Heterogeneous religion: imperfect or braided?

Archival sources dating from the 1550s contain many references to the Italian version of Anabaptism, a doctrinal system built around the humanist-evangelical traditions in the northern regions of Italy. This doctrine represented the organic blend of two distinct theological approaches to the Scripture: the Antitrinitarian traditions of Juan de Valdés and the Anabaptist views of the German territories merged in one single religion. The Italian shade of Anabaptism is considered a religious development so unusual that the traditional Anabaptist/Mennonite interpretation has either neglected it or categorically rejected any connection between the Swiss or German Anabaptists and the Italian congregations. Depositions made to the Venetian Inquisition seem to be using Antitrinitarian and Anabaptist interchangeably.^[1] At the best, a long tradition of studies labeled the Italian movement in a critical tone as heterogeneous, imperfect, or confused.^[2]

These approaches have since been amended by numerous case studies on the north Italian radical Christians and communities, while an attempt was made to classify Anabaptism in Italy as a regional variant of the larger Täufer movement. It has by now been accepted that Italian Anabaptists both held unorthodox views concerning the nature of Christ and combined such Antitrinitarian views with the rejection of infant baptism. Even so, this Italian radicalism seemed less structured and less homogeneous when compared to the Anabaptist doctrines; as a result, it could not be boxed and labeled within definite categories elaborated by the long debates in religious history.

This essay seeks to view the intertwined dissenting syncretism in its complexity. It introduces the term ‚composite religion‘ to describe such heterogeneity, with Antitrinitarianism and Anabaptism regarded as constituent elements. By doing so, the hard-to-explain causality in influences becomes less relevant. Religious trends will not be regarded as imperfect copies of more complete creeds.

I come at this study from a novel direction, as my main line of research has not been on the doctrines and holy practices of the Anabaptists, but on their economic life and material culture. My work on the remarkable pottery produced by the Anabaptist communities in Central Europe shows that religious ideas are not unlike pots and bowls. Just as the shape and decoration of the ceramic ware morph across space to create objects that carry different territorial elements, so do religious thought and practice. There was no quintessential Anabaptist ceramic form. By analogy, instead of assuming the existence of a genuine form of Anabaptism as a measure to evaluate against its Italian version, I consider the territorial variations that communicated through mobile commoners. Consequently, my attention will also shift from the elite leaders to the common followers of Anabaptism. Their circulation across the Alps from Italy to Switzerland, Transylvania, Moravia, and back to Italy is important in itself; more importantly, however, it also directs our attention to the transnational dialogues that affected the evolving Anabaptist and Antitrinitarian movements in sixteenth-century Europe. For this syncretism did not stop in Italy. By means of Italian believers, Anabaptist ideas were transported to Transylvania and Poland of the 1560s and nourished the development of the Antitrinitarian churches.

In a co-authored article focusing on the formative years of German Anabaptism, my collaborator and I introduced an interpretive tool that helps to elucidate the fluidity of the ideas circulating in the specific environment of the early Reformation.^[3] We argued that the religious milieu of the 1520s cannot be described in causal terms as causality cannot reflect complexity. Instead of a sharp fracture between the Saxon reformers and the South German Anabaptists, our essay looked at the porous boundaries, to mirror the intricacy and fluidity of ideas circulating in that specific environment. A great number of connections have been found between Thomas Müntzer, other Saxon reformers and the first Anabaptists. The essay concluded that none of the surviving religious creeds owe their doctrinal structure to one hand. Rather, multiple pairs of hands added pieces and fragments of stolen, borrowed, hand-picked, or simply exchanged ideas fashioning composite religions.

