Narratives of Adversity: Jesuits on the Eastern Peripheries of the Habsburg Realms (1640–1773)

XI Trnava

XI Trnava Sapientia aedificavit sibi domum1 Trnava (Nagyszombat, Tyrnau, Tyrnavia) was the most important community of the Society in Hungary although its roles shifted in focus and importance over time. At various points Trnava functioned as a major training center of Jesuits, secular clergy and laymen, close to the Ottoman frontier, and later, as a staging point safely far from any actual periphery but still in constant communication with Jesuits and others destined for labors along that periphery. The town was where the Society committed itself to its most ambitious building projects in the non-German speaking Austrian Province and was a point of both departure and return for many Jesuits working anywhere within the eastern two thirds of the Austrian Province. It was also a center for education through which Jesuits from other sections of the Province and even beyond it, passed through on various teaching assignments. As we have seen, after a false start that lasted only six years and involved several relocations,2 the Jesuits settled into Trnava permanently in 1615. This moment was the beginning of the first great campaign under the leadership of Cardinal Peter Pázmány (1570–1637) to reclaim Hungary for Catholicism and to organize and rationalize the 1 “Wisdom has built for herself a house” (Proverbs 9:1), a motto appearing over an engraving of the eighteenth-century town and university. 2 Šimončič, “Prví Jezuiti na Slovensku: 450 rokov od príchodu jezuitov do Trnavy.” http://www.jezuiti.sk/index.php?stranka=ktosme_aktuality&tab=akt uality&idc=1276&hp=ok 252 Narratives of Adversity Society’s presence in the fragmented kingdom. From the start the Jesuit project was confronted with serious threats. Gabriel Bethlen’s troops threatened both the town and school shortly after the founding of the latter.3 Yet the school they established grew very rapidly, following the usual pattern of Jesuit academies during the first century of the Society, and could boast 700 students by 1618. Seventeen years later the cardinal , a former Jesuit, though his endowments helped the school gain the rank of university.4 The Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest today claims uninterrupted descent as a Hungarian institution from the beginnings. Trnava also became the place where data about the Society’s activities over a much wider area were compiled.5 The growth and success of the cluster of schools and facilities operated by the Jesuits in Trnava fit into the larger narrative of the Society during its first century . As a place where hundreds of Jesuits were trained and hundreds of other future clergy were trained by Jesuits, this middling sized town was epitomized as a model of Jesuit enterprise in the written history of the Society: echoing the language in the Imago that had described the Society’s progress in human terms, Stephanus Csete (1648–1718) wrote two quasi-historical works about Trnava: Tyrnavia nascens (1706) and Tyrnavia crescens (1707).6 Chosen in part because of its proximity to Vienna, Jesuit-dominated Trnava was for more than century a place on the edge of Catholic Europe from which one might peer into the more exotic haunts of Muslim, Unitarian, and heretic while still being tied to the extensive network of Jesuit schools that stretched westward across the continent and far beyond. Jesuits continually passed through or lighted in the town in the course of their apostolic work. When Gaspar Gorian, a “Croata,” returned from seven years’ service in the Belgrade mission in 1642 and died in Trnava , the town was only a short distance from Turkish outposts.7 Much 3 Kazy, Historia Universitatis, 51; 273. 4 Fraknói, Pázmány Péter, 1570–1637, 183–186; 279. 5 A manuscript of the history of the Society in Hungary, Austria, Transylvania , Croatia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia was composed in Trnava in about 1634. Ms. II/2 Hev. Tomus XXVI, fols. 1–96, ELTEK. 6 Sommervogel, Bibliothèque, ii, 1721. 7 Lukács, Catalogi, II, 603; Molnár, Saint-Siège, 234. 253 Trnava later Franciscus Xavier Pejacsevich (1707–1781), a scion of a distinguished Bulgarian family that relocated in Slavonia, received training in Trnava and become a Jesuit.8 Andreas Helesféni was born in Trnava in 1612, and presumably trained there, and then was sent to Mănăştur in Transylvania, to become the rector of the community, but returned to Trnava the next year.9 Vitus Vitelli, a native of Fiume who...