Multiconfessionalism and Interconfessionality: Religious “Toleration” in Royal Prussia, Lithuania, and the Ruthenian Lands

The last Lithuanian statute wrote into law the toleration that had been agreed among the Christian denominations at the Confederation of Warsaw in 1573. This, and a long tradition of coexistence between the religions in the Grand Duchy, where a majority of Christians were Orthodox, provided fertile ground for religious diversity throughout the whole of the early modern period. The early Lutheran Reformation reached Lithuania from Germany, but Scottish and English Presbyterianism, Antitrinitarians, Brethren and Socinians from Italy, Bohemia, Moravia, Switzerland and Poland equally left a mark. In a case study, this chapter
discusses the religious patronage networks that encouraged the settlement and spread of these religious groups by focusing on the protection provided by the Protestant line of the Radziwiłł family of Birże and Dubinki. While the influence of reformers and scholars such as Philipp Melanchthon, Andreas Volanus, and international Calvinist links to Germany, the Netherlands and the British Isles created the cultural environment for the spread of the Reformation, economic and political patronage consolidated interconfessional communities on the Radziwiłł estates. They increasingly came under threat from a proactive post-Tridentine Catholic church that used the same means that had once led to the considerable
influence of the Reformation in the Grand Duchy. This raises the question of the larger picture of the success or failure of the Protestant Reformation in Europe: why did the Commonwealth’s multi-confessional traditions, magnate confessionalization and patronage at a private level not suffice in order to create institutionalized Protestant churches in the Commonwealth?