From Ashes to Altars: How Geneva’s Fires Fed Transylvania’s Faith
A long time ago, or what now feels like several lockdowns, a career detour, and an ill-advised craft beer subscription ago, the owner of this blog rather grandly declared that he might one day write a book. The declaration was made, as these things so often are, on a wave of caffeine-fuelled optimism and a vague sense that history had somehow overlooked his contributions.
Like all ambitions, it required fuel. And being both a romantic and on a modest budget, I went for the most sustainable source: paper. Paper, books, and more books. The kind of research that starts with one volume on watchmaking and ends with half a dozen open on the floor, a search history that would alarm the Vatican, and a growing conviction that I might accidentally be writing a theological thesis.
It began innocently enough. A fascination with horology — with the elegance of balance springs, enamel dials, and the delightful absurdity of measuring time with tiny mechanical gears while we ourselves fritter it away on meetings that could have been emails. Naturally, this led me to Geneva.
Today, Geneva conjures images of chocolate, diplomacy, and banks with frosted glass doors. But in the 16th century, Geneva was, to put it politely, a moral pressure cooker. A city where clocks ticked in perfect order, but the citizens were expected to tick along with them, or face consequences. And so I inevitably came upon Jean Calvin: lawyer, theologian, moral enforcer, and the kind of dinner guest who would probably tell you you’ve had one too many (even if you’re still on your first glass). Calvin’s Geneva was a place where piety was measured as carefully as the hours. And it was here that my curiosity took an unexpected turn — from watch springs to church bells, from horology to heresy.
From Calvin, it was but a short stumble to a fairly unknown chap, Michael Servetus: a man who had the poor taste to think differently and the even poorer timing to do so within range of Calvin’s bonfire. And from that unfortunate event, well, the fire spread east.
So here we are. This is not simply a tale of watches. It is a tale of faith, fear, and unintended consequences. A tale of how the city that kept time tried to stop ideas, and how those ideas found refuge, not in mighty Rome or learned Paris, but in my homeland of Transylvania.
And to think, I only wanted to understand why the JLC Reverso flips.
The Thread That Started It All - The Huguenots
History class gave the Huguenots roughly the same airtime as the appendix gives the average medical textbook: “present, occasionally troublesome, best removed.” Yet in reality they were anything but an afterthought. Ask the average passer-by who the Huguenots were and you’re liable to receive a bewildering range of answers:
“A brand of yoghurt, I think.”
“One of those budget airlines that cancels on you at Lutton.”
“Wasn’t that the mascot in The Princess and the Frog?”
In reality, the Huguenots were neither probiotic nor amphibian. They were sixteenth-century French Protestants who, having incurred the displeasure of both crown and Church, discovered that mobility was the better part of theology. They travelled light on possessions but heavy on talent: silk-weavers from Lyon, goldsmiths from Paris, engravers who could etch a scene of the Last Judgement onto a thimble without smudging the angel wings. Their exodus became Europe’s inadvertent talent-harvest. Amsterdam acquired its lace; London its silk stockings; Geneva - poor, earnest, Calvinist Geneva - acquired a small army of artisans with nimble fingers and a suspicious fondness for decorative metals.
Calvin, keen to welcome fellow Protestants but less keen on worldly vanities, found himself playing host to craftsmen whose livelihoods depended on making shiny things. It was the Reformation’s version of inviting vegans to a hog roast and then wondering why everyone looks faint.
None of this featured in my school textbook. The Huguenots appeared once, sandwiched between the Peace of Augsburg and a photograph of Louis XIV’s wig, and departed just as quickly. There was no mention of the fact that a quarter of England’s silk workers in the late 1600s were of Huguenot stock, or that the first watch factories on the Rhône’s banks were staffed by refugees who could polish a pinion to a mirror finish while reciting the Psalms. Yet their fingerprints are everywhere. The unusually high thread count on your favourite oxford shirt? Huguenot legacy. The delicate guilloché pattern on your grandfather’s pocket watch? Ditto. The word refugee itself entered English usage in the wake of their arrival. One might argue that the modern city of Geneva with its boutiques selling diplomacy by the half-hour owes at least part of its polish to these itinerant makers. They came, they worked, they raised standards, and they very politely ignored Calvin’s disapproving glare.
