The Expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants

I. The Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg

In the early eighteenth century the archbishopric of Salzburg was one of the principal ecclesiastical principalities of the Holy Roman Empire. Its archbishop was both the spiritual head of a large ecclesiastical province and the temporal ruler of a territory that stretched from the plain north of the city of Salzburg into the high valleys of the Eastern Alps, including the districts of Pongau, Pinzgau, Lungau and the Gastein valley. The archbishop was elected by the cathedral chapter, sat in the Imperial Diet as a prince of the Empire, and governed through a court council and local officials.

The economy of the archbishopric rested on the salt mines of Hallein, on mining for gold, silver and copper in the mountains, and on Alpine agriculture. The mountain districts were inhabited by a population of farmers, herdsmen, miners and craftsmen, many of whom held their farms on hereditary tenure. Their communities were remote from the city, separated by passes and gorges, and the authority of the church and state was exercised through parish priests and district officials who were often few and far between.

The archbishopric had remained Catholic through the Reformation. In the early sixteenth century Lutheran ideas spread among the miners and peasants of the mountain districts, and in 1525–26 the peasants and miners rose in revolt as part of the wider German Peasants' War described in the site's page on the German Peasants' War. The revolt was suppressed, and the archbishops thereafter enforced Catholic uniformity. During the Counter-Reformation, the archbishops of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, notably Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, expelled Protestants from the city of Salzburg, but in the mountain valleys a hidden Protestantism survived.

II. Secret Protestantism in the Valleys

For nearly two hundred years many families in the mountain districts preserved Lutheran beliefs in secret while outwardly conforming to the Catholic Church. They attended mass and received the sacraments from the parish priests, but at home they read Lutheran books, held private devotions and taught their children the Lutheran catechism. Such crypto-Protestantism existed in many parts of the Habsburg lands and neighbouring territories, including Upper Austria, Carinthia and Styria, where it persisted until the Patent of Toleration of Joseph II in 1781.

The religious life of the secret Protestants centred on books. They possessed Luther's translation of the Bible, often in old editions printed in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, together with Luther's catechisms and postils, hymnbooks, and devotional works such as Johann Arndt's True Christianity and Johann Spangenberg's postils. These books were smuggled into the valleys by pedlars and travellers from the Protestant territories of Germany, especially from Regensburg, Nuremberg and Augsburg, and were hidden in walls, haylofts and beneath floors. Reading and instruction took place in the household, and the father of the family often acted as reader and teacher.

The archbishops periodically sought out and suppressed these books. Missions were sent into the valleys, houses were searched, and those found with heretical books were punished. Yet the clandestine networks of instruction and book distribution persisted, and the secret Protestants developed their own forms of piety, emphasising personal reading of Scripture, the singing of hymns, and the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

III. The Defereggen Expulsion and Joseph Schaitberger

An earlier expulsion foreshadowed the events of 1731. In 1684 the archbishop Max Gandolf von Kuenburg ordered an investigation of the Defereggen valley, a remote valley in what is now East Tyrol that belonged to the archbishopric. Around a thousand inhabitants who professed Protestantism were expelled between 1684 and 1686, and several hundred of their children under the age of fifteen were taken from them to be raised as Catholics. The exiles settled in Swabia, Franconia and other Protestant territories.

At the same time, Protestants were expelled from the mining district of Dürrnberg near Hallein. Among them was Joseph Schaitberger, a miner born in 1658, who was forced to leave in 1686, leaving behind his two daughters. He settled in Nuremberg, where he worked as a wire-drawer and wrote devotional works for the secret Protestants of his homeland. His Sendbrief, a collection of letters of instruction and encouragement, circulated widely in the Salzburg valleys and became one of the most important books of the secret Protestants.

Schaitberger also wrote the hymn known as the Exulantenlied, beginning "Ich bin ein armer Exulant", "I am a poor exile". The hymn describes the exile's renunciation of home and possessions for the sake of the gospel and his trust in God's provision. It was sung by the emigrants of 1731–32 on their journey and became a symbol of the Salzburg exodus. Schaitberger lived to hear of the great emigration and died in Nuremberg in 1733.

