By Henry A. Fischer
At the beginning of undertaking
my research into my family origins in Hungary, I ran across references in some
Danube Swabian histories and studies to some settlers whose origins were not from
the German speaking principalities within the Holy Roman Empire, but from France,
Italy and Spain. Most of these references dealt with the Banat in present day
Serbia and Rumania. When I managed to discover the list of the earliest settler
families at Kötcse in Somogy County dated April 1730, a few of the Lutheran and
Reformed settlers from the Palatinate and Hesse had non-German names. The one
that struck me in particular was Gaspari, which is Italian. There were others
that were of French origin but had been Germanized and this would be true in
several other villages. Names like Simon, Rollion, Wallis, Thorau and Lafferton
to mention just a few.
In my later research I discovered that several of these
families came from the village of Rüsselsheim in Hesse, which was also true of
some of my own family connections, the Wolfs and Bruders who were among the
settlers in Kötcse. That reference provoked consternation on my part later when I
followed up on other aspects of the Counter Reformation in Europe that might have
affected the persecution we endured under the Habsburgs and Jesuits in Hungary.
In investigating the barbarous Albigensian
Crusades unleashed by the Papacy in the tenth and eleventh centuries in southwest
France, there were also references to the persecution of the followers of Peter
Waldo, who were known as the Poor Men from Lyon, a movement that had spread
throughout Provence in France. The survivors were later known as the Waldensians.
They were dissenters against papal wealth and power and the corruption of New
Testament Christianity and became an underground movement as wandering
missionaries that spread across Europe preaching an apostolic gospel. Many of
them were tradesmen and merchants and in this way their teachings against Rome
were circulated everywhere.
I had found a reference to them in Ödenburg
(Sopron) in Hungary in the 15th century when their mission there was
exposed and then suppressed by the local clergy and several of the town folk both
men and women were burned at the stake. Ödenburg would later become a stronghold
of Lutheranism with the introduction of Martin Luther’s writings in the early
1520s when clandestine study groups emerged among the citizenry that led to the
formation of a congregation that exists to this day.
The persecution of the Waldensians by the papacy would
go on for over eight hundred years, and yet they managed to survive, principally
in the Piedmont valleys, in the alpine borderlands between present day France and
Italy, and most of the Waldensian were of French and Italian origin, and found
sanctuary in the mountains and a beneficent Savoyan princess. But the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV of France in 1685 that ordered the conversion
of all Protestants to Roman Catholicism led to the flight of hundreds of thousands
of Hugenots (Protestants) across the Rhine into Holland, England and the
German territories, where a notable number received asylum in Hesse.
Unlike their other French compatriots the
Waldensians refused to flee and stood their ground and faced crusading armies for
the next thirty years, in which their numbers were decimated and many of the women
and children fled into the French and Italian speaking cantons of Switzerland and
southwest Germany. In the end their resistance was broken and some ten thousand
of them went into exile into Western Europe, primarily Holland and the German
principalities that were Reformed or Lutheran while other hid in the mountains.
Of those who fled across the Rhine,
there were numbers who were settled in the
territories of Count Ludwig Ernest of Hesse, who allowed them to form colonies of
their own and allowed the use of their language in church and school.
The land they were given, was often not of the best, nor was there much additional
land available to them as the colony grew.
One of these colonies was at Rüsselsheim and is the link to our family history and
our history of dissent. The Gaspari family had its origins there and their
many descendants spread throughout Somogy and Tolna Counties.
It was because
of that I undertook a study of the history of the Waldensians that I would like to
preserve for our descendants as part of their self-identity and heritage.
More on Waldesians:
http://www.giveshare.org/churchhistory/waldenses/notesonwaldensianchurch.html