“Which were only forsaken and destroyed because God could not even five good men, there,” added Mazzare with a faint smile. “However, I think you’ve already met more good up-timers than that.”
Wadding smiled and nodded in agreement; it was the expression of a man whose victory was so secure that he could afford that gesture of charity. “You make an excellent point, Cardinal Mazzare. And yet, we cannot know why God is ever silent, for He often is. And just when we most need the wisdom and comfort of His gentle voice. Perhaps he still spoke to the up-time popes and they responded to the vastly changed needs of the Church and world, fully infused with the guiding Charism of Sacred Magisterium. Or perhaps they worked on in silence, secretly despairing or hoping as their own natures dictated.”
But in the end, Urban called upon Vitelleschi to share his assessments of the contending arguments that had roved across the theological expanses of papal doctrine and canon law. And the outcome was anything but preordained. In actuality, the ramifications of the points made by Wadding and Mazzare would have wanted complete and painfully detailed explication. Consequently, certain of Vitelleschi’s remarks were left “off-screen”—such as this one:
“So let us consider how the arguments advanced by our worthy interlocutors bear upon the issues before us. On the one hand, our Pope is divinely enjoined to convey God’s instruction to all of Peter’s heirs: to care for His flock. On the other hand, our Pope must strive to remain in a state of grace, which is a personal matter between each pontiff and God, and which must not be compromised by favoring pragmatism over principles.
“Father Wadding has already outlined the many social perils that might reside in the ideas of Grantville. And those in turn point to the care that a Pope must take in considering their immediate utility in comparison to their long term impact upon his state of grace and that of the Church. More specifically: although Grantville’s ideas and perspectives brought us short term peace, they may also spawn long term debates, social chaos, and heresies which will end up producing a mixture of diffidence and decadence that could kill the Church like a wasting disease. But on the opposite side of this fearsome coin is a great and hopeful truth: never has Christendom needed unity more than now.
“And one cannot dismiss the tortuous implausibilities upon which the hypothesis of this Infernal conspiracy must ineluctably rest.” Vitelleschi’s voice and eyes became grim. “Satan is the arch-fiend, but he is no fool. He understands that the more complex a stratagem or conceit becomes, the more likely it is to fail. And even we humans can see that the intricate ploy of inveigling the Pontiff’s trust by orchestrating all this ‘legitimating’ bloodshed”—he swept his arms around to take in the sights and smells of the prior night’s destruction and death—“is so hopelessly twisted and byzantine that it must fail.”
And Mazzare, watching him, realized: Vitelleschi’s miffed because Urban put him on the spot, made him abandon his role as the ever-suspicious watchdog for his Pope. And in so doing, he had to give us all a look at optimistic conjectures that he probably hasn’t fully admitted to himself yet. It sounds like he half-suspects that the real reason that God sent Grantville down-time was to correct the excesses of the Counter Reformation: that it is an encouragement to start contemplating the sermon on the mount instead of the clearing of the temple. And of course, in his Jesuitical world-view, he’s probably subconsciously reassured that the lesson came from a bunch of redneck hillbillies. After all, the messiah came unto the City of David as a carpenter’s son mounted upon an ass. And, in his way of thinking, Grantville’s similarly humble origins preclude the presence of Satanic pride…
But Vitelleschi had barely paused for a breath. “In no document or doctrine is such a stark division between possible outcome so clearly and powerfully resident as the up-time Church’s Vatican II. As you suggested, Cardinal Mazzare, it was, from its conception forward, a recasting of the actualities of the Church into a form more amenable to the minds and idioms of your up time world. And, as I think you are right in pointing out, the mere act of rephrasing old truth induced additional, subtle changes that were needful in your epoch.
“Conversely, however, this epoch has its own needs, and they are not the needs that brought your Vatican II to pass, or which informed its outcome. The instructions and language of how that will was imparted in your world are not applicable in this world.”
Mazzare realized he was now holding his breath, realizing that Vitelleschi had just articulated a potential argument for disregarding the infallibility of up-time Papal documents, that they were wholly particular to their own time and place of origins
Vitelleschi drew himself up very straight. “However, the intent of Vatican II is as perfect and unchanging as any other dogma that arises from the Sacred Magisterium and thus enjoys infallibility of faith and morals. Indeed, it is this peculiar requirement of assessing and understanding how both these circumstances can be simultaneously true that confounds this theological situation. In times past, Mother Church’s legal and theological debates simply addressed matters of compliance to well-established standards. Simply put, they were trials to determine whether a questionable action or idea fell within, or beyond, the purview and permitted actions of well-established doctrine or canon. But now, the solidity of those very benchmarks, and the precedents we have built upon them, must be subjected to scrutiny.
Unfortunately, we cannot expect that all the conundrums of this moment will be presently—or ever—solved. Is an up-time pope is to be recognized as a pope in this world as well? I must answer—from a historical and doctrinal standpoint—that the issue is imponderable. It is akin to tautologies such as those which ask, ‘if God is capable of all things, can He then make a stone so heavy that not even He cannot lift it?