IV. Archbishop Firmian

Leopold Anton Eleutherius von Firmian was born in 1679 into a noble family of the Tyrol. He was educated at the German College in Rome and pursued an ecclesiastical career, becoming bishop of Lavant in 1718 and of Seckau in 1724 before his election as archbishop of Salzburg in 1727. He was determined to restore Catholic uniformity in his territory, and his court chancellor, Hieronymus Cristani von Rall, played a leading part in shaping the policy against the Protestants.

In 1729 Firmian invited Jesuit missionaries into the mountain districts to preach and to search for heretics. The missions provoked resistance. The Jesuits sought to identify secret Protestants through interrogation, questioning people about their beliefs and requiring them to renounce heretical views, and they searched houses for books. Some of those who refused were imprisoned or fined. The effect was to bring the hidden Protestantism into the open. Many inhabitants of the valleys, confronted with the choice of renouncing their beliefs or declaring them, chose to declare themselves Lutherans.

By 1731 the archbishop's officials had registered more than twenty thousand persons in the mountain districts who declared themselves Protestants, a figure far exceeding what the government had expected. The Protestants appealed to the Corpus Evangelicorum, the body of Protestant estates at the Imperial Diet in Regensburg, and petitioned for the rights guaranteed to religious minorities by the Peace of Westphalia.

V. The Oath at Schwarzach

On 5 August 1731 more than a hundred representatives of the Protestant communities met at the inn at Schwarzach in the Pongau. They swore an oath of fidelity to their faith, and according to tradition they confirmed it by dipping their fingers in salt and licking it, a custom of the region signifying a solemn bond. The meeting, known as the Salzbund or salt covenant, resolved to send a delegation to Regensburg to seek the protection of the Protestant estates, and to remain steadfast in their confession.

The archbishop's government interpreted the meeting at Schwarzach as a conspiracy and a threat of rebellion. Firmian requested imperial troops from Emperor Charles VI, and in the autumn of 1731 several thousand Austrian soldiers were sent into the archbishopric. Leaders of the Protestant communities were arrested and imprisoned. The government claimed that the Protestants were planning an armed rising with foreign support, a claim for which there is little evidence.

VI. The Peace of Westphalia and the Right of Emigration

The legal framework for the expulsion was set by the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War described in the site's page on Bible scholarship and the Thirty Years' War. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had established the principle later summarised as cuius regio, eius religio, by which the ruler determined the religion of his territory, but it had also granted subjects of a different religion the right to emigrate, the ius emigrandi. The Peace of Westphalia confirmed this right and added protections. Subjects who did not share the religion of their ruler and who had not enjoyed the right of public or private worship in the normal year of 1624 could be required to emigrate, but they were to be allowed a period of at least three years to sell their property and settle their affairs, and they were not to be denied the right to private devotion at home in the meantime.

The Salzburg Protestants claimed the protection of these provisions. The archbishop's government argued that they were rebels rather than peaceful dissenters, and that the protections of the Peace did not apply to subjects who had concealed their faith and had now declared it in defiance of their ruler. The question of whether Firmian's measures complied with the Peace of Westphalia was debated in Regensburg and in the pamphlet literature, and most historians have concluded that the short deadlines imposed on the emigrants violated the terms of the treaty.

VII. The Emigration Patent

On 31 October 1731, the anniversary of Luther's posting of the theses described in the site's page on the Reformation of 1517, Firmian signed the Emigration Patent. It ordered all Protestants in the archbishopric to leave. Those who did not own land, including servants, labourers and miners, were given eight days to depart. Landowners were given between one and three months, according to the value of their property, to sell their holdings and leave. The patent described the Protestants as rebellious subjects and denied them the benefit of the three-year period provided by the Peace of Westphalia.

The first expulsions began in November 1731, in the depth of winter. Groups of landless emigrants, several thousand in number, were escorted by soldiers to the borders of the archbishopric and left to find their way into Bavaria and Swabia. Many had no time to collect their wages or belongings. Children under the age of twelve were in some cases separated from their parents and kept in Salzburg to be raised as Catholics, a measure that caused great distress and protest. The landowners who left in the spring and summer of 1732 were able to sell their properties, often at low prices because of the number of farms suddenly placed on the market, and some received payment only years later after negotiations by Prussian officials.

