Rev. Kendyl Gibbons All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church November 16, 2014

“Nothing Will Halt the March of Truth”

“Nothing Will Halt the March of Truth”

Once before in my life, I have had this feeling. Eight years ago, I traveled to Israel and Palestine with a group of interfaith clergy colleagues. It was educational. It deepened our friendship. I was fully accepted by everyone as a member of the group, but it was not my story we were encountering – the garden where Jesus once wept, the walls of the ancient Hebrew temple. It was moving to see what it meant to the others, but it wasn’t mine. Until we came to Yad Vashem, the museum and memorial to six million Jews who perished in Hitler’s genocidal nightmare. There, alone, I found the garden of the righteous, dedicated to those gentiles who had risked their own lives to save Jewish lives, and in that garden, the names of only three Americans so honored, two of them Waitstill and Martha Sharp, the founders of the Unitarian Service Committee. A Unitarian minister, and his Unitarian wife. My people. My place. My story.

Now I know about being a global citizen, the heir of all human history – that’s right; I’m down with that. But something in us also craves unique identity, the possession of particular heroes who belong to us, and who we belong to. Those whose legacies will be fulfilled, or not, by what we do or leave undone. The story that stands unfinished, to be continued in my life, by my fidelity to what they sacrificed to start. The tribal impulse that is part of our evolutionary makeup certainly has its troubling dimension, subtly urging us to divide the world into in group and out group; those who matter, and those who are dispensable, dangerous, other. This we need to recognize, and resist. But that same tendency has its nobler manifestation, which is this longing to be part of a team, to be the heir of something worth preserving and passing on, to know ourselves by a lineage and a story, that both sets us apart, and demands something of us. Owning Waitstill and Martha Sharp is a responsibility; being part of their continuing story asks me to pay attention, to wonder what they would be doing in the face of the challenges that confront our world today. It makes me better than I would otherwise be.

So, I had that same experience last month, in Romania; specifically, at the tomb of Isabella Jagiellon, princess of Poland, queen of Transylvania, and her son, John Sigismund, the only Unitarian monarch in history – so far, at least. They lie in the cathedral of St. Michael, now a Catholic church in Alba Iulia, once the capital city of the independent Transylvanian kingdom. Based on what I could tell from the schematic map of the church, a transept was added in the 16th century, apparently specifically for the placement of their remains. Other dignitaries are interred beneath the floor nearby, with carved stones laid over them, so the whole area has been roped off with velvet barriers. It was unendurably frustrating to have come so far, only to be forbidden the final few feet, so with the encouragement of our host and guide, the minister of our partner church, I slipped under the cordon, and laid my hands on Isabella’s tomb. The elegant marble effigies had been long ago vandalized; the crown beside her arm chiseled away, his face obliterated. I wished suddenly that I had thought to bring flowers; I did not know before we got there how powerful this sense of connection to the past – my past – would feel. I could have stayed there a long time – much longer than anyone else in our group would have been comfortable – but after all, what difference do the bones make? It is the story that matters, that lives on. Yet all the rest of that day, through the long drive back to the Nyarad valley, I was aware that the white dust of Isabella’s tomb was on my tee shirt.

You have heard the legend that came to me, standing on the top of Deva mountain, fifty yards from the cell in which it is said that Francis David spent the last months of his life, scratching his final testament onto the cold stone of his prison wall. So let me tell you now how it came to that, what Isabella and John Sigismund had to do with it, and why this story belongs peculiarly to us, and we to it.

Princess Isabella was the eldest daughter of King Sigismund the Old of Poland, and his third wife, Bona Svorza, who was said to have single handedly brought the Italian renaissance to Poland. Isabella was raised to read, write, and speak several languages; to understand the complicated political, military, and dynastic landscape of eastern Europe in the 16th century; to be diplomatically astute, and tenacious of her title and power. After several negotiations for more strategically advantageous marriages fell through, at the age of 20 she married John Zapolya, king of Transylvania, who was then 52. A year later, she gave birth to a son, and two weeks after that, John Zapolya died of infected wounds received while subduing a minor rebellion. The infant, John Sigismund, was crowned king of Transylvania at the age of six weeks, in order to frustrate the claim of the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty that Ferdinand, the brother of Emperor Charles the V, was to have inherited the rule of Transylvania upon John Zapolya’s death. During his final days, Zapolya had sought to secure his son’s future by appointing a regency council to hold the throne until the child should grow old enough to assume it in his own right. The three members of this council were Isabella, the widowed mother; George Martinuzzi, a Catholic monk who was John Zapolya’s treasurer, and Peter Petrovics, a Calvinist cousin of Zapolya’s, and a general in his army. King John Zapolya also asked for, and received, the assurance of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman empire on the eastern edge of Transylvania, that he would both recognize the young prince and his regency council as the legitimate rulers of Transylvania, and also defend that right if Ferdinand and the Hapsburgs should ever attack them.

