… an excerpt from Király Béla's chapter on the "Transylvanian Concept of Liberty…."
Please note when you read the portion on the Diet of Torda in 1568: One of the most fundamental freedoms, that of conscience and worship, comes from God—not the King or State, as was universal then. Transylvania predated in its thinking all of those greats of Britain.
This concept of freedom developed here would be followed more than 200 years later in what was to become the United States.
The language was in the three official languages: Hungarian, Latin, and Turkish.
[…]
Freed from the pressure of the Habsburg Counter- Reformation, Transylvania was now able to act on its own. A series of fundamental laws passed between 1550 and 1571 put Transylvania into the forefront of contemporary religious tolerance. In 1550, the diet of Torda (Turda, Thorenburg) granted freedom of worship to the Lutherans with the words: "Every man may hold to his God-given faith, and under no circumstances shall one religion interfere with another."5 Another diet in 1556 secularized the incomes and property of all the Catholic dioceses. A year later, the diet of Torda declared the Lutheran church an "accepted religion" (religio recepta). According to this act, "Every man shall receive unmolested the religion of his choice; his church shall be free to choose its own preachers and to decide how the sacraments shall be taken; no party shall resort to vengeance or violence in competing with any other." This act enabled the Lutherans to set up their own senior church hierarchy and to hold synods. In 1564, the diet of Torda made Calvinism an "accepted religion."
Finally, in 1568, the Transylvanian diet itself declared universal and complete freedom of worship, stating that, since faith was a divine gift born of hearing the Gospel, no obstacle could be put in the way of preaching it.6
Transylvania, the united principality of three nations,7 soon became also the land of four established churches — Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Unitarian, and thus the most tolerant state of its time in Europe. Such freedom was a beacon to the people of royal Hungary. Its borders open to refugees, Transylvania became a haven for Protestant preachers. To it they fled when persecuted by the agents of the Habsburg Counter-Reformation, and from it they returned to royal Hungary reinspired by the Transylvanian concept of freedom of conscience.
There was a profound difference between religious freedom in Transylvania and in western Europe. In the West, the idea of religious freedom was determined by the Treaty of Augsburg of 1555 and refined
by the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Their provisions did not amount to much more than that a sovereign had the assured privilege of deciding his state's official religion (cuius regio eius religio), and that those who confessed religions other than their monarch's might emigrate elsewhere rather than risk being burned at the stake. The Anglo-French Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 went a step further by stipulating that France was to free Protestants imprisoned solely for religious reasons, but the treaty was rather exceptional. International treaties in western Europe usually specified the rights of religious minorities only when the confession of the inhabitants of ceded territories differed from that of the annexing power. The Treaty of Oliva between Sweden and Poland in 1660, for instance, guaranteed the religious freedom of the Catholic inhabitants of Livonia after its cession to Sweden by Poland and of those of Pomerania after its cession to Sweden by Brandenburg. The Treaty of Nijmegen of 1678, by which Louis XIV of France restored Maastricht to the Netherlands, preserved the religious freedom of the city's Catholics. Catholics' rights were one of the provisions of the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697. Catholic religious freedom was again guaranteed when Prussia annexed Silesia from Austria as a result of the Wars of Austrian Succession (1740–48) and in the Prussian acquisitions at the first partition of Poland in 1772. No international treaties in western Europe, however, guaranteed the religious freedom of individuals, and this was the essential point of distinction between Transylvania and western Europe. The Transylvanian concept and practice of freedom of conscience secured the rights of individuals both in Transylvania and, by international treaty, elsewhere in Hungary. This was far in advance of western European theory or reality.