Now, by the 1550s, Geneva sounded like a hammering contest in a jewellery box. Workshops spilled light and noise into narrow streets; apprentices darted about with crucibles and complaints; elders grumbled that the city now smelt of burnt flux instead of fresh righteousness. Calvin’s sermons, meanwhile, thundered against ornament and ostentation. Gold and gemstones, he insisted, were snares for the soul, useful only as cautionary examples or, perhaps, convenient book-weights for Bibles with a tendency to curl. The collision was inevitable. On one side: exiled craftsmen with a genius for embellishment. On the other: a cleric determined to keep Geneva sober, upright and, preferably, matte-finished. The compromise - if one can call it that - would soon reshape the very concept of luxury. But before we reach outlawed jewellery and the birth of the pocket-watch loophole, it is worth savouring the moment: a fervently moral city inadvertently hiring the finest decorators in Europe.
One imagines Calvin peering through a workshop doorway, spotting a goldsmith engraving cherubs on a locket, and sighing the sort of sigh that can extinguish candles at three paces. The artisan, unflustered, merely adds an extra flourish to the cherub’s halo. History, as ever, delights in its small ironies.
But who was Calvin anyway? Jean Calvin (né Jehan Cauvin), born 1509 in Noyon, France, started life aiming for a respectable legal career. Instead, a torrid affair with Augustine, Paul and the humanist grammar of Erasmus rerouted him into theology. By 1536 he’d written the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a door-stop argument that salvation was God’s prerogative and human beings ought to stop showing off as though they had any say in the matter.
Calvin’s theology carried three practical side-effects:
Predestination anxiety – If your eternal fate is already filed, best keep your head down and look pious; Heaven might be taking attendance.
Iconoclast’s itch – Statues, paintings, gilded chalices? They risked distracting the faithful and, worse, implying that God admired good interior design.
Sumptuary zeal – Silk ruffs and jewelled daggers were outward signs of inner vanity. In Calvin’s Geneva, modest dress was both civic duty and spiritual insurance policy.
By the time he acquired effective control over the city in the 1540s, Calvin had overseen a slate of ordinances regulating everything from naming children to singing tavern songs. Simplicity was not a suggestion; it was municipal law, enforceable by fine, public shaming or, in chronic cases, banishment. If you wanted sparkle you could always console yourself with an exceptionally reflective conscience.
With that background, Geneva’s impending crackdown on jewellery makes perfect—if draconian—sense. Unfortunately for Calvin, the Huguenot craftsmen now working mere blocks from his pulpit were less interested in suppressing beauty than in relocating it.
Note: Calvin did not, of course, stride about Geneva personally confiscating shiny brooches like some puritan magpie. He was propped up by a tidy civic ecosystem: the twenty-five worthies of the Petit Conseil, who discovered that a city run on punctual piety was marvellous for trade; the Consistory, a Thursday tribunal of pastors and grey-bearded elders who issued penances with the brisk efficiency of a tax office; a rising class of refugee Huguenot merchants glad to swap French persecution for Genevan influence so long as they applauded every new ordinance; guild-masters who saw in Calvin’s curfews a splendid antidote to drunken apprentices; and a swathe of plain-living townsfolk quietly pleased that sumptuary laws forced the well-heeled to dress as drably as everyone else. Add the city’s recent emancipation from Savoy—keen to brand itself the disciplined antithesis of decadent neighbours—and you have the perfect clockwork coalition: councillors signing edicts, clergy thundering theology, merchants voting piety, guilds policing workshops, and the populace nodding along. Calvin supplied the doctrine; the machinery of Geneva obligingly wound the springs. Which brings us to the moment vanity met ordinance head-on…
Reformation Wall (Mur de la Réformation) Geneva
Tick-Tock, Thou Shalt Not Sparkle: Calvin’s Edicts and the Pocket-Watch Loophole
Calvin’s Geneva ran on two things: sermons and statutes. The sermons scolded the soul; the statutes scolded everything else. By 1548 the aforementioned Consistory had produced enough prohibitions to wallpaper the cathedral, but a particular favourite was the ban on ostentatious jewellery: necklaces, jewelled buttons, even the daintier species of belt-buckle were denounced as “vanities unbefitting a godly citizen.”