Several fine studies on the Italian heterodoxy have shown that the porous boundaries explain the easy passage between various, often competing religious trends. The Venetian study by John Martin showed that, in the 1540s, many members of the north-Italian aristocracy embraced evangelical teachings.^[4] For those Italians affected by anti-Roman feelings and most concerned about the dogmatic reforms, the main avenues of evangelical idea were the University of Padua and the noble circles in the city of Venice. They did not urge for radical societal changes: their peculiar religious practice was understood as a personal spiritual renewal; it excluded the social reform propagated by such leading figures as the itinerant radical preacher Bernardino Ochino. The evangelicals replaced papal authority with biblical authority, reduced the number of sacraments, but invariably maintained baptism as a sacrament. Meanwhile, non-noble humanists and professionals – poets, notaries, goldsmiths, lawyers, and doctors –, as well as artisans of a wide range of trades became caught up in the excitement of the new religious ferment. Easy passage between the social strata was assured by the conversatione continua in the city and backed by the largest and most advanced printing industry in Europe.^[5] This mixing of social strata was a peculiar aspect of the Reformation. In Bologna, for example, radical thinkers included knights, nobles, professors, and university students, but also schoolmasters, merchants, grocers, cobblers and weavers, all bound together by a sense of religious community. In these circles, printed books by Luther, Melanchton, Zwingli, Martin Bucer, and unpublished works by Juan de Valdés passed easily from hand to hand.^[6]

Italian radicals – to whom the evangelists seemed too moderate – have fallen under the influence of the Anabaptists keen on seeking evangelicals receptive to their ideas.^[7] Anabaptism, the radical movement that had been attracting followers since 1526, expanded southwards from the German-speaking lands through the Tyrol. When the movement reached the northern regions of Italy in the early 1540s, it induced many north Italians to reject the sacrament of infant baptism. For the adult believers, the act of baptism was the very sign of the individual’s entrance into the community of believers. It was a rite of passage both spiritual and earthly: purification from sin, but also a quiet rejection of society’s institutions and authorities. Besides adult baptism, the Anabaptist movement advocated the separation of church and state, and the abolition of all kinds of military services, including taxes. As the importance of the Anabaptists’ adult baptism shifted further and further towards its secular meaning, lay authorities joined the religious ones in persecuting these radicals. Persecution drove most adherents to migrate eastward to the Margraviate of Moravia but also pushed them towards the liberal religious milieu of Venice.

And yet, in a fermenting religious environment, even Anabaptist opinions seemed too moderate and Italian radicals were quick to develop them into more radical doctrines. North-Italian Anabaptist groups unreservedly received the Antitrinitarian doctrines of Neapolitan Valdesianism. The anti-Trinitarian views reached northern Italy via the Spanish elite of Naples in the early 1540s. Although Juan de Valdés did not challenge the traditional views on Jesus and the Trinity, his disciple, Juan de Villafranca’s radical conclusions gave a twist to Valdesianism and propagated that „there was no Trinity, but one sole God, that Christ was not God, but that God dwelt in Christ“.^[8] In accord with Anabaptists teachings, Villafranca also declared that Christ’s kingdom was imminent and limited the final resurrection to the elect. Even after Villafranca’s death in 1545, these teachings reached Piacenza and Padua by way of his disciples. The feverish search for truth steered Anabaptism in the direction of Antitrinitarianism and resulted in statements affirming that Christ was „born of semen like all other people“, that only the elect would rise again, and that „baptism should be given to adults“.^[9] It is clear how fragments from one religious creed were mixed with pieces of another to form heterodox understandings of the Bible. This is what is indeed a composite religion.

The term Antitrinitarian Anabaptism is an excellent illustration of the faith’s composite nature. Were one to expect a homogeneous doctrine, such complexity would seem chaotic and besetting. This is why DeWind maintained that Anabaptism and Antitrinitarianism were mutually exclusive. He even offered the evidence of a deposition made to the Venetian Inquisition by the Neapolitan Lorenzo Tizzano^[10] who meant Antitrinitarian when he had said Anabaptist.^[11] Tizzano was not alone in his creed. The long-lived Antitrinitarian influence is seen in the testimonies given to the Inquisition in the late 1560s and early 1570s. The trial documents reveal a relatively lively circulation of prohibited ideas and books in the Veneto region. It is not unusual, claims Paolin, to find archival documents that refer to Anabaptist discussions about the negation of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.^[12] Antitrinitarian Anabaptism shows that people did not so much pass from one religion to another as blend ideas together to form a new heterodoxy.

