Matthias Dévay
Protestant Reformer
Mátyás Biró, also known as Matthias Dévai Biro (c. 1500 in Déva – 1547 in Debrecen), was a Protestant Reformer who has been called the "Luther of Hungary".
Life
Dévai was born in Déva in Transylvania in eastern Hungary around 1500. He was later called "Devai" or "Dévay" because he was from Déva. He may have studied with Simon Grynaeus, the first Hungarian proponent of the Protestant Reformation, at Buda. The University of Cracow listed him as a student there in 1523. After two years of study, he was ordained as a priest and monk in the Roman Catholic Church.
Sometime between 1527 and 1529, Dévay became a supporter of the Protestant Reformation, and in 1529, he traveled to the University of Wittenberg to study under Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. As Luther's student, Dévay lived in Luther's house, a common practice in those days. The house and the student rooms are preserved in Wittenberg.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q897860. VIAF identifies the subject as 46030. The Library of Congress control number is n94049577. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1500, 1547, 1523 and 1527.
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This entry incorporates text from “Matthias Dévay” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.