In the eighteenth century, the archbishopric of Salzburg – like the Electorate of Mainz, the subject of Tim Blanning's first monograph – was a semi-independent territory of the Holy Roman Empire ruled by an ecclesiastical prince who wielded both secular and ecclesiastical authority. Like Mainz and other ecclesiastical principalities of the empire, Salzburg retained its semi-autonomous status up to the Napoleonic era, when it was finally absorbed by Habsburg Austria. Today it is of course Mozart, Salzburg's native prodigy, who dominates its carefully burnished baroque facade. But around the time of Mozart's birth in 1756, Salzburg's reputation – at least in Protestant Europe – was coloured by a very different image. It grew out of the notorious Emigrationspatent (1731) of Archbishop Leopold Anton Freiherr von Firmian, an edict that resulted in the expulsion of more than 20,000 Protestants (most of them Lutheran peasants and farmhands) in the years between 1731 and 1734. The majority sought refuge in Protestant Prussia; the remainder settled in other territories of the empire, with a few hundred migrating to James Edward Oglethorpe's newly founded colony of Georgia. The expulsions occasioned a torrent of protest throughout Protestant Europe, while in the empire itself, as Mack Walker has shown, the extraordinary quantity of pamphlets and published sermons sparked by the expulsions made it one of the most resounding causes célèbres of the century.