The following fragment from the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia serves as a further illustration for the usefulness of the term composite religion. The entry dedicated to Tiziano concludes, albeit cautiously, that it is „impossible to disentangle“ the Antitrinitarian and the northern Anabaptists contributions to the Italian shade of the Reformation. Tiziano was one of the most influential and yet, the most enigmatic figures of the northern radicalism in Italy. Like many other Italian heretics, Tiziano left Italy and found refuge in the Swiss Grisons sometime after the establishment of the Roman Inquisition in 1542. He resurfaced suddenly in 1549 when he took his teachings to northern Italy after he was expelled from the reformed territories because of his nonconformist views regarding infant baptism. As the archival documents indicate, his understanding of Anabaptism did not stop at the denial of the sacrament of infant baptism. Based on a confession signed by his hand in the Grisons, „Tiziano had denied the Trinity and the divine nature of Christ, had suspected the veracity of Scripture, had places the authority of the Spirit above that of the Bible, had rejected infant baptism, and had claimed that Christians could not hold magistracies.“^[13]

Tiziano’s fellow believer Camillo Renato, the Sicilian heretic was tried in Italy on various occasions for his free-thinking rationalistic approach to the fundamentals of Christianity. After a stay in Venice and Bologna in the late 1530s, he was active at Chiavenna in 1546 and later became embroiled in controversies over the sacraments with the Swiss reformed leaders who accused him of being an Anabaptist. His heresies, said they, were as follows: he rejected infant baptism and held unorthodox opinions concerning the nature of Christ, salvation, the existence of hell, and the sleep of souls. Here again, the syncretism of Antitrinitarian and Anabaptist teachings blended into a complex doctrine; but instead of creating a confusion, in this syncretism, the constituent elements are complementary and not conflicting.

Such braided views of Anabaptism and Antitrinitarianism were not confined to Italy; they were carried, via the religious refugees, towards the fringes of Europe. Soon after 1550, the Anabaptists threatened by the Inquisition had to flee Italy. Some of the most educated exponents joined the ranks of the Polish Minor Church and the Unitarian Church in Transylvania,^[14] the two regions that played an outstanding role in the history of sixteenth-century Antitrinitarianism.^[15] Although the two currents mutually influenced each other, there were significant differences between the ways in which Antitrinitarian Anabaptism developed in Poland and Transylvania.^[16]

The principality of Transylvania that came into being in the sixteenth century, had a varied ethnic and religious landscape, saw itself as fundamentally Protestant.^[17] Lutheranism came in intensive waves during the 1530s and 1540s, spreading first among the Saxons, while the Hungarian population only joined the Helvetian movements in the 1550s. In the beginning, they followed Zwingli, then in the 1560s turned more to Bullinger and Calvin. Most of the landed nobility embraced these Protestant teachings. By the mid-1560s, the Catholics had become a negligible minority, concentrated mainly on the estates of the few catholic magnates and among the Szeklers on the eastern territories of the principality, while the mostly peasant Romanians, representing one-third of the population, adhered to the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Unitarian church sank deep roots in Transylvania and has been in continuous existence since the Reformation.