VIII. The Children Left Behind

One of the most painful aspects of the expulsion concerned children. The archbishop's government held that children under the age of twelve, who had not reached the age of discretion, should be raised in the Catholic faith and need not follow their parents into exile. In a number of cases, particularly among the landless emigrants expelled in the winter of 1731–32, young children were kept back and placed with Catholic families or institutions. The practice was condemned by the Protestant estates at Regensburg as a violation of natural law and of the Peace of Westphalia, and the Prussian government made the return of the children one of its demands in negotiations with Salzburg.

Some children were later allowed to rejoin their parents, and the government eventually relaxed its policy for the families who emigrated in 1732. But the separation of families left lasting bitterness, and accounts of parents forced to leave their children became a prominent theme of the Protestant literature on the emigration. The earlier precedent of the Defereggen expulsion, in which several hundred children had been taken from their parents, made the fear of losing children a powerful motive for the emigrants to keep their families together.

IX. The Imperial Politics of the Expulsion

The expulsion took place in the context of the delicate politics of the Holy Roman Empire. Emperor Charles VI, a Catholic Habsburg, was at this time seeking the agreement of the princes of the Empire to the Pragmatic Sanction, which would allow his daughter Maria Theresa to succeed to the Habsburg lands. He needed the support of the Protestant princes, including the king of Prussia and the elector of Hanover, and could not afford to alienate them by supporting the archbishop too openly. At the same time he could not abandon a Catholic prince of the Empire who appealed to him for help against rebellious subjects.

The Corpus Evangelicorum at Regensburg protested vigorously against the archbishop's measures and demanded that the emigrants be granted the three-year period provided by the Peace of Westphalia. The Emperor urged moderation on Firmian, and imperial commissioners were involved in negotiations over the property of the emigrants. In the event, the Emperor's need for Protestant support helped to ensure that the emigrants were allowed to leave with at least part of the value of their property, and that the archbishop's government did not resort to more severe measures. The episode showed how the constitutional structures of the Empire, for all their weaknesses, could provide a measure of protection to religious minorities.

X. The Prussian Invitation

The plight of the Salzburg emigrants aroused sympathy throughout Protestant Germany. King Frederick William I of Prussia, who sought settlers for the eastern provinces of his kingdom, issued a patent of invitation on 2 February 1732, offering the Salzburgers settlement in East Prussia with the privileges of colonists, including land, tax exemptions and assistance with travel. The region of Lithuania Minor, in the north-east of East Prussia around Gumbinnen, Tilsit and Insterburg, had been depopulated by plague and famine in 1709–11, which had killed perhaps a third of the population, and the king had been seeking colonists for two decades.

Frederick William declared that he would protect the emigrants as his subjects, appointed commissioners to receive them, and pressed the archbishop through diplomatic channels to allow the sale of their property and the payment of its value. His motives combined religious solidarity with economic and political calculation: the settlement of industrious farmers in the depopulated east increased the revenue and strength of the kingdom, and the protection of persecuted Protestants enhanced Prussia's standing as a leading Protestant power within the Empire.

XI. The Trek to East Prussia

The emigrants travelled in groups, or trains, of several hundred to a thousand persons, by road through Bavaria, Swabia and Franconia to central Germany and then north and east to the Baltic. Some travelled by way of Berlin, where the king received them; others went to Stettin and continued by sea to Königsberg. The journey of more than a thousand kilometres took several months. Prussian commissioners accompanied the trains, paying for food and lodging and arranging their passage.

The trains passed through many Protestant cities, among them Augsburg, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Halle and Berlin, where they were received with great public sympathy. Townspeople came out to meet them, churches held services of welcome, clergy preached sermons on the emigrants' faith, and the citizens gave food, clothing and money. The emigrants sang hymns as they travelled, including Schaitberger's Exulantenlied, and observers noted their simple piety and their attachment to their Bibles and devotional books, which they had brought with them from the valleys. In Augsburg, a city with both Catholic and Protestant inhabitants, the reception of the emigrants was the occasion of much public display and some tension.

