Hungary. In May 1676, the court granted this request, and these prisoners were sent into exile across various Protestant states.Footnote ¹⁵

News of the imprisonment of the Hungarian ministers, their trial, and particularly the plight of the rather small number of ministers who were sent to Spanish galleys therefore quickly circulated across Reformed and Evangelical Europe. Informal contacts galvanized support from churches and clergy who appealed for action to save their persecuted brethren. Lobbying by Reformed clergy and intellectuals, as well as the pressure of popular sentiment, was important in encouraging the Dutch authorities in particular to intervene. The leading characters in the drama, de Ruyter and Bruyninx, also clearly played a vital role in applying direct pressure on the authorities at Naples and at the Habsburg court.

However, this was not a simple tale of concerted Protestant pressure being mobilized to aid co-religionists in distress from Catholic persecution. The Dutch were in a position to exert influence in 1676 because they had entered into an alliance with the emperor and Spanish monarchy in 1673 in the face of a threatened French invasion, which the English supported. De Ruyter was in the Mediterranean in 1676, not to save Hungarian ministers, but to assist the Spanish to suppress the pro-French Messina revolt in Sicily. William III, anxious to shore up domestic support for his rather unlikely Habsburg alliance, may well have been encouraged to support intervention on behalf of the Hungarians at Naples by both religious sentiment and practical domestic politics. Since they had opened separate peace negotiations with the French at Nijmegen in January 1676, the Dutch authorities could also take advantage of a point of immediate pressure on the Habsburg court. In this context, for the Habsburg court to acquiesce to Dutch demands to release a few dozen Hungarians perhaps seemed a rather small price to pay for trying to sustain the stability of their anti-French alliance. One French Catholic writer, Louis Aubery du Maurier, certainly thought that the whole episode showed how the Spanish had made “religion truckle to interest.” Although Spanish rhetoric had longed criticized France for making alliances with the Dutch and Swedes, now the Spanish “look upon the Hollanders as the greatest support of their monarchy.” He noted how to:

However, Leopold's political and religious aspirations in Hungary must have hardly seemed to have been dented by permitting a limited number of clergy to be sent into exile rather than remain imprisoned in Hungary and Italy. Exile had, in any case, been one of the options that the Bratislava court originally presented to Protestant clergy and teachers. However, the exiled ministers' physical presence in foreign Protestant states certainly did some damage to Leopold's reputation. Their personal testimony was first heard in their refuge at Zurich and then in the Dutch Republic, England, and in Saxony. The ministers were also visually represented as determined and saintly martyrs. At Zurich in 1676, Konrad Meyer painted the refugee ministers István Harsányi Móricz and István Séllyei Balog. Harsányi was the former Reformed minister at Rimaszombat, whereas Séllyei had been court preacher to Transylvanian prince György II Rákóczi before becoming minister at Pápa. Both ministers look straight out of the picture at the viewer with steady expressions. Neither shows any visible marks of their suffering, dressed in black cloaks, heads covered by black caps, and both with lengthy beards. However, in the image Harsányi points to a galley in the background under dark skies broken only by the celestial light of divinely appointed liberation.Footnote ¹⁷

More disturbing for the court at Vienna was that the story of the liberation of the Hungarian ministers was quickly circulated in print across Protestant Europe. These pamphlets highlighted the cruelty of Habsburg and Catholic persecution and the innocent suffering of Hungarian Protestants. They also publicized requests for pardons for the ministers from their convictions as rebels and for their right to return home to serve their communities in peace. These pamphlets were based on manuscripts written by some of the liberated clergy. A 1676 Latin text was completed at Zurich by Bálint Kocsi Csergő, with some assistance from István Harsányi Móricz. Different, shortened versions of this manuscript were then translated and published before the end of 1676 in Dutch, German, and English.Footnote ¹⁸ Ferenc Fóris Otrokócsi, the former Reformed minister at Rimaszécs, completed another manuscript account of the ministers' trials, and this became the basis for another illustrated Dutch pamphlet that the Amsterdam doctor Abraham van Poot published in 1684.Footnote ¹⁹

