The Salzburg transaction

In 1731-32 the archbishopric of Salzburg expelled some 20,000 Protestant farmers from the alpine districts above the city and, upon the invitation of King Frederick William I, they were resettled as colonists in a distant corner of East Prussia. The episode provoked a sharp confessional confrontation that threatened to destroy the delicate political equilibrium of the Holy Roman Empire, but today it is remembered, if at all, as an anachronistic outburst of obscurantism and intolerance unbecoming to the century of Enlightenment, a source of Protestant pride and Catholic discomfort. In this elegant book Mack Walker not only provides the most complete available account of the expulsion but also makes a strikingly original contribution to historical method. He tells the story in five different ways: as an episode in the history of the Salzburg archbishopric, in the history of the Prussian state, in the confessional and constitutional life of the Holy Roman Empire, in the experience of the emigrants themselves, and in the legendry of German (especially Prussian) Protestantism. His unusual narrative method enables him to reveal, as perhaps no previous historian has done, the intricate inner workings of the Holy Roman Empire, where conflicting confessional, dynastic, political, and economic interests were held in constantly shifting balance. The exile of the Salzburg Protestants, Walker shows, satisfied all parties concerned - except possibly the migrants themselves. The Salzburg Transaction will find an appreciative audience among historians of Europe as well as those concerned with problems of religion and society and with the nature of migration.