“Inquisitions did not exist in Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, or England, being confined mainly to southern France, Italy, Spain, and a few parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The Inquisition could not have killed that many people because those parts of Europe did not have that many people to kill!”
Everybody knows about how the Protestant bishops Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake in England.
You are conflating all religious persecution with the Inquisition. Also, since Mary was married to the king of Spain, there was a Spanish influence on the policies during her reign–but as far as I know the formal Inquisition was not introduced. Plenty of government executed people without benefit of the Inquisition.
Everybody knows full well in Hungary how the Jesuit-led counter-Reformation
But was the Inquisition involved? This is narrowly about the Inquisition, not about religious persecution in general. (And yes, Catholics need to be reminded that persecution went way beyond the Inquisition.)
exterminated thousands of Protestants (mainly Reformed) under the treacherous and bloodthirsty Peter Pazmany who for example forced naked Protestants to stand in the freezing waters of Lake Balaton in order to force them to convert back to Catholicism.
Do you have any documentation for this claim in a Germanic or Romance language? Alas, the only Hungarian words I know are koszonom, Isten, szivesen, and (oddly) villamos. I found a brief description of
Peter Pazmany here, though it may of course be whitewashed.
This site claims that Pazmany used only nonviolent methods. I read all about the evil Jesuits in Eastern Europe long ago in J. A. Wylie’s
History of Protestantism. But I have since learned that Wylie is not to be relied on, and the impression I have gotten from my limited reading on the subject as a scholar of the Reformation is that the Jesuits primarily used education and persuasion (and, yes, political intrigue) to win Protestants back, rather than violence. (Actually I remember Wylie primarily talking about these methods too, but he made them sound very sinister.)
And why do you call Pazmany treacherous? Because he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism?
How Protestant churches were opressed, for example by not being allowed to have their churches on main streets, how all administrators were forced to swear by Mary and the saints,
These things I have no difficulty believing. Even in the tolerant Netherlands Catholic and dissenting Protestant churches were not allowed to be on main streets or advertise their presence.
how 40 Reformed pastors were sent to the gallies for years.
I had not heard that this happened in Hungary, but it doesn’t surprise me–the Hapsburgs were not gentle, and the French government was doing the same thing at about the same time.
Slowakians and Czechs also know how the Hussites, followers of the evangelical Jan Hus were also cruelly exterminated during an Inquisition of their own.
Again, are you using “Inquisition” broadly to mean any religious persecution? And while the Hussites were persecuted at various points, I would not say that they were “exterminated” as if they were just rounded up and massacred. It’s also hard to talk about the Hussites as a whole, because the Utraquists, the revolutionary Taborites, and the nonviolent Unity of the Brethren were quite different from each other and naturally had very different relationships to the state.
You have not increased your credibility around here by citing the “Jesuit Oath” which is known to be a forgery (it is recorded in the archives of Congress because some Congressman quoted it at some point–the idea that this confers credibility on it is utterly absurd).
Edwin
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