There were also texts in circulation in the empire and Sweden written by exiled Evangelical ministers that showed some similarities with the published Reformed narratives. However, there were also important differences, not least because of the varying perspectives of the two churches on how well their respective clergy had withstood Catholic persecution. In 1675, an illustrated manuscript was completed by Johannes Simonides, and in 1676, Latin and German texts were compiled by Georgius Lani and another illustrated German text was written by Tobias Masznyik. These three Evangelical authors were those who had escaped from the forced march through Italy. Although not rescued by de Ruyter, their liberation from “the darkness of Italy” to exile at Wittenberg in the “light of the Gospel” had hardly been less dramatic. The ministers had escaped, only to be captured again, and were then being transported, so they thought, to the galleys of Naples. However, they discovered that benefactors had in fact paid for their release. One of these benefactors was Georg Welz, and the released Hungarians were amazed at suddenly finding themselves safe in Naples in a house that had a secret stock of Protestant books.Footnote ²⁰

The speed with which the story of the persecution and liberation of Hungarian ministers was circulated speaks to the strength of ongoing international connections between both Reformed and Evangelical activists, intellectuals, and clergy. However, the narrative was represented in different ways depending on the intended audience. The length, tone, and use of illustrations in the pamphlets that were printed in 1676, 1677, and 1684 certainly signaled a deliberate attempt to engage the emotions of a broad range of readers. The text and pictures conformed to stereotypes about the nature of Catholic persecution long since established for Dutch, French, and English audiences through the narratives and images used in domestic martyrologies.Footnote ²¹ Images included depictions of the ministers' trial, their imprisonment in chains, their beatings, and their forced labor. There were also images of the ministers being beaten into attending a Catholic mass, being beaten to kneel before a monstrance, and of a Catholic priest blessing a soldier as he beat a woman who had tried to help the prisoners. There were depictions of the ministers on their road of suffering through Italy, before the triumphant emergence of the survivors from captivity and their joyous reception aboard de Ruyter's ship. For Dutch readers in particular, these pictures and narratives of persecution and liberation resonated with memories of past domestic experiences. They also presented a comforting representation of current Dutch Reformed heroism, in the guise of de Ruyter, which had obvious popular appeal at home as well as value in representing Dutch credentials abroad amid the complicated politics of survival of the Dutch state during the 1670s.Footnote ²²

An unknown author compiled an English version of Kocsi's manuscript entitled A Short Memorial of the most grievous sufferings of the ministers of the Protestant churches in Hungary by the instigation of the Popish clergy there. This author represented the experience of the Hungarians to show that a “cruel and bloody sport does yet ferment among” the Catholic clergy to exterminate those they regarded as heretics. This insatiable cruelty of the Catholic clergy and their “thirst for Protestant blood” were represented to be the same as had been witnessed in France, in the Gunpowder Plot, and during the 1641 Irish rebellion. The English author was also certain that Catholic priests held the prime responsibility for driving the emperor to “such violent courses, when the necessity of his affairs presses him to more moderation.”Footnote ²³

This text particularly highlighted the conduct of the Hungarian ministers under persecution, which followed a recognizable pattern for readers of English martyrologies. The author acknowledged that some Protestant clergy renounced the ministry or went into exile, but explained that “those who gave this compliance were of the Augsburg confession.” Meanwhile, Reformed ministers showed an amazing “constancy and cheerfulness” in the face of their violent torture. The ministers resolved “patiently and willingly to bear the Cross, and therefore gave themselves wholly to prayer and fasting, that God might enable them to suffer anything.” Despite all their miseries, the ministers “were so wonderfully supported by the joyes of the Holy Ghost, that they were never so much cast down, but rejoyced and sang Psalms continually.” When confined to the misery of the galleys, the ministers remained “patient under the Cross, never repining against the Holy Providence of God, nor making shipwreck of the faith, or a good conscience.” Then, “having brought glory to the Gospel by their sufferings, God sent a deliverer, who broke off their chains, and changed their captivity into a welcome liberty.”Footnote ²⁴

