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

IV Campaign in Prešov

IV Campaign in Prešov “Through carelessness, or more probably malice…” A long day’s journey to the north of Košice was Prešov (Eperijes, Preschau , Eperiensis), a heavily Lutheran town that had been badly buffeted by war, fire and, in particular plague, and had lost more than half its population during the seventeenth century, leaving no more than about 2,000 inhabitants struggling to sustain themselves.1 When 24 prominent citizens were executed in 1687 for their support of the Thököly uprising, the impact on the town was devastating. The execution of these convicted conspirators and the display of their quartered bodies took place in the square across from the Jesuit collegium, symbolism doubtless not lost on the locals, who never seemed to warm to the fathers. Perhaps the Jesuits did not appreciate the depth of resistance to Catholicism that had long characterized the town: Decades earlier Prešov had been the destination of Utraquist refugee Jakub Jacobaeus, who would become a source for Samuel Timon’s historical work.2 The struggle between Catholics and Protestants had already been played out once before publicly in Prešov. On 13 May 1671, the Austrian Major General Spankau, in the company of the bishop of Eger and several Jesuits, had seized the Evangelical collegium, and the following year the Jesuits made this building their residentia. 3 The year 1673 saw the suspension of the constitution of Hungary, which contained 1 Marečková, “Eperjes társadalmi szerkezete a XVII. században,” 71. 2 Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia, 71. 3 Zsilinszky, ed., A magyarhoni protestáns egyház története, 266. 94 Narratives of Adversity guarantees of religious liberty.4 The so-called “Prešov massacre” of Protestants followed immediately and in the next year Evangelical pastors and teachers were ruthlessly persecuted as part of the program to make all of Royal Hungary staunchly Catholic without delay.5 The local Lutheran leadership then faced the choice of pleading guilty to crimen laesae maiestatis and subsequent exile, or trials in which a verdict of guilty would bring a sentence to the galleys.6 In the following years, under the strong pressure of the Archbishop of Esztergom, Georgius Szelepcsényi, no less than 65,000 Protestant residents of Royal Hungary officially became Catholics, many as the result of Jesuit efforts.7 Yet despite mass conversions and “voluntary” exiles, northeastern Hungary , unlike districts in the Holy Roman Empire, still claimed too many non-Catholic inhabitants for the Society to expel or imprison them all.8 Instead Jesuits, after their persecution of the Protestant leadership , sought to exert power by retaining the properties they had seized and using them as bases for missionary and educational undertakings, a strategy that had both pluses and minuses. Not surprisingly, anti-Habsburg and anti-Jesuit feelings here ran as high, if not higher than in Košice, and here the lower number of Hungarian speakers may have contributed to this hostility to predominantly Hungarian speaking Jesuits who came to live in Prešov. If the largely literate population did not dare to express its resistance to the Jesuits through open protest, they could still read and retain books that denounced the Society. At least one burgher, known only as “Gutt,” had an anti-Jesuit book in his library in 1676.9 Eleven years earlier 4 Király, “The Hungarian Church,” 107. 5 Kowalská, “Learning and Education in Slovakia During the Late 17th and 18th Centuries,” 33. 6 Kowalská, “Confessional Exile from Hungary in 17th Century Europe.” 7 Holotík, ed., Dejiny Slovenska I., 330. 8 Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque, 217. The fortress towns of Upper Hungary resisted forcible Catholicization so obdurately that by 1674 Vienna had to rethink its policy and relent. Betts, “The Habsburg Lands,” 493. 9 The title of this otherwise unidentified work, Contra Masenij Soc[ietatis] Jesu…, probably refers to the Jesuit poet and pedagogue Jakob Masenius (1606–1681). Farkas, Bálint, et al., eds., Magyarországi magánkönyvtárak ii. 1588–1721, 89. 95 Campaign in Prešov a Protestant nobleman, Franciscus Bónis, listed among the books in his house in Košice a volume he called Pater Jesuitak titkai, which is in all likelihood the anonymously produced Jezsuita páterek titkai [The Secrets of the Jesuit Fathers] (Várad, 1657), a collection of tales describing the evil doings of the Society.10...