As if this mix of political ambition and opposition to the Muslim Turks were not volatile enough, at the same time, many of the leading families of the Transylvanian nobility adopted the reformation ideas of Luther, or even John Calvin. During his reign, John Zapolya had made only sporadic, half hearted attempts to quench the spread of the reformation in his country, and these efforts had been unsuccessful. Throughout the regency period, the reformation continued to spread into Transylvania.

The situation was, as I said, volatile. Transylvania lay in its cradle between the mountains, a buffer zone with two mighty empires on either side. To the west, the European Hapsburgs, including the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the V – Catholics. To the east, the Turkish Ottoman empire, governed by Sultan Suleyman, who longed to conquer Vienna and spread his territory westward – Muslims. The ethnic Magyar and Szekler tribes of medieval Transylvania had no power to enforce their own independence; the only thing their leaders could do was to play the two surrounding empires against each other. The Sultan Suleyman had promised to protect Isabella and her son because it suited his purpose to do so; he did not want the Hapsburg forces with a military position right on his borders. For their part, the Hapsburgs, led by Ferdinand, saw the infant king and widowed queen as easy pickings. Soon after John Zapolya’s death, they marched into the western edge of the country, and after a quick early victory, Ferdinand managed to have himself crowned king with the same crown used for the baby’s coronation earlier that year. This crown will show up again in the story; keep an eye on it.

The three members of the baby John Sigismund’s regency council had been chosen with the awareness that they would each have to work hard if there was going to be any throne left for him to take by the time he came of age. Isabella’s job was to raise a king. Petrovic’s job was to be their ambassador, a diplomatic negotiator who would travel constantly to the royal courts of Poland, Austria, France, and Germany, as well as to Rome, and to Constantinople, Suleyman’s capitol, juggling treaties, private assurances, marriage negotiations, tributes of money, and threats, to keep the powerful neighbors balanced against each other, so that Transylvania could maintain its independence. The monk Martinuzzi’s job was to make sure that there was money for all this, and to organize military strategy whenever the diplomacy failed. When Ferdinand and the Hapsburg army showed up that first year, it was Martinuzzi who called upon the Sultan to fulfill his promise of protection. Suleyman did as he had agreed, came with his own military forces, threw the Hapsburgs out, and restored the nation and the crown to Isabella and the regency council. As always, he cast covetous eyes westward toward Vienna while he was about it, but nothing came of it that time, and Suleyman returned to Constantinople, after being formally presented to the baby king. There is a painting which records this event in the Ottoman archives.

Well, it would have been a difficult 18 years if everything had gone well, but of course that rarely happens. To say that Isabella and Martinuzzi did not get along with each other would be an understatement. Within a very few years, they were deep enemies. She complained that there was never enough money to maintain the royal household, and demanded an accounting from the monk. He retorted that the only person he would account to was John Sigismund himself – after the prince came of age. In hindsight, it can be seen that Martinuzzi was shorting John and Isabella’s maintenance in order to hire mercenaries, and create his own personal army. He also wanted to be elevated as a cardinal in the church, and eventually he made a deal with Rome; he would orchestrate a Hapsburg invasion, supported by his own troops, such that by the time word could reach Suleyman, it would be too late for the Sultan to intervene. This plan was carried out in 1551, when John Sigismund was eleven years old. Isabella was forced to abdicate the throne on his behalf, surrender the royal regalia, and flee back to her former home in Poland, taking her son. Just prior to their departure, she broke the golden reliquary cross off the top of the crown, and gave it to John Sigismund, who wore it on a chain around his neck for the rest of his life.