Hence, the exemplary piety of the suffering Hungarian ministers, rather than “Admiral de Ruyter of blessed memory,” was the clear focus of the English narrative. De Ruyter was indeed a rather unlikely English hero. For more than twenty years, de Ruyter had fought a series of naval battles against the English in the North Sea, the English Channel, the Caribbean, off west Africa, and alongside the Danes against the English and Swedes in the Baltic Sea. De Ruyter led the June 1667 raid on the Medway, burning English vessels and towing away the royal flagship. In 1672 and 1673, de Ruyter gained vital defensive victories against combined Anglo-French fleets which prevented full-scale invasion of the Republic from the sea. The English had then been forced to sign a peace with the Dutch in 1674, and William thereafter worked to reach more amicable terms with the Stuart court. The ministers' release came during a period when Charles II had a declared anti-French policy, and in which there was public and parliamentary support in England for reconciliation with their Reformed neighbors. In the end this bore fruit with a 1678 treaty and William's marriage to Princess Mary. However, in 1676 there were still well-justified concerns about Charles's intent since in February he had signed another secret treaty of alliance with Louis XIV.Footnote ²⁵ Unaware of this, the author of the pamphlet welcomed the apparent evidence of growing cooperation between the English and Dutch in 1676. He wrote that eight of the exiled Hungarian ministers, who were then in England, had appealed to Charles II for help, “which his Majesty has been pleased graciously to take to heart.” The English, as well as the Dutch representative, at the Habsburg court had then appealed to Leopold to have the ministers' sentence overturned, for their right to return home, and to restore the freedoms of the Reformed church in Hungary.Footnote ²⁶

The persecution of Hungarian Reformed ministers was therefore represented to an English audience as highlighting the international danger of Catholicism against which Protestant, or at least Reformed, states were seen to have stood united. It also reflected on questions of immediate domestic significance about rebellion against lawful authority for the cause of religion and about religious toleration. The English author of the 1676 pamphlet was understandably anxious to distance his Hungarian martyrs from any taint of plotting rebellion against monarchy. He clarified that the Habsburgs and Catholic hierarchy had acted in Hungary “not to punish rebellion, but to extirpate the Protestant religion.” The author also reproduced and refuted letters, allegedly sent by István Vitnyédi, that had been presented at the ministers' trial to suggest involvement in anti-Habsburg plotting.Footnote ²⁷

The pamphlet was also clear on the implications of events in Hungary for the toleration of Catholicism in England, writing for an audience already very familiar with reading about the dangers of popery from a rising tide of increasingly hysterical anti-Catholic pamphlet literature. Despite such overwhelming evidence of the violent cruelty of their co-religionists toward Protestants in Hungary, the author suggested that English Catholics:

The reader was rather to understand that, as “soon as ever they are in a capacity to do it,” Catholics would persecute all those whom they damn as heretics. Although by publishing his text, the author claimed that he did not wish “to provoke any to retaliate upon those of that religion here: no, we profess to believe the Gospel of peace and love, which allows of no cruelty,” still “we have the greatest reason in the world, to take what care is possible, by all fair and lawful means, to hinder them from ever being in a capacity to exercise their cruelty on us.”Footnote ²⁸

Thanks to this 1676 pamphlet and to a similar but shorter pamphlet published in 1677, as well as the physical presence of eight exiled clergy, there was a growing awareness in England of Hungarian Protestant suffering. For some, the fate of the Hungarian church became a call to greater piety. In 1677, William Smith told his audience in Norwich cathedral that the “distant accents of sorrow” from Hungary ought to evoke their prayers. Smith warned his congregation:

Others adopted the example of the Hungarian ministers to suggest the futility of religious persecution. The divine Richard Baxter, who was deprived of office following the 1662 Act of Uniformity, argued in his 1679 The Nonconformists' Plea for Peace that the imprisonment of nonconformist ministers in England was both dishonorable and pointless. This was since “no execution short of death or utter disablement will make the most conscionable forsake their duty, and sacrilegiously desert the office to which they were dedicated and ordained (as the late case of the Hungarian ministers declareth).”Footnote ³⁰

