Salzburg Protestants
In the early 16th century, Lutheran ideas quickly spread throughout the Salzburg lands along with miners recruited from Saxony by Archbishop Matthias Lang von Wellenburg (d.
Under the terms of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg signed by Emperor Charles V, the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio applied within the Empire.
[3] In 1684, Prince-Archbishop Max Gandolph von Küenburg decided to expel the Protestants living in the remote Defereggen Valley, after receiving complaints from Matrei that a seller of Catholic tokens had been mistreated.
After five years of wrangling, Emperor Leopold I intervened and instructed Kuenburg's successor, Archbishop Johann Ernst von Thun, to give the children the choice of joining their parents in exile.
Bowing to pressure from the Protestant estates, the archbishop modified the order to allow families to stay until 23 April 1732 and to retain their property for three years.
The Prussian government subsequently declared that the Salzburgers were bona fide Lutherans who were entitled to the protection of the Peace of Augsburg.
[3]: 67–72 King Frederick William I in Prussia saw an opportunity to resettle the Salzburg Protestants in his East Prussian territories, which had been depopulated by an outbreak of plague some years before.
About 16,000 to 17,000 arrived in East Prussia, where they were settled in the Lithuania Minor region, mainly in the area of Gumbinnen (present-day Gusev, Kaliningrad Oblast).
Several hundred found refuge in territories ruled by King George II of Great Britain, including the Electorate of Hanover and the British colony of Georgia, where, at the instigation of the Augsburg preacher Samuel Urlsperger, several Salzburger emigrants led by Johann Martin Boltzius founded the town of Ebenezer.
Prussia dispatched Baron Erich Christoph von Plotho to Salzburg to sell the lands that the Protestants had left behind, valued at about 2.5 million Prussian thalers.
[3]: 98–99 Following the Salzburg example, Emperor Charles VI adopted the policy of expelling Protestants from his adjacent Salzkammergut territories from 1734 onwards.
As he had no intention to lose any subjects to the Prussian king, he had about 4,000 refugees resettled in the Habsburg crown lands of Transylvania and Hungary.
Nevertheless, still in 1837, the Salzburg archbishop Friedrich Johannes Jacob Celestin von Schwarzenberg urged Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria to expel several hundred Protestants from the Tyrolean Zillertal.
