Keresés

Keresési eredmények

• A mártíromság és a katonai hivatástudat a 16. századi Magyarországon

  96–111.

  Őze Sándor

  Megtekintések száma:

  92

  During the period of Reformation a strong resistance to the cultivation of saints can be witnessed in Hungarian Protestant martyrology. The faithful ones borrowed their sacral heroes from the Old Testament, identifying them with the leaders or Protestant martyrs of their age, lest a new cult of saints should emerge. These heroes were initially protagonists in the “Antichrist” Wars of the period (preachers or deceased soldiers); victims selected strictly with the purpose of setting an example. To make the fundamentally repulsive profession and inordinate stereotype of soldiers accepted, it was first of all necessary to profess the war in which they are engaged as a just undertaking. The next step presupposes a military commitment adapted, at all times, to the situation. From the mid-sixteenth century, then, under the Ottoman threat, linked to Apocalyptic expectations, sacrality returned more and more prominently, together with the medieval title of Miles Christi (Soldier of the Christ). In Hungary, evidently, the heroes of the patriotic war against the Turks were thus elevated: the defenders of Eger (1552) as well as Miklós Zrínyi had acquired such fame by the late sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, then, the Protestant glory of martyrdom would shine around those heroes, missing in action during the Ottoman conquest, who appeared as exemplary figures in Protestant sermons, while their memory obtained ever stronger connections with the tradition of the independent Hungarian state.