By the 1680s, dire warnings of the potential threat posed by Catholicism in England seemed to some to have been prophetic. In 1687 the vehemently anti-Catholic political activist Robert Ferguson, who had been involved in the Rye House Plot in 1683 and joined Monmouth's rebellion in 1685, provided A Representation of threatening dangers, impending over Protestants in Great Britain. Ferguson raised the specter of events in Hungary and France where Catholic clergy urged monarchs to “enter into a holy war against Protestants everywhere.” Ferguson warned his readers that no value could be placed on the promises and oaths that Catholic monarchs might offer to Protestant subjects, citing how Hungarians had been granted such protection but were still subjected to “the bloody streaks” of persecution.Footnote ³¹ In 1698 the political pamphleteer and strong supporter of William, Daniel Defoe, drew the same lessons from events in Hungary about the fundamental untrustworthiness of Catholic monarchs. Defoe had personal testimony to support his arguments since he remembered:

Defoe recalled that Hungarian Protestants had been “forced to fly for protection to the enemies of Christianity” because they could trust the sultan more than the emperor to keep “whatever bargain they make for their religion.” For Defoe, the treatment of Hungary's Protestants demonstrated that Protestant and Catholic Europe were still “as two collective bodies divided in interest and religion.”Footnote ³²

The persecution of Protestants in Hungary during the 1670s was also presented in a particularly striking way through Pierre Jurieu's Prejudices against Popery, first published in French in 1686 and translated into English in 1689.Footnote ³³ Having studied in France, the Netherlands, and England, Jurieu was ordained a minister in the Anglican church and in the French Reformed church. He was professor of theology at Sedan until its closure in 1681 when he went into exile to serve the Walloon church at Rotterdam, predicting the overthrow of Antichrist for 1689. Jurieu provided an emotionally charged and graphic account of the fate of Hungarian clergy. It was based on access to either manuscript or printed accounts of the events of 1676, and Jurieu also quoted the personal testimony of the Zurich professor Johann Heinrich Heidegger about the “history of their martyrdom.” Heidegger, the principal author of the 1675 Formula Consensus Helvetica, had hosted István Harsányi Móricz for two years in Zurich and reported having seen the “glorious marks” of persecution on the bodies of exiled Hungarian ministers.Footnote ³⁴

In Jurieu's account, events in Hungary provided clear evidence of the anti-Christian “spirit of Popery,” which chimed in with the similar experiences of long-suffering French Reformed communities. Jurieu was not particularly interested in reviewing claims and counter-claims of Protestant involvement in rebellion, but merely stated that when Austrian troops entered Hungary in 1670, “the archbishops, bishops and Jesuits of Hungary thought they must not let slip the opportunity they now had to persecute the Protestants.” Jurieu described how then “Hungary became a place like hell for the Reformed, where death, punishments, and torments presented themselves everywhere before their eyes.” According to Jurieu, during the early 1670s across Hungary in “most places there were horrible massacres,” with churches “razed everywhere” and whole villages burned to the ground.Footnote ³⁵

Jurieu then turned to the prosecution of Protestant ministers in 1674, acknowledging that many gave way in the face of violence and threats. However, he was certain that the Reformed pastors of the confession of Switzerland had more courage than the most part of the Evangelical pastors who “went voluntarily into banishment.”Footnote ³⁶ Jurieu then focused on the horrible cruelty that these courageous Reformed ministers faced. First, they were sent to castles across the kingdom to endure torture in deep dungeons “as dark as hell,” surviving amid “man's dung, serpents, and toads.” Jurieu quoted one Catholic bishop happily looking forward to the death of these prisoners, quipping that “earth enough will be found in the fields to cover them.” Another elderly Catholic bishop personally beat prisoners with a mallet until they were not able to move for bruises and broken limbs. Jurieu also claimed that two Jesuits beat a man to death, while a woman who offered the prisoners some bread “was dragged through the city, put in the pillory, and treated as they do public whores.”Footnote ³⁷

The ministers sent to Italy fared worst of all, leaving a “track of their own blood, which fell from all parts of their bodies.” After lengthy descriptions of these horrors, Jurieu offered only one line on the role of de Ruyter, when “God sent them, as by a Miracle, Mr Ruyter the Holland Admiral, who rescued them from these horrible miseries.” Jurieu moved quickly on to describe the further miseries that other imprisoned ministers suffered before their release, thanks to the intervention of Bruyninx. When five survivors emerged, “they had no human shape, their throats were putrified with their teeth fallen out, and they could not endure any meat in their mouths without feeling very sharp and pungent pains.”Footnote ³⁸

