ABSTRACT
The year 1623 was one of triumph for the Jesuits in Vienna. Not only did they at last receive control of most of the city’s university thanks to the Pragmatic Sanction of Ferdinand II, but work was able to begin on what would eventually become one of the gems of baroque Catholicism in Europe: Vienna’s Universitätskirche, also known as the Jesuitenkirche.1 The Society of Jesus was finally and visibly established with security, power and growing authority in one of the major urban centres of early modern, east central Europe, where their role would continue to go from strength to strength in the decades to come.2 Yet it had not always been thus for the Jesuits in Vienna, and their later pre-eminence there belies some inauspicious beginnings in the middle of the sixteenth century. They were there by royal appointment, after the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand (later Emperor Ferdinand I) wrote to the order’s General,
1 The Jesuits in Vienna were much aided by having the warm and wholehearted support of the Holy Roman Emperor himself. In a codicil to his testament of 1621, Ferdinand II had written to his heir that ‘we earnestly commend to you the well-deserving Society of Jesus … Through their skill, their instruction of our dear youth, and their exemplary manner of life, they do much good in the Christian Catholic Churches and more than others loyally work and exert themselves to maintain and propagate the Catholic religion.’ Cited in Robert Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts and Confessors (Cambridge, 2003), p. 10. On the Jesuits’ long struggle for control of Vienna University, see Ulrike Denk, ‘Schulwesen und Universität’, in Karl Vocelka and Anita Traninger (eds), Wien, Geschichte einer Stadt, Bd. 2: Die frühneuzeitliche Residenz (16. Bis 18. Jahrhundert) (Vienna, 2003), pp. 365-422, especially pp. 377-84; Kurt Mühlberger, ‘Universität und Jesuitenkolleg in Wien. Von der Berufung bis zum Bau des Akademischen Kollegs’, in Herbert Karner and Werner Telesko (eds), Die Jesuiten in Wien: Zur Kunst-und Kulturgeschichte der österreichischen Ordensprovinz der ‘Gesellschaft Jesu’ im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2003), pp. 21-37.