“However,” said Vitelleschi, “while our exegesis is customarily based in adherence to tradition, it is also true that not all new ideas are pleasing to Satan. Consider: the prophets who announced Christ, the apostles who continued his work, the great authors and thinkers of our own world who have expanded our understanding of both Holy Writ and God’s presence. All of them added new ideas to mankind’s collective consciousness, new ideas that strike both despair and fury in the Satanic breast. So, we must therefore ask: what kind of new words and ideas are coming from Grantville? Do they further the Devil’s work, are they neutral in effect, or do they actually serve to impede or counteract his infernal plots? Unless it can be conclusively be shown that the first of these possibilities is accurate—that the ideas and documents of Grantville innately aid and abet Satan’s objectives--then there is no logical reason why the Prince of Evil would bother to wrench the up-timers from the future and strand them in our present.
“Rather than simply asserting that no such conclusive evidence has been presented, I will go further and assert that Grantville’s books, ideas, and people might not only illuminate our efforts to build a society that is more just, but one that is more compassionate and Christ-like. If so, far from being an Infernal ploy, Grantville might even be a gift sent to us by our Heavenly Father. Consider what the up-timers’ own histories depict: their own imperfect world had been poised on the very brink of self-destruction for decades. And yet, those imperfect humans stayed their hands, wrestled down their fears, and ultimately reached out for peace across the divides and impasses that had long separated them. I ask you: would Satan send such a lesson of hope and perseverance to us? Would his pride allow him to do so?”
Vitelleschi bowed his head. “And if we find the answer to that query to be in the negative, then we are left with one final alternative to consider: what if Grantville’s displacement in time is not a trap set by the Devil, but also, is not a gift from God? What if it is, instead, a happenstance of nature? But still there is no quandary residing in this option, for resolving this event to the will of God is simplicity itself. For it goes without saying that, verily, Nature acts at the pleasure of God, not the other way around.”
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Hungary and Transylvania, Part I by Gábor Szántai
Foreword
The science-fiction book 1632 by Eric Flint and its Ring of Fire series created an alternative universe where a small American miners' town from 2000 AD with all its residents and buildings gets relocated to Thuringia, Germany, in the year 1631—right in the middle of the Thirty Year War. History is greatly affected by this and various changes take place all over Europe. After many adventures the story has now arrived at the point when a clash with the Ottoman Empire seems to be inevitable: No one knows what this alternative future might hold for either the western countries or the Kingdom of Hungary and the Principality of Transylvania. What would a modern American in Grantville think about Hungarians? What would a modern American of Hungarian descent think of Hungarians in the seventeenth century, and more importantly, what would the seventeenth-century Hungarians think of them?
When talking about any actions concerning the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century, Hungarians cannot be bypassed. So far there have been just a few Hungarian characters in this series: either villains, charmers, or the minions of the not-so-friendly Habsburg monarchy. So the readers need to see a more detailed picture as the story reaches out towards the attacking Ottoman Empire.
In order to show more than the tip of this political iceberg, it's necessary to dig deeper into Hungary's history, because in the year 1630 it had already been fighting an unequal war with the Ottoman Empire for a good 230 years. Considering the disparate sizes of the military forces, this indicates that Hungarian military power cannot be underestimated.
It's hard to know how much of the military power—the local Hungarian nobles and castle captains of the captaincies of the Hungarian kingdom—were loyal to the Habsburgs in the 1630s. What was the magic of these soldiers that they could keep the overwhelming Ottoman Empire's armies at bay for so long with so little monetary support? It was not a miracle that the Turks couldn't reach Vienna in more than two hundred years' time. It wasn't the doing of the glorious Habsburg troops, either.
Vienna simply could not be reached from the two main directions from which the Turks had been trying to do so for hundreds of years. The Turks were either following the line of the Danube in the hope of taking the formidable forts of Komárom, Győr (Raab), and Pozsony (Pressburg, Bratislava) that were guarding the river with their cannons all the way to Vienna or attempting to cut through the densely fortified Trans-Danubian region.
A third way would have been to go all around the Hungarian lands and climb the Alps as Hannibal had done a couple of thousand years before the current era.
The only other option left for the Turks if they wanted to get anywhere near Vienna was to get there with Transylvanian assistance. Prince György Rákóczi I of Transylvania had it in his power to make the way free to the Turks during the 1630s.
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First, however, some information about the nation that was able to prevent the Muslim invasion of Europe and was crippled by it:
When it comes to Hungary and Hungarians, people have mixed feelings. Whether they're regarded as some kind of eastern freedom-fighters armed with Molotov cocktails who invented Vitamin C in their spare time, or low Balkan savages, the servile allies of Germans in both World Wars and the barbarian offspring of Attila the Hun, mostly they are just a simple people who try to survive between the West and East—as their seventeenth-century folk song says:
"The wage of a poor soldier's lad is cheap:
it is two-three pennies for a day.