Around sixteen thousand emigrants reached East Prussia in 1732. They were settled in the districts of Gumbinnen, Stallupönen, Insterburg and others in Lithuania Minor, on vacant farms and in villages. The settlement faced difficulties: the climate was harsher than in the Alps, the land was different, and many of the emigrants were craftsmen and miners rather than farmers. Many died in the first years. But the settlers gradually established themselves, and the Salzburgers became a recognisable community in East Prussia, preserving their identity for two centuries. The University of Königsberg, whose scholarship the site describes on its page on Bible scholarship in Königsberg, and the Lutheran church of the province provided pastors for the settlers.

XII. The Settlement of Accounts

The question of the emigrants' property occupied Prussian and Salzburg officials for many years. The landowners had been forced to sell their farms quickly, and many sales were not completed before their departure. Prussian commissioners were sent to Salzburg to collect the proceeds and to negotiate the sale of unsold properties. The settlement of accounts continued into the late 1730s, and the total sum paid to the emigrants amounted to several hundred thousand florins, transferred through the Prussian treasury. The careful administration of these sums was part of the Prussian state's reputation for efficiency, and it ensured that many emigrant families began their new lives with some capital.

XIII. Other Destinations

Not all the emigrants went to Prussia. Several hundred miners from the Dürrnberg near Hallein were settled in the Netherlands, on the island of Cadzand in Zeeland, at the invitation of the States General, though many of them later moved on. Others found refuge in the Protestant imperial cities of southern Germany, in Württemberg and in Hanover, where the elector, who was also King George II of Great Britain, offered assistance.

A small but well-known group went to the British colony of Georgia in North America. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London, with the support of the Georgia Trustees, organised the passage of Salzburger emigrants to the new colony founded by James Oglethorpe in 1733. The first group of about forty families arrived at Savannah in March 1734, accompanied by two Lutheran pastors from Halle, Johann Martin Boltzius and Israel Christian Gronau. They founded a settlement they named Ebenezer, after the stone of help set up by Samuel in 1 Samuel 7:12, where the prophet said, "Up till now Jehovah has helped us". The settlement was moved to a better site on the Savannah river in 1736, and further groups of Salzburgers and other German Protestants arrived in the following years. The history of the Georgia settlement is described by the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

XIV. Ebenezer and the Halle Pietists

The Georgia Salzburgers were closely connected with the Pietist movement centred at Halle, where the Francke Foundations, established by August Hermann Francke, supported missions, education and Bible distribution across the Protestant world. Boltzius and Gronau had been teachers at the Francke Foundations, and their reports from Ebenezer were published in Halle in a series known as the Ausführliche Nachrichten, which provides a detailed record of the life of the settlement. The settlement received books, money and medicines from Halle, and its religious life was organised along Pietist lines, with regular catechesis, prayer meetings and the close supervision of the community by the pastors.

Ebenezer became known for its orderly community life, its orphanage, founded in 1737 on the model of the Halle orphanage, and its silk production and mills. The Salzburgers opposed the introduction of slavery into Georgia, which was prohibited by the Trustees until 1751, and Boltzius argued against it on moral and economic grounds, though the settlement later accepted it after the prohibition was lifted. The Jerusalem Lutheran Church at Ebenezer, built in 1767–69, survives and is among the oldest church buildings in Georgia still in use. The town declined after the American Revolution, during which it was occupied by British troops, but the descendants of the Salzburgers remain an identifiable community, and the Georgia Salzburger Society preserves their history.

XV. The Religious Life of the Emigrants

The faith of the Salzburg emigrants was simple and grounded in the reading of Scripture. Their Lutheranism had been preserved through generations of household instruction without the guidance of pastors, and it emphasised the authority of the Bible, the catechism, and the hymns of the Lutheran tradition. Observers in the cities through which they passed were impressed by their knowledge of Scripture and of the catechism, and by the persistence of their faith despite two centuries of suppression.

