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

II Peripheries

II Peripheries Those on the periphery and those at center were bound together not only by iterated cycles of correspondence, but they were also bound by codes of trust and a common identity based on their shared formation as Jesuits and their commitments to the ideals of the Society.1 The collection of territories belonging to the Hungarian Crown which in the mid-seventeenth century lay under Habsburg control was a secular administrator’s nightmare.2 The northeastern counties had enjoyed de facto independence from the Habsburgs at various points from the 1630s onward,3 and the region remained a hotbed of resistance to the ruling dynasty, mountainous and heavily forested, lacking decent roads or navigable waterways, and of little interest to alliance-builders in far-off Rome, where attention was instead focused on assembling a Holy League to fight the Turks.4 Repeated heavy-handed treatment by the Habsburgs Portions of this chapter appeared, in a different form, in the author’s “Mission Mostly Accomplished: Narratives of Jesuit Successes and Failures in Hungary and Transylvania, 1640–1772,” Publicationes 15, no. 2 (2009): 181–184. 1 Harris, “Confession-Building,” 315. 2 For the geographical problems inherent in defending and administering this region see Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe, 52. 3 Zombori, “Az ungvári g. e. püspöki lak és főegyház.” Ferdinand II however refused to recognize Bethlen’s authority in the region. Goetstouwers, Synopsis Historiae Societatis Jesu, 173. 4 Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870, 23. 38 Narratives of Adversity in the latter part of the century left the population, regardless of their ethnic affiliation, angry and injured, a situation inviting comparison with the brutalized peasants of the Irish Pale.5 Farther into the mountains and beyond were peoples scarcely known or even named by Western Europeans : in 1666 Jesuits were reported to be traveling through the “land of the Cumans” somewhere in the Central Carpathians.6 Royal or Upper Hungary was also a singular challenge to a Society committed to its goals of advancing the cause of the Church, communicating in a coherent baroque aesthetic, building a network of schools, and articulating a comprehensible narrative of its own undertakings .7 This project that had been underway since 1554 when Nicholas Olahus (1493–1568), archbishop of Esztergom, invited the Jesuits to Trnava (now in Slovakia) to teach and help rebuild Catholic institutions in the rump of the historic Kingdom of Hungary left after the upheavals of the Reformation and the Turkish invasion.8 The 5 Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs, 11. See also Kowalská, “Z vlasti do exilu.” 6 The “Cumani” or “Comani” are the Cumans (or in Hungarian, Kun), a central Asiatic people who arrived in Hungary in the thirteenth century. According to one story, they arrived in Ruthenia among groups of prisoners of many nationalities captured by King Ladislaus in 1285. They were related to groups settled to the east in Moldavia. Benkő, Milkovia, ii, 7. Lucian Periş, citing G. I Moisescu, Catolicismul în Moldova până la sfârşitul veacului al xiv-lea (Bucureşti, 1942), says Catholicism in Moldavia commenced with the conversion of the Cuman kagan Bortz-Membrock by the Dominicans in Esztergom (Periş, Presenze Cattoliche, 31). Yet it is possible that Jesuits meant Romanianspeaking Moldavians or Valachs here, and since sevententh century maps often identified the Danube Basin east of the river as “Cumanorum Campus,” this too may be what is meant. Kupčik, Alte Landkarten, plate XIII. 7 Royal Hungary (Királyi Magyarország) is sometimes used interchangeably with “Upper Hungary”; the former term refers to land historically part of the Kingdom of Hungary previous to the Turkish occupation, and not under direct control of the Princes of Transylvania. While never an official designation the term is frequently applied to this region in the period before 1699, and here will likewise apply to the same territory in the decades following, to distinguish it from the Danube Basin. 8 Mrva and Daniel, “Slovakia during the Early Modern Era,” 119. Hungarian and Romanian historians have debated the question of Olahus’s nationality in a somewhat anachronistic fashion; what is more important is that Olahus identified himself as a Catholic and therefore an ally of the Habsburgs in their efforts to expand eastward. Ştefan Pascu, A History of Transylvania, 39 Peripheries first Jesuit to set foot in Hungary is said to have been Juan de Vitoria , the...