For five humiliating years, they lived on the charity of Isabella’s brother, who had succeeded his father as king of Poland. Peter Petrovics strove with the Transylvanian nobles, with Suleyman, and with the royal courts of Europe, to have their rights restored, while Martinuzzi became a cardinal, and was soon thereafter accused of treasonously negotiating with Suleyman, and assassinated by the pope’s forces. Meanwhile, the political and military tides shifted again, and the nobility of Transylvania became tired of having an absentee Hapsburg king, to whom they were only a negligible, back water territory. In 1556, with Suleyman’s support, the congress of nobles invited John and Isabella to return, assuring them of their loyalty and commitment to independence. Upon their triumphant return, the 16 year old king and dowager queen found a country, and a nobility, more religiously diverse than ever. Some were still loyal Roman Catholics; a few were influenced by the eastern Orthodox tradition. Many had converted to Lutheranism, and some were followers of John Calvin. A handful were experimenting with the enlightenment anti-trinitarianism of the recent martyr, Michael Servetus.

The Hapsburg administration had of course been attempting to re- establish Catholicism, and the congress of nobles was understandably eager to know what the policy of the restored royal house was going to be. Not for nothing was Isabella aware of her debt to Suleyman, and the example of the Muslim empire, which had long practiced a certain hierarchical religious tolerance for Christians and Jews. Modeling on their proclamations, based on her own renaissance education, native intelligence, political savvy, and compassionate conscience, the queen made a fateful decision. This was no time to be stirring up opposition by trying to enforce religious uniformity. In 1557, she issued a stop- gap pronouncement; no one was to injure or harass anyone else about religious matters; everyone could continue to worship as they were doing. She did not say, “…until John Sigismund comes to the throne, and then he can figure it out,” though I suspect that it may have been widely understood that way.

But who was educating John Sigismund, after all? Isabella, with her mix of political expediency, renaissance aesthetic sensibility, intellectual curiosity, and royal prerogative. The young king grew up both intelligent and widely literate, sensitive, artistic, musical, with a talent for languages and a personal charm that was remarked upon in all the records we have. There is some historical suggestion that he may have been gay; he never married, and was not known to have had any mistresses or children, and his detractors sometimes made this allegation in biographical accounts of the period. Later sympathetic chroniclers disregarded the idea as slanderous, but did not seek to disprove it. The king is reported by contemporaries to have been a skilled jouster, fencer, and archer, but his true preference was for intellectual argument, and he took particular interest in religious discussions. Although as far as we can tell, she remained a practicing Catholic all her life, Isabella was also interested in Reformation ideas, and her trusted inner circle of advisers included the well known physician, Giorgio Biandrata, a supporter of Servetus, and early advocate of Unitarian theology. She was the last living member of the regency council, and when she died in 1559, at the age of 40, John Sigismund came to the throne in his own right, at the age of 19.

The council of nobles was once again understandably anxious to know what the now independent king was going to do in the matter of religion. Only four years earlier, in the treaty that would come to be known as the Peace of Augsburg, the nations of the Holy Roman Empire had agreed to end their wars of religion on the basis of cuius regio, ius religio – whoever is king, his religion prevails in that realm. If the teenage monarch followed this principle in Transylvania, then whatever he declared about his own faith would be imposed upon the rest of the country, most likely at huge expense and bloodshed. But John Sigismund had a different idea. If belief is forced on people, he said, “their souls would not be satisfied.” The position of toleration first established by his mother was to be permanent; preachers were to speak the truth as they understood it, and people were free to listen to whichever of them they found most persuasive. The four established churches – Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Unitarian – were equally acceptable; you could hold office, teach school, own property, no matter which one you belonged to. Even Jews, Muslims, and the Eastern Orthodox, though by no means equal, were protected to a limited extent.

To model this notion in practice, and also, I suspect, to indulge in one of his favorite activities, in 1568 the king called for a religious playoff event; a marathon debate in which the most articulate representatives of each of the four established churches would compete for the minds and hearts of Transylvanians, as it were. The eloquent and popular preacher from the town of Kolosvar, Francis David, would represent the anti-trinitarian position.

