In the early 1600s, the Habsburgs’ Alpine hereditary lands were returned to Catholicism. With the exception of select Lower Austrian noble families, who were granted personal freedom of conscience without domestic heterodox practice, local Protestants had to forsake their former beliefs. Any exercise of the Lutheran or Calvinist creed was proscribed. Once-formidable Austrian Protestantism was driven underground.
There was a catch, however. Foreign embassies increasingly gained the status of exterritorial entities. This special status also extended to the religious sphere, allowing foreign emissaries and their households to practice their faith within the confines of their embassies, regardless of domestic legal restrictions. In the imperial residence of Vienna, the Danish, Swedish, and Dutch delegations established Protestant chapels on embassy grounds. In his new book, Stephan Steiner examines the role of Lutheran and Calvinist places of worship in a territory that had outlawed these faiths among its citizens, with a special focus on the reign of Emperor Charles VI in the early eighteenth century.
Steiner came well prepared for his study. The Austrian historian had previously examined Protestant life in the shadow of the Counter Reformation and drawn attention to the eighteenth-century deportations of Alpine Crypto-Protestants to Transylvania. His new subject, the embassy chapels in Vienna, are a well-known but not always well-researched phenomenon. These sanctuaries created a small yet symbolically significant heterodox subculture that comprised both privileged lawful members, most of whom were foreigners, and occasional locals who partook in secret. Prominent among the former were international wholesalers, whose economic importance gained them substantial privileges, even in religious matters. The latter were often Crypto-Protestants from Alpine hideouts, among them Carinthian artisans who found their way into the Danish embassy chapel while on work sojourns in Vienna.
At the heart of the community—as well as of the study—we find the pastors. Although they were attached to foreign embassies, they were native German-speakers from Protestant imperial territories or—in the case of the Calvinists—Switzerland. Even if German played a significant role in the contemporary Danish, Swedish, and Dutch empires and many of the ambassadors hailed from German backgrounds, the virtual absence of the titular state languages from everyday practice indicates that the embassy chapels served resident Protestants more than diplomatic envoys.
An important supplement to the pastors were the so-called informators, typically recent theological graduates who served as private tutors in Vienna’s Protestant community while remaining in close contact with their spiritual advisors in the Pietist stronghold of Halle. These informators, who often hoped for a career in the ministry themselves, were able to assist with pastoral duties but also expanded the narrow social and spiritual sphere of the ambassadorial ministry.
The embassy pastors not only served their congregations but also functioned as information hubs. They alerted their associates in Halle to religious oppression in the Habsburg domains, as well as in neighboring Salzburg. The prominent early chronicler of Austrian Protestantism, Bernhard Raupach, could also count on their cooperation. They were more reluctant to intervene politically, however, because they feared repercussions for their own congregations.
“Das Reich Gottes hier in Wien” shows that Vienna’s function as the residence of the Holy Roman Emperor distinguished it from its Alpine surroundings. This special position continually brought Protestant imperial officials, soldiers, merchants, and craftsmen into the city. Their legal status was precarious and changeable, and for poorer members of the congregation, even technically permitted rituals such as funerals might prove elusive due to obligatory additional payments to the local Catholic priest.
The study lives and dies by its sources. Much of the analysis draws upon the correspondence between the pastoral staff and the Pietist religious institutions in Halle. This source selection not only accentuates the Pietist aspects of Lutheran practice in Vienna but also bears upon the factual information available. Pastors who were not affiliated with Halle, such as the Reformed ministers at the Dutch embassy, are less visible in the presentation.
Steiner makes the most of his unevenly preserved material and quotes it extensively. Thus, we gain deep insights into some aspects of Protestant life in Counter Reformation Vienna, including contemporary city maps showing the location of relevant locations. Other facets are less developed, with chapters that can be as short as two pages. Therefore, the author also struggles to pull the divergent threads together in a substantive conclusion.
As a consequence, the book’s explanatory subtitle title could profitably have been adjusted. New insights into the life of domestic Protestants are relatively limited, whereas the study’s focus on Halle Pietism is so strong that it would have deserved to be visualized in the heading. This relationship between the Pietist centers in Halle and their spiritual outposts in the Habsburg Empire makes for compelling reading in its own right, however. And in the end, the sheer presence of Vienna’s idiosyncratic Protestant sphere inspired and reinforced the Crypto-Protestant milieus of Alpine Austria as well.