The emigrants understood their exile through the narratives of Scripture. They compared themselves to Abraham, who left his country and his relatives at God's command, as recorded in Genesis 12:1, and to the Israelites leaving Egypt. They drew comfort from the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:32-33 that whoever acknowledges him before men he will acknowledge before his Father, and from his instruction in Matthew 10:23 that when persecuted in one city they should flee to another. The description in Hebrews 11:13 of the faithful who acknowledged that they were "strangers and temporary residents in the land", and the statement in Hebrews 13:14 that "we do not have here a city that continues", were often cited in sermons preached to the emigrants and in the pamphlets that described their journey. The promise of Mark 10:29-30, that no one who has left house or brothers or fields for the sake of the good news would fail to receive a hundredfold, was quoted as a reassurance to people who had left their farms.

The reception of the emigrants also stimulated a broader revival of interest in religious matters among German Protestants. Pastors used the example of the Salzburgers to exhort their congregations to greater devotion, contrasting the steadfastness of the exiles with the lukewarmness of those who had always enjoyed religious liberty.

XVI. Publicity and Print

The Salzburg emigration was one of the great media events of eighteenth-century Germany. Several hundred books, pamphlets, sermons, engravings and broadsheets were published about it in 1732–33 alone. The most comprehensive account was Gerhard Gottlieb Günther Göcking's Vollkommene Emigrations-Geschichte, published in two volumes in 1734–37, which collected documents, reports and descriptions of the emigrants' journey. Engravings depicted the emigrants in their Alpine costume with their wagons and bundles, and portraits of individual emigrants were sold as prints.

The publicity served several purposes. It encouraged charitable donations for the emigrants, it strengthened Protestant solidarity within the Empire, and it served the political interests of Prussia, which presented itself as the protector of persecuted Protestants. Catholic writers responded with defences of the archbishop's measures, arguing that the emigrants were rebels and that the archbishop had acted within his rights as a sovereign prince. The controversy was conducted in the language of the imperial constitution, and both sides appealed to the Peace of Westphalia.

The story of the emigrants also entered literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's narrative poem Hermann und Dorothea, published in 1797, was inspired by an anecdote about a Salzburg emigrant girl who married the son of a wealthy citizen of a town through which the emigrants passed, although Goethe transposed the story to the period of the French Revolutionary Wars.

XVII. Consequences for Salzburg

The expulsion had serious consequences for the archbishopric. The loss of around twenty thousand inhabitants, a substantial proportion of the population of the mountain districts, left many farms vacant and damaged the economy of the Pongau and Pinzgau. The mines, which depended on skilled labour, were affected by the departure of the Protestant miners. The archbishop's government sought to repopulate the vacant farms with Catholic settlers from Tyrol and other regions, with mixed success, and some farms remained unoccupied for years.

The expulsion did not entirely eliminate Protestantism from Salzburg. Some secret Protestants remained and continued to practise their faith in private. In the later eighteenth century the Enlightenment brought a more tolerant climate. Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo, who ruled from 1772 to 1803, was an Enlightenment reformer, and Joseph II's Patent of Toleration of 1781, though it did not apply directly to Salzburg, signalled the end of the era of religious expulsions in the Habsburg lands. Salzburg was secularised in 1803 and became part of Austria in 1816, and Protestant congregations were later established there.

In the twentieth century the Catholic Church in Salzburg publicly expressed regret for the expulsion, and the churches of Austria and Germany held joint commemorations. In 1981, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Emigration Patent, a major exhibition was held in Salzburg, and Catholic and Protestant churches took part in services of reconciliation.

XVIII. The Salzburgers in East Prussia after 1732

The Salzburg settlers in East Prussia maintained a distinctive identity for two centuries. In Gumbinnen they established a hospital and charitable foundation, the Salzburger Anstalt, which supported elderly and needy members of the community, together with a Salzburger church. The descendants of the emigrants preserved family records, traditions and the memory of the exodus, and the anniversaries of the emigration were celebrated in East Prussia with services and festivities.

The community was scattered by the events of 1944–45, when the population of East Prussia fled or was expelled as the Soviet army advanced and the province was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union. The Salzburger Verein, founded in 1911, continued in West Germany to preserve the memory of the Salzburg emigrants and their descendants, and it maintains links with Salzburg and with the Georgia Salzburger Society.