The effect on Geneva’s newly imported French goldsmiths was rather like inviting a Michelin chef over and then outlawing salt. They had workshops full of gemstones, customers with disposable income, and a city ordinance insisting that sparkle led straight to perdition. Something had to give, and, as history tends to arrange it, that “something” was the definition of jewellery itself. If a pendant was sinful but a portable clock was merely useful, then the obvious solution was to hide the pendant inside the clock. Thus the pocket watch emerged: equal parts timekeeper and secret jewel, small enough to tuck into a doublet yet elaborate enough to satisfy any refugee artisan’s decorative itch. Dials were enamelled, cases engraved, hinges polished until they reflected the face of any cleric nosing about for moral infractions.
And Calvin? He turned a blind eye - or perhaps two, given the size of his theological workload. Pocket watches were, after all, instruments of punctuality, and punctuality was next to godliness. The fact that they were cased in engraved gold, set with tiny sapphires, and occasionally sang the hour with a miniature automaton angel was treated as an unfortunate but tolerable side-effect.
Within a decade, Geneva’s streets rang not just with church bells but with the subtler click of fusées and the conspiratorial hiss of files on brass. By the 1570s travellers spoke of “those little Geneva clocks” in the same tone modern executives reserve for bespoke carbon-fibre gravel bikes - half admiration, half suspicion that someone is showing off. The watches became the acceptable face of luxury: pious on the street, flamboyant in private, rather like a monk who moonlights as a jazz pianist once the abbey doors are shut.
And there we have the city’s grand irony: determined to stamp out vanity, Calvin inadvertently midwifed Europe’s most lucrative cottage industry. The springs he tried to wind so tightly now ticked in waistcoat pockets from London to Kraków, each beat a tiny reminder that moral zealotry can neither outrun ingenuity nor silence the human appetite for beauty, though it may inspire quite a lot of engraving.
Flames, Flow and a Spaniard Who Wouldn’t Shut Up
While Geneva’s gold-smiths quietly turned prohibition into profit, Calvin returned to his preferred pastime: argument. The watches could tick; he preferred to tock - loudly, in Latin, and with footnotes. Sermons, treatises, open letters: all deployed to tighten the theological belt another notch.
Into this narrowing gap stepped a Spaniard who refused to breathe through an approved doctrinal straw. Miguel Serveto y Conesa - latinised as Michael Servetus - was physician, geographer, amateur meteorologist, editor of Ptolemy, and full-time irritant to every hierarchy he encountered. Among his brighter indiscretions he accurately described how blood leaves the heart, passes through the lungs, takes on fresh air, and returns (a revelation the medical establishment would politely ignore for another seventy years: everyone was busy disputing angels, not haemoglobin). He was, in short, a polymath and worse, one who published. In 1531 he produced De Trinitatis Erroribus (“On the Errors of the Trinity”), a slim but radioactive volume arguing that the classic three-persons-in-one formulation was a late-Roman bookkeeping convenience rather than a scriptural requirement. A year later he followed up with Dialogorum de Trinitate, doubling down on the notion that Father, Son and Spirit were less a metaphysical mystery than a theological group-photo nobody had properly captioned. He dismissed infant baptism as “washing potatoes,” likened predestination to “blaming a mirror for the face it reflects,” and peppered his margins with tart footnotes aimed squarely at Calvin’s Institutes. In an age when even mild disagreement could earn you an ecclesiastical migraine, Servetus’s prose arrived like a hand-delivered wasp’s nest: admirably constructed, buzzing with energy, and impossible to shelve without first being stung.
In 1553 the French Inquisition caught up with him in Vienne (he was Spanish, but controversy travels well). Tried for heresy, he was imprisoned - and promptly escaped three days later by swapping clothes with a sympathetic gaoler and climbing out of a window. Records suggest he set off for Italy, perhaps Milan. Why he then detoured via Geneva is one of history’s smaller mysteries; theories range from “wanted a shorter Alpine route” to “fancied a decent pastry.” Whatever the reason, Geneva was the last place on earth a man with his bibliography should have chosen for a weekend break.