In Poland, Antitrinitarians broke away from the Calvinist church. The first advocate appears to have been Piotr Giezek Gonesius who had spent several years of study and teaching at the University of Padua. His master there, Matteo Grimaldi had introduced him to the works of Servetus, executed at Calvin’s instigation in Geneva in 1553. On his journey home from Italy, Gonesius passed through Moravia, where he visited the Hutterite Brethren and became an enthusiast for adult baptism and pacifism. Anabaptist Antitrinitarianism found proselytes among the Polish landowning class; nevertheless, they strongly opposed the ideas of non-resistance and community of goods. Antitrinitarianism took institutional form with the establishment of the Minor Church in 1565, while Raków became the intellectual and cultural center for those who supported the Anabaptist model based on the community of goods. Polish and Lithuanian faithful retreated from the sinful world to Raków to pursue their communitarian, egalitarian, and pacifist ideals. After unsuccessful attempts at union with the Moravian Hutterites, the movement’s social radicalism faded.^[18]

Although it is habitual to present the early Transylvanian and Polish Antitrinitarianism in parallel, it is important to highlight the particularities of the two movements. In the 1560s and 1570s, there was a parallel development between the Polish and Transylvanian Anabaptist churches with abundant cooperation in which Italians often acted as intermediaries. The Antitrinitarian physician Giovanni Giorgio Biandrata is one of the prominent members who influenced the course of events in Poland and Transylvania. He served Queen Bona Sforza of Poland from 1540 to 1552. Returning to Italy, he practiced medicine at Pavia where his interest in theological speculation aroused the hostility of the Inquisition. In 1556 he fled to Geneva and became an elder in the Calvinist congregation of Italians. He soon antagonized Calvin by declaring that debates over the nature of the Trinity threatened the concept of the unity of God. Two years later Biandrata was back in Poland, where he became an influential elder in the Minor Church. In 1563, king John II summoned him as court physician in Transylvania. Despite the differences between the churches, Biandrata created a link that would become important in the development of later events.

Antitrinitarian ideas in Transylvania first appeared in the circles close to Biandrata, and fiery debates must have happened at Kolozsvár/Klausenburg (today Cluj) since the town council recorded in 1565 that false biblical interpretations were carried to the town by many. Key figures of the Italian current, like Gian Paolo Alciati, spent shorter spells there, and connections arose as well with the Moravian center of Niccolo Paruta. In contrast to Italy or Poland, the Antitrinitarian and Anabaptist representatives did not have to hide or set up clandestine movements. The status of Antitrinitarianism was elevated to state religion in 1568, and with the printing of various Antitrinitarian works, the Unitarians proselytism achieved success.

Under these favorable circumstances, Biandrata played an important role in converting the Calvinists population to Antitrinitarianism. Bishop Ferenc Dávid, a prolific writer and the most important representative of the movement in Transylvania, was his ally up to the early 1570s setting up the Unitarian Church in close cooperation with the Polish Minor Church. The texts of the Italian Lelio Sozzini were a common ground on which both churches positioned themselves in matters of Christology. Their rejection of the Trinity was based on Jesus being God’s revelation but still a mere man, divine by office rather than by nature.

On the issue of baptism both the Poles and the Transylvanians shared the same ideas. Both churches borrowed from Servetus’s „Restitutio“ in which he attacked the practice of infant baptism; nevertheless, the Transylvanian texts significantly softened the polemical tone. Dávid argued that Catholic and Protestant adults joining the church should be baptized; there is no mention, however, of any practical application of these ideas.^[19] Aided by a very active printing house in Kolozsvár, Dávid published three editions of his „Argumenta quibus paedobaptismus impetitur [Arguments with which infant baptism is attacked]“: the first one as an addition to the invitation to the Torda synod in 1568 when he (along with Biandrata) confronted the Calvinist pastors Péter Méliusz and Gáspár Károli on 37 points.^[20] Dávid’s rejection of infant baptism was very likely fed by several intellectual sources. In 1570, he published a booklet translated from Flemish to German and sent to Transylvania by the Polish physician Alexander Willini. The „Büchlein über die wahrhaftige christliche Taufe [Booklet concerning the true Christian baptism]“ contains arguments against infant baptism; Dávid translated it into Hungarian with the title „Könyvetske az igaz kerestyéni keresztségről“, and published it along the German version.^[21]

