10 000 Forint 500 years of Reformation

The 2017 issue commemorates the quincentennial of Martin Luther's posting of the Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg — the act conventionally dated to October 31, 1517, that fractured Western Christendom. Hungary's relationship with the Reformation was swift and consequential: Protestant ideas spread through the kingdom with unusual speed in the 1520s and 1530s, aided partly by the collapse of royal authority following the catastrophic Ottoman defeat at Mohács in 1526, which left the institutional Catholic church too weakened to mount effective resistance.

Reformed and Lutheran communities both took deep root, and Transylvania became one of the first polities in Europe to legally codify religious toleration, with the Edict of Torda in 1568.