At that early stage of the Reformation it would have been quite easy for the king and the nobility and the clergy to stamp out this epidemic of erroneous opinions. But such a step would have obliged the rulers of the republic to unite upon a definite and common policy and that of course was directly in contradiction to the most hallowed traditions of this strange country where a single dissenting vote could upset a law which had the support of all the other members of the diet.
And when (as happened shortly afterwards) it appeared that the religion of the famous Wittenberg professor carried with it a by-product of an economic nature, consisting of the confiscation of all Church property, the Boleslauses and the Wladislauses and the other knights, counts, barons, princes and dukes who populated the fertile plains between the Baltic and the Black Sea began to show a decided leaning towards a faith which meant money in their pockets.
The unholy scramble for monastic real estate which followed upon the discovery caused one of those famous “interims” with which the Poles, since time immemorial, have tried to stave off the day of reckoning. During such periods all authority came to a standstill and the Protestants made such a good use of their opportunity that in less than a year they had established churches of their own in every part of the kingdom.
Eventually of course the incessant theological haggling of the new ministers drove the peasants back into the arms of the Church and Poland once more became one of the strongholds of a most uncompromising form of Catholicism. But during the latter half of the sixteenth century, the country enjoyed complete religious license. When the Catholics and Protestants of western Europe began their war of extermination upon the Anabaptists, it was a foregone conclusion that the survivors should flee eastward and should eventually settle down along the banks of the Vistula and it was then that Doctor Blandrata got hold of Socinius’ book on Jesus and expressed a wish to make the author’s acquaintance.
Giorgio Blandrata was an Italian, a physician and a man of parts. He had graduated at the University of Montpellier and had been remarkably successful as a woman’s specialist. First and last he was a good deal of a scoundrel, but a clever one. Like so many doctors of his time (think of Rabelais and Servetus) he was as much of a theologian as a neurologist and frequently played one rôle out against the other. For example, he cured the Queen Dowager of Poland, Bona Sforza (widow of King Sigismund), so successfully of the obsession that those who doubted the Trinity were wrong, that she repented of her errors and thereafter only executed those who held the doctrine of the Trinity to be true.
The good queen, alas, was gone (murdered by one of her lovers) but two of her daughters had married local noblemen and as their medical adviser, Blandrata exercised a great deal of influence upon the politics of his adopted land. He knew that the country was ripe for civil war and that it would happen very soon unless something be done to make an end to the everlasting religious quarrels. Wherefore he set to work to bring about a truce between the different opposing sects. But for this purpose he needed some one more skilled in the intricacies of a religious debate than he was himself. Then he had an inspiration. The author of the life of Jesus was his man.
He sent Socinius a letter and asked him to come east.
Unfortunately when Socinius reached Transylvania the private life of Blandrata had just led to so grave a public scandal that the Italian had been forced to resign and leave for parts unknown. Socinius, however, remained in this far away land, married a Polish girl and died in his adopted country in the year 1604.
These last two decades of his life proved to be the most interesting period of his career. For it was then that he gave a concrete expression to his ideas upon the subject of tolerance.
They are to be found in the so-called “Catechism of Rakow,” a document which Socinius composed as a sort of common constitution for all those who meant well by this world and wished to make an end to future sectarian strife.