Chiliastic elements appeared in both the Polish and Transylvanian version of Antitrinitarianism: expectation of the Second Coming was an element that seems to be influenced by the Anabaptists. In his „Short Explanation [Rövid magyarazat]“, Dávid laid out further chiliastic expectations and determined a precise date for the end of times.^[22] Meanwhile in Poland, the theologian Grzegorz Paweł z Brzezin speculated along the same ideas; he completed a work, now lost, on the end of times and the second coming of Christ.^[23]

Dávid’s further radicalization broke his alliance with the Italo-Polish Antitrinitarians. He preached that Unitarians should not worship Christ at all. Lelio Sozzini’s nephew, Fausto, summoned from Poland by Biandrata, tried in vain to convince Dávid to modify his views. The Unitarians lost influence after the death of prince János Zsigmond in 1571; the new prince, the Catholic noble István Báthory (also elected as Polish king in 1576), took every opportunity to act against Antitrinitarian beliefs. Báthory also supported a law approved by the Transylvanian Diet that prohibited any further religious innovation in Transylvania. With Dávid’s trial on charge of innovation, his death in captivity in 1579, and Biandrata’s ultimate conformity to the Catholic church, the leadership changed. The Unitarian doctrine in Transylvania was thus heavily influenced by Jacobus Paleologus (Giacomo da Chio) during the 1570s. He accentuated the non-adorantist principle of the Unitarians and paid less attention to baptism. Paleologus’s theology acknowledged the heavenly rule of Jesus Christ who, due to his merits, ascended to the heavens. However, since Jesus did not rule over the inhabitants of the earth, it was unnecessary to call on his help or to invoke his name. It was also forbidden to the faithful to worship or adore him: Jesus was not God as the one true creator God never shared his majesty with anyone else. When these ideas first circulated among Antitrinitarians in Transylvania, they were met with resistance. However, by the second half of the 1570s a significant proportion of Unitarian congregations had embraced Paleologus’s non-adorantist thought. This development further eroded the relationship with the Antitrinitarian congregation in Poland and set the Unitarian church in Transylvania to a particular path. The sequence of events outlined above also illustrate that the influences to which Unitarianism was exposed came from different directions and, in either country, eventually matured into one belief system.^[24]

In the 1550s and 1560s, the third location of special importance for the Antitrinitarian Anabaptists was Moravia. Following the Inquisitional activity in the Veneto, many Italians formed their own communities there or found refuge in the existing Anabaptist communities.

The Anabaptist movement had spread quickly across the Habsburg territories as the first Anabaptists fleeing from German-speaking lands settled in Moravia in 1526, enjoying the protection of the local nobility. Among Anabaptists themselves there was little unity. True, all Reformation-era persons or sects that disavowed infant baptism were called Anabaptists and considered by their detractors as being of one party. From the outside the stance was seen as a single movement, one that aroused the anxious hostility of governments and leading theologians. Within the current, however, the Anabaptists never managed to form one single cohesive group. The Anabaptists in Moravia belonged to many sects. Marcantonio Varotta (d. 1568), a Venetian weaver and painter who travelled extensively across Protestant Europe and converted to Anabaptism, when visiting Moravia noted harsh rivalries between Anabaptist sects.^[25] They all grew out of the same criticism of what seemed an unholy alliance of church and state, and all shared high regard for Scripture and the centrality of grace, but disagreed on so many other beliefs and practices that each group had its own articles of faith.