For Jurieu, the prime significance of these events lay not in the ministers' path to liberation, but in providing evidence about the character of Catholicism. Jurieu called on people to look at how priests and monks behaved and to behold the nature of the Catholic church “with its cords, whips, gibbets, its racks, its wheels, its fires and flames, snarling and threatening like the Devil,” and tell him if there was “any thing like it in the character of the Christian religion.” He concluded that “there are no honest men in the church of Rome,” which was “the Babylon of the Revelations, which makes herself drunk with the blood of the martyrs of our Lord Jesus.”Footnote ³⁹ Jurieu's representation of Hungary in the 1670s owed something to depictions of religious violence in France in the 1560s and 1570s, as well as to the contemporary persecution of Huguenot communities. For Jurieu, events in Hungary offered obvious confirmation of the imminent eschatological meaning of the suffering then being endured by the true Church at the hands of Antichrist across the continent.

The persecution of Protestants in Hungary during the 1670s galvanized activists across the continent to agitate in their own states for action to relieve their suffering. The incident demonstrated the continuing capacity for practical action of ongoing international links between clergy and others. Understanding of the Hungarian ministers' fate was then represented in different contexts: to demonstrate Dutch Reformed heroism, to warn English Protestants of the dangers of empowered Catholics, and to confirm for Huguenots the anti-Christian depths of Catholic barbarity. Some also used de Ruyter's intervention at Naples to try to promote a revival of an imagined past when Europe was sharply divided along religious lines, in which the Reformed world was united against their Catholic enemies, and in which Lutherans were sometimes useful, if rather unsteady, Protestant allies.

Meanwhile, reception in Hungary of news of the ministers' fate at Naples was first known through communication between the exiled ministers and their families and colleagues and by word of mouth among Protestant congregations. The lack of any contemporary printed texts by survivors of the Naples galleys in Hungary reflected the restrictions that the Habsburg authorities imposed on Protestants. Copies of the Latin manuscript completed by Bálint Kocsi Csergő in 1676 certainly circulated in Hungary, and parts of this text in Hungarian-language manuscripts also survive from the period.Footnote ⁴⁰ A part of Kocsi's 1676 text was later printed at Utrecht in 1728 within a Latin history of the Hungarian Reformed church. This text provided the basis for a Hungarian manuscript translation of the work completed in 1738 by the Transylvanian Reformed historian, Péter Bod.Footnote ⁴¹ Contemporary published narratives about the events of the 1670s had emerged in Transylvania. István Szőnyi Nagy, a Reformed minister expelled from Torna in 1671, published a text, the Crown of Martyrs, in Transylvania in 1675 on his experiences.Footnote ⁴² A leading Reformed noble published a Latin defense of the ministers from the accusation of rebellion in 1677, which was also printed at Utrecht in 1678.Footnote ⁴³ The Transylvanian prince Mihály Apafi also cited the treatment of Protestants during the 1670s, and in particular the “horrible and detestable” treatment of those sent to the galleys, in his 1681 Manifesto against Leopold's “oppression” of Hungary.Footnote ⁴⁴

Reflecting on the events of the 1670s, Hungarian Protestants could draw some uncomfortable lessons. Although a small number of ministers had shown heroic resilience under persecution in 1674 and 1675, many clergy and teachers had evaded prosecution or given in to pressure to relinquish their offices. Dwelling on the sacrifices of the exiled minority of ministers implicitly acknowledged the comparative lack of fortitude that many others had shown. Considering the damage caused by ministers who had abandoned their communities during the 1670s hardly helped to rebuild the Reformed and Evangelical churches when the 1681 Sopron diet restored their legal rights. Hungarian Protestants could also draw somber conclusions about how the sins of the Reformed community were to blame for bringing divine wrath and persecution against them. In 1676, Bálint Kocsi Csergő had reflected on how the sins of the ministers and of the Hungarian nation had rendered them worthy of God's just judgment. Other authors of the period echoed this theme by highlighting their own moral failings, and called for greater piety in the practice of religion and for congregations to adopt strict standards of moral conduct in order to avoid further divine punishment.Footnote ⁴⁵