Still, he can't even spend that because
he is shedding his blood for one homeland,
between two pagans…"
The two pagans are the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
Hungary's twenty-first century situation derives straight from the seventeenth-century period being discussed. If Hungary hadn't been weakened so much by the Turks, she never would have been occupied by the Habsburgs. So there would be no Slovakia nor Yugoslavia to speak of and the very existence of Romania as a state would be questionable and Transylvania would have remained within Hungary's borders.
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Origins of Hungarians, Romanians, and Slovakians
However insignificant Hungary may seem now, its central location made it quite significant between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In the seventeenth century, Transylvania was a principality led by and populated mostly by Hungarians. (Except, perhaps, for Count Dracula.)
Neither Romania nor Slovakia existed as countries at the Ring of Fire. The name Romanian was invented in the nineteenth century and was not used at the time of the Ring of Fire. The people who are now referred to as Romanians and who had dealings with the Turks in this time period were from Wallachia and Moldavia, two satellite states which were wholly subservient to the Turks. At the time of the RoF they were mostly called Wallachians ( "Oláh” in Hungarian).
The Wallachian and Moldavian population within Transylvania was not numerous and they didn't belong to the three nations which formed an alliance in order to guard their religious liberties: the Hungarian nobles, the Secler Nation ("Székely Nemzet", a distinct and ancient Hungarian group) and the Saxon Germans mainly from Thuringia, in their seven major Saxon cities. In German, Transylvania is called "Siebenburgen"—the land of these "seven cities".
During Transylvania's history up to the RoF, there was only one non-Hungarian prince. Mihail II, Prince of Wallachia, got hold of Transylvania's throne for a very short time in 1599. During his rather tyrannic reign he wanted to cease the religious tolerance and introduce the domination of the Orthodox Church along with the exclusive use of the Romanian language. But he failed in his intentions and was chased away after a year. Wallachian and Moldavians are not discussed here in great detail since their role compared to the Hungarians' in fighting the Turks was minor. If you wish to compare the striking difference between Transylvania and the two Romanian principalities, read the French traveler and diplomat Pierre Lescalonier's book in which he shares his journey's story from Istanbul through Wallachia to Transylvania in 1574. The young French knight felt like he was entering civilization when he arrived in Transylvania and was surprised to witness the people in the local Lutheran churches finishing their prayers after each sermon saying:
"Please, God destroy the Papist and the Muslim tyranny!"
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Slovakians—or rather, the predecessors of those Slavic people now called Slovakians—in the 1630s were mostly south Slavic refugees finding asylum and protection on the Hungarian Kingdom's northern fringe. The Hungarian highlands offered a protected melting pot for several ethnic groups with different Slavic origin—southern Slavs (Serbs and Croatians), Moravians from Bohemia, Rusyns from Moldavia—coexisted and provided a basis for the beginning of a future Slovakian nation. That area later—in 1918—became Slovakia, with great numbers of indigenous Hungarians who were turned into minorities and considered second-class citizens. So on a modern map, Slovakia roughly covers the northern part of what was the Hungarian kingdom in the 1630s.
Readers and writers within the 1632verse should be aware of the settlements' seventeenth-century names; the modern Slovakian names weren't used until 1918, but they're the ones that are used on most English language maps. However, the German versions of these names, as well as the Hungarian versions, were used in the 1630s, so these are the ones used in this article as well as the older names for present-day Serbian, Croatian, Ukrainian, and Romanian towns mentioned. Eastern Europe is a difficult place. As the joke goes, Hungary is the only country in Europe that is bordered by itself.
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Hungarians are neither Germans nor Slavs—or even Indo-Europeans.
Even their names are backwards to European norms. In Hungary the family name comes first and the given name comes second, as in China and Japan.
The origin of the nation is much debated. The official version says they are Finno-Ugric and came from somewhere beyond the Ural Mountains and
settled in the Carpathian Basin in the ninth century AD. Others say that the Finno-Ugric theory was forced and fabricated by the Habsburg-influenced Hungarian Academy of Science in the nineteenth century and was reinforced by ruling communists in the twentieth century in order to deprive the nation of a richer and more heroic origin. Heroes can be dangerous. Hungarians used to have quite a rebellious reputation and having a famous and glorious past could have meant trouble for the oppressing communist ruling class or from a new-born neighboring nation like Czechoslovakia. In Central Europe, national history, patriotic literature, and poetry have always been as perilous as explosives, and that's still true today.
Romanians like to point out in their history schoolbooks how barbarian the invading Hungarians had been when they arrived in Transylvania and how they had oppressed poor Romanians who could only keep their superior culture by running and hiding in the Carpathian Mountains to wait for the glorious 1918. Slovakians even fabricated a genealogy for Slovakian kings that dates back to a fictional "Great Moravian Empire" that allegedly had been destroyed by the arrival of the bloodthirsty Huns in the ninth century. [Most scholarship, the Internet and Wikipedia does not agree with this statement. -Ed] The point is always that the neighboring or oppressor nations are supposed to be older and superior in their culture and origin. An indigenous Hungarian person living in one of those new countries could get in trouble if he publicly denied those falsifications.
Grantville Gazette, Volume 67 Page 14
