The Church of Hungary

In the Christian taxonomy of Andalusada, there was an isolated entry called "the Church of Hungary." It's the replacement for the Church of England IRL, and it takes things a step further by claiming to be Orthodox and Catholic and Protestant at the same time.

The buildup to the Church of Hungary

My IRL precedents for the Church of Hungary are, understandably, somewhat limited, and I'm going to bring up some of this.

• The Council of Florence. Yes, I realize that it was rejected by half the clergy and most of the laity, but that does mean that half the clergy didn't reject it. (Also of note: at this point in time, the Orthodox Church was still the church of the heirs to the Roman Empire.)
• The Italo-Greek experience: "However, he and his successors recognized the Byzantine Rite and discipline wherever it was in legitimate possession. Moreover, the Latin bishops ordained the Greek as well as the Latin clergy. In the course of time the Norman princes gained the affection of their Greek subjects by respecting their rite, which had a strong support in the numerous Basilian monasteries..."

That's the familiar stuff, at least. But, probably more than anything else, the Church of Hungary's foundations were laid by Greek scholasticism.

No matter how bad relations between the West and Byzantium were politically, the flow of knowledge was not one-sided. The Greeks did react to, and engage with, Western scholasticism on their own; it didn't really become a thing not because Constantinople was blind or ossified, but because it had a scholarly legacy of its own, and Orthodox scholasticism was a cross-cultural niche thing on par with Western Confucianism.

Andalusada's medieval Hungary, however - by this point a Catholic state with an Orthodox-majority population in the Byzantine sphere - becomes a promising patron. As part and parcel of the Great Translation, Hungary becomes the de facto patron for a lot of Western-influenced Greeks (especially the ones exiled or deposed back home), who give Hungary a distinct intellectual landscape, increasingly Latin in form but Greek in style, such that by the time Constantinople falls in 1476 it's outlasted by a distinct, if rather niche, Orthodox scholastic tradition.

More than anything else, that scholasticism stops Hungary from going Orthodox. Even if they tried to (and to this day the Church of Hungary insists that it is a legitimately Orthodox church), Hungarian Orthodoxy would look, think and act very differently from the rest of the communion.

A brief history of the Church of Hungary

Let's start with the most basic detail: it's Constantine II's fault. In 1492, for perfectly valid political reasons, converted to Catholicism for the simple reason that he had to if he wanted to get back on the throne. (For which cause the Patriarch of Serbia excommunicated, anathematized and - according to legend - cursed him.)

This was a fine move to make, except for one small problem: his wife doesn't produce any heirs, and the Pope [who?] refuses to grant him a divorce. Henry VIII, faced with a similar situation IRL, had to break from Catholicism to resolve the issue; Constantine, by contrast, simply converts back to Orthodoxy. (Sort of. It involves the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople being an appointee by the Turks, for one thing, and widely acknowledged as a bad one after his death.)

• The issue at that point is that, while this is received decently by most of Hungary's non-Hungarian subjects, it's poorly received by the Hungarians themselves. (This is a big part of where Constantine's story intersects with the world's vampire mythos.)
• An even bigger issue, at that point, is that Hungary has just alienated all of its potential allies in the endless war against the Turks.

Hungarian distinctives

Even moreso than Anglicanism, the Church of Hungary is defined by its via media.

• The Church of Hungary falls somewhere between the Latin and Greek Biblical canons.
• The Church recognizes a somewhat eclectic calendar of saints. A fair number are familiar to local Orthodoxy but unknown to Rome, while St. Francis and Gonzalo have been added to some iconostases.

The Church of Hungary in the world

Anglicanism IRL stood to gain a great deal from the British Empire being world-spanning; Hungary's empire, by contrast, has made the Church of Hungary a much smaller thing, though no less for that.

This is still enormously a work in progress.