There was another complication posed for those wishing to highlight the exemplary role played by the survivors of the galleys by the later career of Ferenc Fóris Otrokócsi. Otrokócsi had written from Naples to alert contacts at Utrecht University of his plight, and he later completed a text on his experiences. Entitled the “Raging beast against the witnesses of Jesus Christ in Hungary,” this text provided the basis for a 1684 illustrated Dutch pamphlet. However, this was not a pamphlet that Otrokócsi would later wish to have seen translated and published in Hungary. After he was first permitted to return, Otrokócsi served as Reformed minister in Kassa and Gyöngyös. In 1690 he travelled back to his countries of previous refuge in the Netherlands and England. On his return again to Hungary, Otrokócsi converted to Catholicism in August 1694. The eighteenth-century Reformed historian Péter Bod could only write of Otrokócsi that “after suffering every misery for the true faith, he later abandoned it.” Otrokócsi received financial support from the Habsburg court, taught at the Jesuit college at Trnava (Nagyszombat), and published sharp criticisms of Reformed doctrine. In 1698 Otrokócsi's remarkable personal journey was marked by a return to Italy to visit Rome, and he later produced a short text on Rome, the Holy City of God.Footnote ⁴⁶

More broadly, the domestic impact of Habsburg religious and political policies during the 1670s, exemplified by the fate of the Protestants sent to Naples, contributed to Hungarian “limited rejection” of the Habsburg monarchy. The court was certainly able to build support for Habsburg rule among members of the Hungarian nobility who closely identified with Catholic power. However, the court's reliance on Catholic magnates, clergy, and troops to govern Hungary had at the same time alienated substantial non-Catholic sections of the nobility. The 1670s drive to construct a Catholic Hungary secure under close court control failed because of the court's need for a wide base of noble support to ensure the defense of Hungary from the Ottomans, as well as because of the need for international allies to combat the French. In this context, the failure either to accommodate or to eliminate Protestantism was an ongoing source of weakness for Habsburg control over Hungary. Anti-Habsburg sentiment was sustained among Protestants, both Evangelical and Reformed, by stories of the cruel and unjust way their clergy had been treated. Action against dissident nobles led to armed resistance during the 1670s from the shelter of Ottoman-occupied Hungary, directed by Imre Thököly, the Reformed son of a noble whose estates had been confiscated in 1670. Under pressure to direct resources westward to defend against French encroachment, as well as to unite Hungary's nobles to defend against Ottoman attack, in 1681 Leopold was compelled to reverse his centralization of governance in Hungary and to restore rights for Protestant clergy. However, only those churches that had not already been reconsecrated for Catholic use were subsequently returned to Evangelical or Reformed control.Footnote ⁴⁷

Memories of events in Hungary during the 1670s continued to play a role in the long-term development of Hungarian Reformed identity. In the face of only slowly easing state restrictions and repression, stories of the apparent courage of earlier generations were recounted as part of a potent narrative of survival in the face of persecution. Events at Naples and the figure of de Ruyter remained prominent in these narratives. The key center of Reformed religion at Debrecen provided the setting for one later expression of these memories. Behind the town's imposing central Reformed church stands a Reformed seminary college. The church and college are separated by Calvin Square, which features a five-meter tall obelisk that was erected in 1895. At the tip of the obelisk is a globe, and on its side is a relief of a galley in bronze and an open Bible with the passage of 2 Timothy 4:7, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.” In between the galley and the Bible is an inscription: “To the Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, the liberator of 11 February 1676.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The setting of this memorial to de Ruyter was charged with meaning. During the 1848 revolution, legal equality was granted to the Catholic, Reformed, Evangelical, and Unitarian churches of Hungary. In April 1849, national independence from Habsburg rule was declared by the parliament meeting in Debrecen's church, and proclaimed by the Evangelical Lajos Kossuth. However, when the revolution was crushed, Protestants faced renewed restrictions. After the 1867 Compromise, the Reformed and other Protestant churches gained some legal rights, and in 1881 the Reformed church was able to hold its first modern national synod at Debrecen. In 1895 the Hungarian parliament finally passed a law granting the free practice of religion for the Catholic, Reformed, Evangelical, Unitarian, Jewish, and Orthodox communities. And, in 1895 the widow of a certain Mihály Hegyi paid for an obelisk to be erected to the memory of Michiel de Ruyter. The figure of de Ruyter had retained a powerful presence in nineteenth-century Reformed memory as a liberator from earlier Catholic persecution, violence, and domination. In addition, de Ruyter's action was identified with struggles for national liberation within the hearts of some Hungarian patriots. This is not to suggest that Reformed religion played a large part in the articulation of nineteenth-century Hungarian nationalism, partly because of the diversity of Hungary's religions and partly because of the secularization of public life. However, it does point to the ways in which popular memory of religious commitments could inform engagement with narratives of Hungarian national liberation and independence.Footnote ⁴⁹