The degree of religious tolerance in Moravia much depended on the outcomes of a power struggle between the Habsburg centralizing policies and the critical loyalty to the crown of the Moravian estates. In 1526, when the Catholic Ferdinand of Habsburg became Bohemian King, he inherited a kingdom with largely autonomous baronial power, property and privilege. The accommodation of religious plurality in Moravia resulted from a series of hard-fought political and economic compromises: the country’s laws granted religious rights, limited the Crown’s rights to impose taxes, and exempted the nobles from participating in any war outside the kingdom of Bohemia. The Habsburgs’ centralizing tendencies on the one hand and their need for the critical loyalty of the Moravian aristocracy on the other, created power struggles that unsettled the political environment.^[26]

Nevertheless, after a great persecution of 1547–1553, the so-called Good Years and Golden Years (1554–1591) allowed the Anabaptist communities unhindered growth. One such community was organized around Niccolò Paruta; at his house in Austerlitz, several Italian Anabaptists and Antitrinitarians showed up for shorter or longer periods. Paruta was a religious dissident deeply embedded in the Antitrinitarian and Anabaptist networks. He emigrated first to Geneva and then in 1561 finally settled at Austerlitz (now Slavkov) where he owned several vineyards and a house with a well-equipped library. From there, he maintained closely knit contacts with the like-minded Antitrinitarians in Transylvania and Vienna. His Moravian house was a focal point for the Italian exiles; his guests were, among others, Valentino Gentile, Giampaolo Alciati and the old Bernardino Ochino who died there in 1564. The surgeon Niccolò Buccella from Padua lived in Austerlitz until 1562. He was an educated companion to the Anabaptist Antitrinitarians of Moravia. When he returned to Italy in 1562, the Inquistion captured him. After his abjuration in 1564, Buccella practiced as a doctor in Italy and teached students of the German nation at the University of Padua. Despite the abjuration, he maintained connections both with Paruta in Moravia and Biandrata in Transylvania, and in 1574 became the court doctor of Catholic prince István Báthory, whom he followed to Poland in 1576.

Other Italians, with fewer social resources, chose a different path and joined the Anabaptist communities in Moravia. During the second half of the sixteenth century, most of the Anabaptist sects in Moravia dwindled; only the Hutterite Brethren became a robust and dynamic sect, thanks to their practice of the community of goods. In a mere five years they managed to coin a religious profile and identity that distinguished them from other Anabaptist sects in Moravia. The Hutterites, who were awaiting Christ’s Second Coming, conformed themselves to the only Christian way they knew by separating themselves from the sinful world. In their chiliastic communes, the private property could not exist. Still, spiritual and material comfort was offered from the cradle to the grave while they followed the stringent rules that regulated every single aspect of their day-to-day lives. The Hutterites welcomed new members in big numbers. Interestingly, they so firmly professed their belief in the Holy Trinity that they turned away anyone questioning the divinity of Christ.^[27] Those who joined them had to take up their teachings; thus, those Italian Anabaptists who fled the Inquisition and joined the Hutterite communities, surely renounced to the Antitrinitarian elements of their theologies.

Italians who can be identified by the Hutterite sources are rather few. In Hutterite sources, few appear who are without doubt Italian. Well-integrated into their communities was Andrea Lorengo of Padua, who, according to the inscription of his surviving Bible, arrived to Moravia in 1556.^[28] He was appointed as a preacher in 1572 at Pribitz (now Přibice); in 1578 he was confirmed at Kostel (now Podivín), and six years later died at Kostel.

The Hutterites were expansionists. They aimed to mobilize and assemble the elect for the last days, to await Christ’s imminent return. As, according to their agreements with the protecting patrons in Moravia, the Brethren had to refrain from proselytizing among the local population, their missionary works targeted faraway lands. At the same time, the missions proved to be a survival strategy: in order to sustain the community, and keep their numbers up, the Hutterite leaders systematically sent out missionaries, across a large area from Tyrol to the Palatinate. It was an expensive mission: some four-fifths of the missionaries sent out were martyred, but most of their converts managed to settle in Moravia.

