Your Trash, Our Treasure: The Salzburg Refugees

 

The princely state of Salzburg, in present-day Austria, had in the early-modern era a Catholic majority and a small but visible Protestant minority. The Protestants’ visibility was not so much social as topographical: most lived in independent farmsteads on the heights above Salzburg town, leaving on occasion to work for wages in neighboring states (where pastors had introduced many of their ancestors to Lutheranism). Salzburg’s ecclesiastical rulers tolerated this heretical population throughout the 1600s, but in the second quarter of the eighteenth century Prince-Archbishop Leopold von Firmian identified them as a stain on his principality. After a failed attempt to convert the mountain-dwellers to the One True Faith, in 1731 Leopold invoked the doctrine cuius regio, eius religio and expelled his Protestant subjects. He relented only to the extent of allowing the expellees a little extra time to sell their lands and property before deportation. In the spring and summer of 1732, thirty thousand men, women, and children went into permanent exile from their homeland.

 

Konstantin Cretius, The Salzburgers Received,1860

The other princes of the Holy Roman Empire did nothing to stop Leopold, for in challenging him they might undermine their own prerogatives. Moreover, some of these potentates wanted the subjects the prince-archbishop was discarding. One third of the expellees settled in Holland or Hanover, or in the new colony chartered by and named for the Elector of Hanover (in his capacity as King of Great Britain), Georgia. Most of the Salzburg Protestants, however, sought refuge in the far east of Germany, near the Prussian city of Konigsburg. King Frederick William, pleased to enlarge his kingdom’s future base of taxpayers and army recruits, offered the refugees land, travel funds, and a temporary tax abasement, and twenty thousand of them accepted his offer. To their new homeland they followed a clockwise route around the mountains: west to Ulm, north to central Germany, then east to Prussia. King Fred-Bill personally greeted the first emigrant party outside of Berlin, and joined them in prayer and song. He doubtless saw the arrival of so many new subjects as providential, while understanding that the migration was entirely the work of men - in particular of two men, a religious bigot and the constructive opportunist the king so frequently saw in his mirror.

 

Sources: Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulson and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cornell UP, 1992); Julie Sweet, Negotiating for Georgia (U. Georgia, 2005), 106-107.

No Amount of Praise Is Ever Enough

 

Longtime fans of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight will recall his episode (12 Aug. 2019) on Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, the incumbent autocrat of Turkmenistan. President Berdimuhamedov’s egotism and eccentricities - including his single-minded love of horses -  and his cavalier attitude (cough) toward civil liberties seem fairly typical of post-Soviet dictators. What Oliver failed to capture in his segment was the modesty and transparency of Mr. Berdimuhamidov’s regime when compared to that of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, alias Turkmenbashi. At some point in his career, someone must have handed Comrade Niyazov a biography of Caligula and challenged him to outdo the mad emperor in sheer dictatorial excess. Turkmenbashi did so. During his fifteen-year reign (1991-2006), the Autocrat of All the Turkmen made these contributions to the annals of megalomania:

 

1 Added “the Great” to his official name, and claimed descent from Alexander (an early member of the Great family) and Muhammed.

2 Emblazoned his portrait on all the nation’s currency and in the top corner of every state television broadcast.

3 Renamed the months of the year after members of his family.

4 Outlawed all institutions and practices that he considered detrimental to the spiritual health of the Turkmen people, or just offensive to him personally, e.g. circuses, ballet, Internet cafes, long hair on men, and makeup on TV actors.

5 Wrote* a national bestseller, Ruhnama, The Book of Wisdom, an encomium to the Turkmen and their Father, Turkmenbashi. The Ruhnama became the subject of a giant monument in Turkmenistan’s capital, the principal text used in high school and college classes - replacing such inferior subjects as the humanities - and an obligatory text in mosques. Driving tests, too.

6 Financed his expensive remaking of the capital city, Ashgabat, by firing 110,000 teachers and health workers.

 

Turkmenbashi wishes you Bon Voyage!

Most of these policies were ended by Turkmenbashi’s dentist and successor, the aforementioned Gurbanguli Berdimuhamedov. The new president continued Niyazov’s suppression of dissent and imprisonment of political rivals; modern Turkmenistan has won no accolades from Amnesty International, and it rivals North Korea in its attitude toward press freedom. Still, in an age when many of us can only look forward to the next dictator, it is comforting to know that some dictators are less chaotic and vicious than others.

 

* They always write a book, these dictators. Mussolini even wrote a romance novel, The Cardinal's Mistress (1910). I understand its obscurity is not entirely undeserved.

 

 

Source:  Erika Fatland, Sovietistan (Pegasus, 2021), 48-56.

Treasure Type H

As befits an imperial family whose empire at one point stretched from Central Europe to the Andes, whose subject peoples bore little love for the imperator, and whose military record tended in its later centuries toward the sub-par, the Habsburgs were obsessed with their own legitimacy. A succession of emperors devoted their attention not to improving the lives of the common folk (riff-raff, all of them) but to filling them with a sense of supernatural awe and dread. To this end, they turned the Habsburg court and its adjuncts into theaters of ritual, and devoted much of their day to ceremonies, like royal banquets and receptions, designed to aggrandize the imperial person. Adorning these theaters were countless relics and cult objects chosen to demonstrate the dynasty’s age, gravitas, and close relationship with the divine or supernatural realm. The imperial wunderkammer included a mantle  that allegedly belonged to Charlemagne*; a “unicorn” horn, or rather a narwhal tusk, that Ferdinand I had decreed one of the dynasty’s “inalienable heirlooms”; an agate bowl inscribed with the letters “XRISTO,” which the Habsburgs identified as either the Holy Grail or part of the same dinnerware set; an alleged basilisk in a real bottle; an emerald bottle from South America; two bored ostriches and a live dodo; and a lustrous black sword, engraved with eldritch runes that could devour the souls of its victims. I may have made one of these artifacts up.

 

Please specify your name, quest, and favorite color.

Simon Winder, a popular historian of the dynasty, described Habsburg power as “strangely hieratic and spooky.” The adverb doesn’t necessarily apply. Early modern Europeans often ascribed priestlike powers to monarchs, as for example in the English and French royal custom of curing scrofula, the “king’s evil.” The Habsburgs stood out from their western European contemporaries, however, in their association of legitimacy with royal isolation. Queen Anne (the last English monarch to attempt the cure) and Louis XVI used the laying-on of hands to affirm their divine power, but did so, necessarily, via direct contact with the rank-scented multitude. The Austrian emperors’ treasures and rituals, by contrast, demonstrated the great distance between them and the common folk, and even the nobility. During his very long reign the penultimate emperor, Franz Joseph, believed that he could hold his fractious empire together by invoking his subject peoples’ common love for the royal person. That they all chose instead to join a different set of artificial families, offered by the nationalist movements of the early twentieth century, vexed him but remained beyond his comprehension. Why wouldn’t anyone want to remain under the rule of a family that had such wonderful toys?

 

Source: Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 85-87, 121-125, 156-57

 

* Actually it was the former possession of Roger II of Sicily. He had it embroidered with gold camels.