Ferdinand I Expels the Unity of the Brethren from Bohemia

Ninety one years after the Unity of the Brethren formed in Bohemia in 1457, already recorded here, and forty five years before the Unity completed the Kralice Bible in 1593, also recorded here, King Ferdinand I of Bohemia moved against the Brethren for their part in the Bohemian estates' failed revolt of 1547 against Habsburg rule. In 1548 he issued an edict closing Brethren churches, imprisoning their ministers, most prominently the senior bishop Jan Augusta, who remained in captivity for sixteen years, and ordering the laity to leave the kingdom within forty two days on pain of confiscation. Roughly two thousand Brethren obeyed, marching in two columns north through Litomysl, Chlumec and Solnice, then through Frankenstein and Breslau and across the Giant Mountains into the Polish province of Great Poland, where the noble Gorka family gave them shelter. The refuge proved brief; the bishop of Poznan persuaded the newly crowned king Sigismund II Augustus to order the Bohemian exiles out of his kingdom as well, and most of the column moved on into East Prussia, where Duke Albert granted them naturalization and free worship. The expulsion cost the Unity its homeland's protection and its senior bishop's freedom for a generation, but it planted Brethren congregations in Great Poland and Prussia that outlasted the Bohemian crown's hostility, and it was during Augusta's long imprisonment that the scholar Jan Blahoslav rose to lead the Unity's biblical and literary work, work that would culminate in the Kralice Bible itself.