Four Italians died as Hutterite martyrs. Giulio Gherlandi of Treviso (identified in the Hutterite documents with the name Julius Klampferer), Francesco della Sega (known by the Hutterites as Franciscus von der Sach) of Rovigo, the nobleman Gian Giorgio Patrizi from Cherso, and Antonio Rizzetto (also known as Antonius Wälsch) from Vicenza completely overcame previous influences and became prominent members of the Hutterite community. In 1561, della Sega was appointed to serve as a preacher.^[29] Soon afterwards, the Italian Brethren were sent on mission journeys to their homeland with the task to recruit prospective members for the Hutterite communities and to lead them to Moravia. In the summer of 1562 when their companion, the Swiss Alexius Sweitzer (Alessio Todeschi) betrayed them, the missionaries were arrested. Gherlandi was executed by drowning in 1562 while Francesco della Sega and Antonio Rizzetto spent three years in prison and were sentenced to death.^[30] Gian Giorgio Patrizi returned to Istria on several occasions as a missionary; he also died as a Hutterite martyr in 1571.^[31]

Despite the Inquisition, the Antitrinitarian influence was long-lived in Italy. Giovanna Paolin describes a vivid circulation, in the late 1560s and early 1570s, of prohibited ideas and books in the Veneto. It is not unusual, she claims, to find archival documents that refer to discussions about the negation of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Nevertheless, it was not Antitrinitarianism, but the Hutterite missionary work that drove almost all inhabitants of Cinto, a little borgo in Northern Italy, to convert and migrate to Moravia. A group of Antitrinitarian Anabaptists in Padua was likewise closely connected to the Anabaptists in Moravia; a certain Bartolomeo was most probably an appointed as a servant of the Word by the congregation in Moravia.^[32] Notably, some of these men, when they were finally forced to flee to avoid the Inquisition, opted not to take the usual exile routes over the Alps to the world of the Reformation, but moved instead to the more exotic Levantine cities of Salonica, Alexandria, Damascus, and Constantinople where they were granted asylum. Nevertheless, the martyr stories and the group conversions highlight how the stubborn individualism of the Antitrinitarians was replaced by the communalism of the common man.

All the examples shown in this essay point to a circulation of people between different religious communities that was much larger than previously thought. Circulation was also habitual among leaders of religious communities and common followers alike. The back-and-forth movement of persons across distant territories inevitably meant exposure to a ferment of theologies, sects, and churches. The constant religious flux gives an idea of how new creeds were formed: vertically, by way of dialogues between leaders and their followers via written tracts and sermons and other lessons, and, horizontally, from disputations and practical engagements of the believers. The circulation of Antitrinitarian Anabaptists across the Alps from Italy to Switzerland, Moravia and back to Italy – is important in itself, but it also directs our attention to the transnational dialogues that shaped the evolving Antitrinitarian and Anabaptist ideas in Italy. Naturally, these face-to-face interactions, debates and disputations caused an exchange of diverse ideas that pushed the formation of new belief systems in one direction or another.

It is also clear that the camp of the Antitrinitarian Anabaptists was anything but internally homogeneous or coherent. In this, it much resembled other radical experiments of the 1560s. The territorial variations that developed simultaneously at times cooperated, but also contradicted each other on various occasions and finally took different paths towards the formation of mature religious churches. Nevertheless, such heterogeneity should not be regarded as a weakness in the formation of the new religious creeds. Rather, the experimental nature should be appreciated here. Just as in other radical theologies, the heterogeneous vision of the Antitrinitarian Anabaptists was not a result of lack of ability to articulate itself but a matter of principles. These principles were varied from open opposition to tempered nonconformity, from the inclusive and popular to the exclusionary, and separatist.

Passing from one creed to the other on the large spectrum of Antitrinitarian Anabaptism was not just a consequence of fluid boundaries. Changing sides was facilitated by the braided intellectual influences, whereby the relocating migrants facilitated the circulation of the ideas that would later become the backbone of a movement. In the practice of commoners, the Antitrinitarian Anabaptism took different twists and turns, and integrated ideas and practices from several movements as well. From this perspective, this essay confirms the earlier perspective on the composite religion: the creeds owe their existence not to one person but to multiple hands.