The creative power of collective memory has continued to be applied to narratives about what happened to Protestant clergy in the 1670s. Processes of selective forgetting, sifting, and retrospectively reinventing the past have allowed these dramatic events to be presented in usable forms for subsequent generations up until the present.Footnote ⁵⁰ A confessional history of the Reformed church compiled shortly after the end of World War II reproduced some of the images of the suffering and liberation of clergy first published in the 1670s. In 1976 some of the key pamphlets from the 1670s were published in Hungarian for the first time by the leading historian László Makkai within a context of exploring the development of resistance to Habsburg rule.Footnote ⁵¹ Since the end of Communist rule, memories of de Ruyter have been displayed in evocative and emotional rituals of remembrance of victimhood and liberation. Strikingly, the figure of de Ruyter has also provided a focus for the promotion of good relations between Hungary's Christian communities. In 1991, on the 315^th anniversary of the liberation of the ministers from the Spanish galleys, Pope John Paul II came to Calvin Square, Debrecen, during his visit to Hungary to place a wreath at de Ruyter's obelisk. In February 2001, on the 325^th anniversary, there were more speeches and meetings in Budapest, Sárospatak, and Pápa, and wreaths were laid in Debrecen to honor the memory of de Ruyter. Those present around the monument at Debrecen included Reformed and Evangelical bishops and Hungary's Catholic archbishop, who offered an apology on behalf of his church for having persecuted Protestant clergy.Footnote ⁵²

The figure of de Ruyter has at the same time provided a focus for the continuing expression of emotional and practical fraternity between the Dutch and Hungarian Reformed communities. In 1907 the Hungarian church presented a silver laurel to the New Church in Amsterdam in recognition of de Ruyter's action. The Dutch ambassador to Hungary and a thirteenth-generation descendant of de Ruyter attended the commemorations at Debrecen in 2001, who presented church representatives with a replica key to de Ruyter's funeral monument. Annual ceremonies at this monument in the New Church in Amsterdam have also recalled de Ruyter's action. On this occasion in 2001, five Dutch citizens were awarded decorations by the Hungarian state, including Miklós Tóth, then secretary of the Hungarian Federation in the Netherlands. In his speech of acceptance, Tóth spoke of a previous meeting in the vestry of the New Church on 4 November 1956 when the Soviet army attacked Budapest. He recalled how Hungarians and Dutch had then held a service together and “sang the psalms wherein Hungarians and Dutch for centuries found their ultimate, divine security.”Footnote ⁵³

Meanwhile, at Debrecen in 2001, anniversary celebrations were marked by the establishment of a foundation to offer charitable assistance to the Hungarian Reformed community at Mihăieni (Krasznamihályfalva) in Romania. Since October 2005, the “Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter house,” complete with a commemorative plaque and a decorative ship's wheel built into its balcony, has provided a venue for local community events. F. C. de Ruyter de Wildt and László Tőkés attended the official opening. Superintendent of the region's Reformed church, Tőkés was also a leading figure in the 1989 rising at Timişoara (Temesvár) against the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu. De Ruyter's presence has hence persisted in the articulation of the identity of Hungarian Reformed communities as survivors of persecution, although this identity is now shorn of the venom of anti-Catholicism in which it was once forged and hardened.Footnote ⁵⁴