Flucht hinter den „Osmanischen Vorhang“. Glaubensflüchtlinge in Siebenbürgen

Abstract

Abstract The article deals with several periods and phenomena of migration to Transylvania behind the “Ottoman curtain” and its impacts between the first half of the sixteenth to the midst of the eighteenth century. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century the mental, political and confessional diverted or inhomogeneous frame conditions preordained the region as an area which was open minded for heterogeneous thinking, experiments and individuals or groups. Especially the dominance of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans enabled adopting the reformation without Habsburg renitancy as a laboratory for religious heterogeneity. First, we notice that the later Reformer of Braşov (Johannes Honterus) imported the German Reformation to Transylvania after the end of his political exile in several centres of Reformation. After an expulsion order by the Habsburg King Ferdinand I, the Wittenberg minded reformer Paulus Wiener from Ljubljana (Slovenia) settled in Sibiu and became in 1553 the first superintendent and fortified the reform. Italian deviant preachers travelled through the realm of Queen Isabella Jagiellonica and King/Prince János II Zsigmond Szápolyai. After expulsion from Poland because of antitrinitarian ideas, the court physician Giorgio Biandrata tried to establish an open-minded protestant country. Freedom of preaching the gospel without hierarchical control – perhaps the aim of a Unitarian established regional church in the Principality – opened the border for antitrinitarian thinkers who had flown from Heidelberg, Italy and other parts of Europe. In the seventeenth century – in the 30 years’ war – the Calvinist Gábor Bethlen founded an ambitious university Academy in Alba Iulia and offered resort to Calvinist professors of central Europe. At the same time (1622), the Diet of Transylvania provided refuge to Hutterites (handcrafters called Habaner) from Moravia to settle in Transylvania – interdicting mission. Their Anabaptist behaviour attracted 130 years later some of the “Transmigrants” who were expelled by the counterreformation minded Charles VI and Maria Theresia from Austrian, Styria and Carinthian underground Protestants. About 3000 persons were exact relocated to the “heretic corner” of the conquered province of Transylvania – the former Ottoman vassal – where the Habsburgs had to respect the Basic Constitutional Law (by the Diploma Leopoldinum) including religious freedom of 1595. The religiones receptae were Roman-catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian, but also the “tolerated” Rumanian-orthodox churches. There has to be some research to the question of Ottoman-Christian interplay, motives and strategies of the heteronomy of the estates and the problem whether the non-absolutistic governance and policy was an advantage.