Ödenburger Landtag from 1681
The Ödenburger Landtag of 1681 was a Hungarian state parliament that met from May 24th to December 30th, 1681. The declared main goal was the restoration of the Hungarian constitution, but the driving force was the protracted religious conflict, against the background of which the decisions on Protestant religious practice in articulate communities can be seen as the main result.
prehistory
The state parliament was an attempt to resolve a situation that had gotten lost in over a decade. Contrary to his absolutist self-image, the situation of Emperor Leopold was weak, since he was trapped between the Turkish wars and battles with France that flared up again and again. At the same time, he pursued the Counter-Reformation with great severity . On the occasion of the magnate conspiracy against him, the emperor suspended the constitution in 1671 and reacted with severity. Instead of pacifying, repression produced a decade of civil war . The situation was exacerbated by the Transylvanian Kuruzzre uprisings .
Participants and the mix
145 county representatives , 76 aristocrats and 18 (arch) bishops took part. Eight of the nobles were Protestant. Of the county representatives, 29 were Lutherans and 16 were Reformed . Regarding the question of faith, the magnates of the nobility were united in the line of the Catholic Church and showed little willingness to compromise. In contrast, the military pressure of the (Protestant) Kuruzzen and a broad need for pacification of the civil war played into the hands of the Protestant delegates.
course
Since the plague was circulating in the usual conference location of Pressburg , the state parliament was moved to Ödenburg . The emperor Paul Esterházy was able to assert himself as Palatine (who was among other things presiding over the state parliament) . By means of a conference boycott, the Protestant representatives succeeded in forcing the treatment of the religious topic, which had been postponed in earlier diets and thus remained unresolved in favor of the Catholic power. In the course of the protracted negotiations, the tensions caused by the Protestant boycott were increasingly directed against the church representatives and magnates, who stood in the way of a compromise with their persistence. Finally, on October 8th, the emperor passed a resolution that affirmed the already formally granted religious freedom, at the same time placing the landlords above this freedom, so that it could only be effective in royal free cities and among Protestant landlords, while removing the practice of the Catholic faith from such restrictions , a respectful mutual treatment required, as well as the invocation of the emperor as arbitrator instead of armed conflict. Since the estates could not agree on an acceptance of the resolution, the emperor issued a new version on November 8th, which granted the Protestants additional articulated congregations and explicitly named these places in Article XXVI (hence the articular congregation ). This resolution stood against further attempts by the estates to get more out of each other.
During the state parliament on December 9th, Leopold's wife Eleanor was coronated as Queen of Hungary.
Other resolutions included: The restoration of the Croatian ban ; an amnesty; Abolition of taxes; Abolition of certain military courts; Rearmament of the Gyepűmilitia ; the strengthening of the Hungarian participation in negotiations with the Turks.
literature
- Imre Gyenge: The Hungarian Parliament of Ödenburg 1681 and the articulated community. in: Peter F. Barton (Ed.): In the light of tolerance. Institute for Protestant Church History, Vienna 1981, pp. 33–58