David was what we might call today a late bloomer. The son of a shoe maker, it was only after he entered the Catholic priesthood that his intellectual talent was recognized, and he was sent from his home in Kolosvar to receive a university education in Wittenberg. While there, he was necessarily exposed to Reformation ideas, writings, and thinkers, returning to his native city in 1555, already in his mid-40s. So powerful was his preaching by then that he was soon appointed the head preacher of the city’s central church, and as he moved through the evolving stages from questioning Catholic to Lutheran to Calvinist and ultimately to Unitarian, the congregation and most of the city followed him. Not surprisingly, king John Sigismund, who so enjoyed the engagement of other vibrant minds, especially with regard to religious ideas, quickly made this pulpit superstar his official court preacher, and called upon him to advocate for the most innovative of the positions represented in his debate tournaments.

It probably won’t come as a shock to hear that not everyone was cheering them on. Despite the ultimate failure of Cardinal Martinuzzi’s treachery, the Pope still cherished hopes of reclaiming Eastern Europe to the Catholic fold. It is not clear whether the overturned carriage that killed John Sigismund in 1571, at the age of 31, was genuinely an accident, or a regicide by those concerned for the succession, and the unlikelihood of his fathering an heir, or a religiously motivated assassination. The fact that it followed by only a few months his official designation of Unitarianism as one of the four established religions suggests the latter to me, but it’s hard to prove at this point.

Aware that he had no natural successor, in his will the king had named his close friend and military adviser, Gaspar Bekes, as heir to the throne. This might have worked, if Bekes had not been out of the country at the time, on a diplomatic mission, but in the event, the congress of nobles had elected and crowned Stephan Bathory, a Catholic Transylvanian count who was seen as an able administrator and military strategist, before Bekes could return to claim the kingdom. Stephan Bathory promised, as a condition of his election by the council, to respect and enforce the policy of religious toleration initiated by Isabella and John Sigismund, and he kept the letter of this agreement throughout the five years of his direct reign. Nevertheless, he was not a supporter of Reformation thought, and Francis David was dismissed as court preacher, and returned to his parish Kolosvar, where he remained as popular as ever, and served as head bishop of the growing Unitarian church. Unitarianism continued to thrive and increase its adherents under David’s leadership and the reign of Stephan Bathory, but this relatively benign period ended after five years. At that time, Isabella’s brother, the king of Poland, died without an heir, and the Polish nobles, seeing the effectiveness of Stephan Bathory’s administration, invited him to become their new king. When he left for Poland, Stephan turned the rule of Transylvania over to his brother Kristof, and Kristof Bathory was a whole different kettle of fish.

Kristof was a supporter of the Jesuits, and of the Catholic counter- reformation. Although he could not drive the reform churches out of his country overtly, since he too had promised to preserve the policy of religious tolerance, he could be very clear that it applied only to those faiths recognized at the time of John Sigismund’s final edict, and only in the form that those churches then had. No further innovation in theological ideas whatsoever – no questions, no changes, no new liturgical practices – would be acceptable. Of course, Francis David’s intellectual and religious journey was not so easily ended; he had reached the point of wondering, if they claimed that Jesus really was not god, whether it made any sense to address prayers to him, or to worship him. David maintained that such questions were already implicit in the doctrines established by the Unitarians in 1568, but other leaders in the church, fearful for its future under the oppressive regime, stood against him, and he was found guilty of ‘theological innovation’ and sent to die in prison in the stone fortress on top of Deva mountain. It was permitted for his son and daughter to visit him, but it is not clear whether they ever did; within six months he was dead, leaving his final witness to the truth scratched onto the wall of his cell.

Now, martyrs are not that hard to find; they abound in the history of humanity’s awkward evolution into rationality and acceptance of diversity. The sheer human tragedy of these stories does not make them unusual, what makes them special is that they are mine. These are my spiritual ancestors, and yours as well. They paid with their lives, and their work, for the faith we share today. Against all the odds, Isabella brought up a son who bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice, compassion, and human dignity; she saved the throne for him, and bequeathed him the concept of religious toleration that would not occur to the rest of Europe for centuries. Francis David stirred the spiritual imagination of a city, of a king, and of a nation, so vividly that the churches he founded still serve the message of freedom, truth and community in that land. Their integrity, even unto death, challenges me, both to follow their example, and to cherish their memories, for in them I find the mirror of who I am, and who I am called to be.