CHURCH AND STATE IN SALZBURG

The most dramatic episode in the story of religious revival, an event which had its repercussions throughout Protestant Europe and America, and taught lessons to the Habsburgs, was the great emigration from Salzburg in the winter of 1731–2. Contemporaries found this an even more ‘surprising work of God’ than Jonathan Edwards found the revival at Northampton, Mass.; but, like that revival, it had roots in the past.

Salzburg was both an archdiocese and a principality. It was characteristic of the old Europe that the boundaries of the two jurisdictions did not coincide on the ground and were not always harmoniously exercised by the same person. Thus, for example, for purposes of secular government, most of the Defereggertal was subject to the principality of Salzburg, but part belonged to the Tyrol; in spiritual matters the valley was entirely subject to the archdiocese of Salzburg and belonged to the archdeaconry of Gmünd in Carinthia, a territory for secular purposes subject to the Habsburgs. Wolf Dietrich (archbishop 1587–1611), who was suspected of trying to secularise the principality and fetched up in effect a prisoner of the Pope, had begun with an edict getting rid of the Protestant town councillors of his capital city, and requiring all his subjects to become Catholic or leave the country. This achieved the desired result in and about Salzburg.