Calvin heard Servetus was in town before Servetus had finished his first cup of whatever passed for coffee. The reformer’s reaction was brisk: citation for heresy, immediate arrest, and a trial before the city council, keen as ever to show its orthodox credentials. A polymath vs. a polemicist was never going to end in a handshake. What began years before as tart correspondence between the two, escalated when Servetus posted Calvin an advance copy of Christianismi Restitutio - helpfully annotated with comments such as “Here you are dreadfully mistaken…” And Calvin remembered.
And so, on 27 October 1553 Servetus, book chained to thigh and straw crown upon his head, was marched to Champel field and burned over a slow green-wood fire. His final words asked God to forgive his accusers. Calvin later remarked that a swifter execution (beheading) would have been merciful - though, regrettably, illegal. Few found the comment reassuring.
Sparks on the Wind
But the flames did not behave. Refugees carried the story east with their looms and lathes; clandestine students copied Servetus’s medical notes; and in the rough borderland of Transylvania the tale found unusually fertile soil. There, Prince John II Sigismund (Szapolyai János Zsigmond), advised by the Italian physician-diplomat Giorgio Biandrata and the reformer Ferenc Dávid issued the Edict of Torda in 1568, Europe’s first formal nod to religious tolerance. Geneva had tried to silence dissent; Transylvania quietly filed it under “accepted denominations.”
That Servetus’ ideas should take root in Transylvania of all places sounds, at first blush, like filing Mozart under “heavy metal.” The principality was a patchwork of Magyars, Székelys, Saxons and the occasional Ottoman tax-collector, a place where wooden churches perched on hilltops and bears occasionally interrupted parish picnics. Yet the very untidiness that made it hard to rule made it unusually tolerant. With Catholic Habsburgs to one side, Muslim Turks to the other and restless nobles in between, the safest policy was: let every man pray as he pleases, provided he turns up for muster and pays his levies on time.
Into this pragmatic landscape rode the aforementioned Giorgio Biandrata, a court physician with pockets full of Servetus’ forbidden pages and a talent for whispering theology between blood-lettings. He found an eager ally in Ferenc Dávid, a former Calvinist bishop whose appetite for doctrinal fine-tuning rivalled any Swiss reformer’s, minus the bonfires. Together they persuaded young Prince Sigismund - more interested in keeping his throne than counting angels - to sign the Edict. Four confessions gained legal standing, heresy hunts were discouraged, and the pulpit became Transylvania’s favourite spectator sport.
Thus, while Geneva perfected punctuality, Transylvania perfected pluralism. Sermons that would have fetched a death-warrant on Lake Geneva were here met with a polite shrug and an invitation to Sunday lunch (bring your own cabbage). In that climate Servetus’ anti-Trinitarian ideas slipped comfortably into the liturgy, alongside the more traditional concerns of harvests, wolves and whether the Turk would raise taxes before Michaelmas.
By now you may be wondering whether we have mislaid our horological point entirely. Rest assured: this detour is the point. Research is a mischievous apprentice; give it a simple brief - “why does the JLC Reverso flip?” - and it will return with pocket watches, jewellery bans, polymath martyrs and an Edict signed in a land best known today for Dracula merchandise. The joy is in discovering that the cogs of history mesh as neatly as any balance wheel: Calvin’s austerity begat hidden ornament; hidden ornament begat Geneva’s watch trade; Servetus’ sparks begat Transylvanian tolerance; and somewhere along that chain a modern reader lifts the case-back of a Jaeger-LeCoultre and hears the faint tick of sixteenth-century politics.
If nothing else, remember this: forbid a thing and craftsmen will miniaturise it; burn a book and its ashes will fertilise foreign soil; start with a question about a flipping watch and you may end up halfway across Europe, dodging inquisitors and counting bear-proof churches. Call it paper-fuelled ambition - or simply the way curiosity keeps time. …And if you now glance at your own wrist, wondering how many sermons and sparks lie hidden behind that sapphire crystal - well, that’s exactly the point.