XIX. Comparisons with Other Alpine Minorities

The Salzburg Protestants were not the only Alpine religious minority to face expulsion in this period. The Waldensians of the valleys of Piedmont, whose history is described in the site's page on the Savoyard–Waldensian Wars, were expelled by the Duke of Savoy in 1686 and allowed to return in 1689 after the Glorious Return. In the Cévennes, the Protestants of southern France rose in the War of the Camisards of 1702–04 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In Carinthia and Upper Austria, crypto-Protestants were deported to Transylvania under Charles VI and Maria Theresa in the 1730s and 1750s, in what became known as the Transmigration.

These communities shared certain characteristics. They lived in remote mountain areas where the authority of the state and the church was weak, they preserved their faith through household reading and instruction, and they drew strength from contacts with Protestant communities abroad. In each case the authorities sought to impose religious uniformity and the minorities resisted, by concealment, emigration or in some cases armed revolt. The Salzburgers, unlike the Camisards, did not take up arms, and their exodus was conducted under the protection of the imperial constitution and the Prussian state.

XX. The Miners of the Dürrnberg

The miners of the Dürrnberg salt mine near Hallein formed a distinct group among the emigrants. They were skilled workers employed by the archbishop's own salt administration, and their departure threatened the revenue of the archbishopric. Several hundred of them emigrated in 1732, and most went first to the Netherlands, where the States General had offered them land on Cadzand. The Dutch settlement was not a success, since the miners were unaccustomed to farming the reclaimed land of Zeeland, and many moved on to Prussia or elsewhere.

XXI. Historical Assessment

Historians have viewed the expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants as one of the last major religious expulsions in western and central Europe. It occurred at a time when the Enlightenment was beginning to change attitudes towards religious difference, and it attracted widespread condemnation in Protestant Europe and some criticism in Catholic circles. Mack Walker's study The Salzburg Transaction, published in 1992, examined the expulsion as a complex negotiation among the archbishop, the Emperor, the Prussian king, the Protestant estates and the emigrants themselves, emphasising the political and legal dimensions of the event.

Other historians have emphasised the religious history of the secret Protestants and the role of books and household reading in preserving their faith. The Salzburg expulsion has been compared with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France in 1685, which led to the emigration of some two hundred thousand Huguenots, and with the expulsions of Protestants from the Habsburg lands in the seventeenth century. The case of the Salzburgers demonstrates the persistence of religious identity under conditions of concealment over several generations, the importance of printed books smuggled across borders, and the capacity of ordinary farmers and miners, without clergy of their own, to sustain a coherent theology. It also shows the role of Scripture in sustaining that identity, since the Bible, the catechism and the hymnbook were for many families the only teachers of their faith for over a century. The emigrants carried these books with them on the roads to Prussia and Georgia, and many of the volumes survive in the collections of their descendants and in museums. Their story also illustrates the interaction of religious conviction, territorial sovereignty and the imperial constitution in the last phase of the confessional age.

For summaries of the political setting, readers may consult the Grokipedia entries on the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg, the Peace of Westphalia, Frederick William I of Prussia and Lithuania Minor.

XXII. Chronology

In 1525–26 the peasants and miners of Salzburg rose in revolt. From 1684 to 1686 Protestants were expelled from the Defereggen valley and the Dürrnberg, and Joseph Schaitberger went into exile in Nuremberg. In 1709–11 plague depopulated much of East Prussia. In 1727 Leopold Anton von Firmian was elected archbishop. In 1729 Jesuit missions were sent into the mountain districts. On 5 August 1731 the oath was sworn at Schwarzach. On 31 October 1731 the Emigration Patent was signed, and in November the first landless emigrants were expelled.

On 2 February 1732 Frederick William I issued his patent of invitation. During 1732 the landowning emigrants left in trains for East Prussia, and around sixteen thousand settled in Lithuania Minor. In 1733 Schaitberger died in Nuremberg. In March 1734 the first Salzburgers arrived in Georgia and founded Ebenezer. In 1737 the Ebenezer orphanage was founded. In 1781 Joseph II issued the Patent of Toleration, and in 1797 Goethe published Hermann und Dorothea.

XXIII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.