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A Protestant's letter and its Catholic interpreters: Michael Starinus’s pastoral report from 1551 and its echo in Croatian historiography

The early rise and progression of the Reformation around the Middle Danube, in the central parts of the former Hungarian-Croatian Kingdom, is a well-known phenomenon, primarily in Hungarian historiography. This phenomenon comprised parts of present-day Croatia, namely eastern Slavonia and Baranja, at that time territories of the Ottoman Empire. Despite this fact, the sixteenth- and the seventeenth- century Reformation in this area has received little attention among Croatian historians, who mostly consider it (unfoundedly and anachronistically) as a fleeting episode of little importance. The primary sources for the study of this subject include above all: letters and reports written by Protestant preachers and ministers as well as those by Catholic clergy and missionaries ; early works of the Hungarian Protestant church historiography ; and Ottoman and Habsburg tax registers and household censuses. A special place among the earliest sources belongs to Michael Starinus (Michael of Sztára, d. 1575), a schoolmaster and Paduan student turned into an ardent Protestant preacher, leader and author of a variegated body of writings. In a letter of 1551, written in Laskó (today Lug) in Baranja, Starinus describes in a humorous literary fashion how he and his assistants prevailed against Catholic priests in their fight for the loyalty of the Christian people around Valpovo and Vukovar (in eastern Slavonia). The details contained in this short report have become later, among Croatian Catholic church historians, the starting point of a peculiar interpretation of the events referred to by Starinus. This series of historians, among whom we find Euzebije Fermendžin, Matija Pavić, Emerik Gašić, Paškal Cvekan and others, have (mis)interpreted Starinus' lines as being proofs of the violence and torture allegedly used by the Protestants against Catholic clergy. While it is clear (and sufficiently corroborated by extant sources) that Protestant-Catholic relations of this period and in this area were indeed violent at times, it is also quite demonstrable that these nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians read their own preconceptions and biases into Starinus' text. In this paper I will provide a review of these biased readings and retellings of Starinus' original passage against the backdrop of a historical and philological analysis of its actual contents.

Reformation; Hungary; Baranja; Danube area; Michael Starinus; pastoral report

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