Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg

• 1. Introduction

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  The Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg was a place where bishops commanded armies, defied popes, and expelled entire communities in the name of faith. For centuries, the archbishops of Salzburg held a peculiar double life: shepherds of souls on Sunday, territorial princes on Monday. They ran a state, levied taxes, went to war, and sat alongside kings and dukes in the assemblies of the Holy Roman Empire. The Catholic diocese itself was founded in 739 by Saint Boniface, but the secular principality that grew around it became something far more complicated. How did churchmen accumulate so much earthly power? How did they keep it for five centuries while larger neighbors closed in on all sides? And what finally brought it to an end? The story stretches from a Roman city on the Salzach river to the court of Frederick William I of Prussia, and it passes through plague, peasant revolt, the Reformation, and the life of a composer named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

• 2. A Territory Between Mountains

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  Salzburg itself stood on the site of the former Roman city of Iuvavum, and its geographic setting shaped the principality's entire existence. The territory ran along the Salzach river from the High Tauern range in the south, where Mount Großvenediger rises to 3,666 meters, down through the broad valley to the Alpine foothills in the north. The five historic subdivisions, called Gaue, captured this range: Flachgau held the capital in the wide northern valley; Tennengau clustered around Hallein; and the mountainous southern districts of Pinzgau, Pongau around Bischofshofen, and Lungau beyond the Radstädter Tauern Pass completed the picture. The northern fringe even reached the Rupertiwinkel on the western shore of the Salzach, a strip of land that today belongs to Bavaria. Salt was the great economic engine of the region. The Salzkammergut border area was so valuable as a salt-trading zone that the House of Habsburg steadily seized it and absorbed it into their Upper Austrian lands. That loss typified Salzburg's geopolitical situation: surrounded on nearly every side by Habsburg territory by 1363, when the archdukes added the County of Tyrol to their holdings in the west. Only to the northwest did Bavaria remain as a non-Habsburg neighbor, along with the tiny Berchtesgaden Provostry, which clung to its independence until the Mediatisation of 1803.

• 3. Princes of the Empire

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  Archbishop Eberhard II of Regensberg was elevated to prince of the Empire in 1213, and the decades that followed showed both the ambition and the vulnerability of that position. Eberhard created three new dioceses: Chiemsee in 1216, Seckau in 1218, and Lavant in 1225. By 1241, at the Council of Regensburg, he delivered a striking condemnation of Pope Gregory IX, calling him that man of perdition who claimed he could not err. That kind of boldness had limits. During the German Interregnum, Salzburg fell into disorder. Philip of Spanheim, heir to the Duchy of Carinthia, refused priestly consecration and had to be replaced by Ulrich, Bishop of Seckau. King Rudolf I of Habsburg then quarrelled with the archbishops through the influence of Abbot Henry of Admont, though peace was eventually restored in 1297 after Rudolf's death. Through the subsequent Wittelsbach struggles, the people and archbishops of Salzburg stayed loyal to the Habsburgs. When the Black Death reached Salzburg in 1347, that loyalty to order collapsed in a different direction: the Jewish population was accused of poisoning wells and subjected to severe persecution. The prince-archbishops bore the ancient title of Primas Germaniae, meaning First Bishop of Germany. Despite that dignity, they never obtained the electoral vote that would have let them choose the emperor, a ceiling on their influence that they could not break through.

• 4. Reform, Revolt, and the Reformation

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  Leonard of Keutschach, who reigned from 1495 to 1519, restored order after a period of instability by taking a blunt approach: he had all the burgomasters and town councillors arrested at the same time and imprisoned in the castle for levying what he considered unfair taxes. His tenure ended in bitter rivalry with Matthäus Lang of Wellenburg, Bishop of Gurk, who succeeded him in 1519. Matthäus Lang operated largely below the radar of official circles, yet Protestant ideas entered Salzburg on his watch. He brought in Saxon miners, and those workers carried Protestant books and teachings with them into the archbishopric. Lang tried to hold the Catholic line, but the effort drew fierce resistance. During what the source calls the Latin War, he was besieged inside the Hohen-Salzburg and condemned as a monster by Martin Luther himself. Two peasant uprisings followed, spreading suffering across the archdiocese. Later archbishops handled the religious tension more carefully, and Salzburg avoided the full devastation that swept through other parts of Germany. Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, who held the see from 1587 to 1612, gave Protestants a clear choice: convert to Catholicism or leave. Under his direction, the cathedral was rebuilt with a splendor that reportedly surpassed every church north of the Alps. Archbishop Paris von Lodron, who ruled from 1619 to 1653, then guided Salzburg through the Thirty Years' War without being drawn into the carnage that consumed the rest of Germany.

• 5. The Protestant Expulsion

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  Leopold Anton von Firmian, who held office from 1727 to 1744, presided over one of the most dramatic single acts in the principality's history. In 1731, he ordered the expulsion of the remaining Protestants in Salzburg. He had invited the Jesuits in, appealed to the emperor for support, and finally demanded that Protestants either recant their beliefs or leave. More than 20,000 people were forced out of their homes. Most of them accepted an offer of land from King Frederick William I of Prussia, resettling far from the Alpine valleys where their families had lived. The scale of this displacement set Salzburg apart even from other Catholic territories of the era. It also underscored how completely the prince-archbishops fused religious authority with coercive state power. Firmian's successor Sigismund III of Schrattenbach held the archbishopric from 1753 to 1771, and it was during this period that a child named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg.

• 6. Mozart and the Last Archbishop

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  Hieronymus von Colloredo, who ruled from 1772 to 1812, is remembered today almost entirely because of his relationship with Mozart. He was Mozart's employer and patron, and the composer was a native of Salzburg. Colloredo pursued reforms of the church and education systems that alienated him from the people he governed. The relationship with Mozart was famously strained, ending in a rupture that forced the composer to seek his fortune elsewhere. In 1803, Colloredo's secular authority came to an end when the principality was secularised and transferred to Ferdinand III, the former Grand Duke of Tuscany and brother of Emperor Francis II, who had lost his own throne in the upheavals of the Napoleonic period. The new Electorate of Salzburg was short-lived. By 1805 the territory became part of Austria, and by 1809 it passed to Bavaria. The Bavarian administration closed the University of Salzburg, prohibited monasteries from accepting novices, and banned pilgrimages and processions. The archdiocese was reestablished without any temporal power in 1818 as the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Salzburg. Colloredo held the title of prince-archbishop until 1812, though he had exercised no secular authority for nearly a decade by then.

• 7. Titles Without Thrones

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  What survived the secularisation was not land or political power but a set of ancient honorifics that carry an unexpected weight even now. The Archbishop of Salzburg still bears the title Primas Germaniae, making the occupant the Pope's first point of contact in the German-speaking world. That function was once far greater: it included the right to preside over the princes of the Holy Roman Empire itself. The Archbishop also holds the title of Legatus Natus, meaning born legate to the Pope. That rank comes with a privilege that no cardinal appointment could grant: the right to wear red vesture that is described as deeper in color than a cardinal's scarlet, even when the Archbishop appears in Rome. These surviving dignities mark where the borders of the old principality once ran and preserve a faint outline of an institution that exercised real force for nearly six centuries, from Eberhard II's elevation in 1213 to the Bavarian closure of the university in 1809.