All events · Conquest and the Slave Trades

The Expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants

1731–1732 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement Abduction (Children)

Displaced

20,000

Well documented for an eighteenth-century expulsion because both the expelling and receiving states kept lists. The emigration patent of 31 October 1731 was followed by the departure of roughly 20,000-21,000 people, the great majority of the archbishopric's crypto-Protestant population; Prussian settlement records account for some 17,000 resettled in East Prussia, with smaller parties reaching other German states, the Dutch Republic and the new colony of Georgia in North America.

Share of the population affected

10%

of the population of the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg, 1731

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

Protestantism had survived clandestinely among the mountain peasantry of the prince-archbishopric of Salzburg long after the Counter-Reformation. After Protestant villagers organised and appealed to the Corpus Evangelicorum, Archbishop Firmian issued an emigration patent in October 1731 requiring unpropertied Protestants to leave within eight days and property-holders within one to three months, in midwinter and in breach, the Protestant powers argued, of the Peace of Westphalia. Around 20,000 left. Frederick William I of Prussia offered them land in the depopulated Gumbinnen district of East Prussia and organised their transport; most of the emigrants walked north across Germany in publicised columns that became a European media event, and a small party was settled at Ebenezer in Georgia. Children below a certain age were initially retained by the Salzburg authorities to be raised Catholic, and their release was a principal demand of the Protestant states negotiating on the emigrants' behalf.

Parties

Prince-Archbishop Leopold Anton von Firmian expelled the Protestant peasantry of the archbishopric of Salzburg; Prussia and other Protestant states organised their reception

Disputed

Whether the retention of Protestant children by the Salzburg authorities was systematic or exceptional was disputed at the time between the archbishopric and the Corpus Evangelicorum, and the winter timing of the expulsion of the unpropertied is still argued over as either deliberate harshness or administrative rigidity.

The denominator

The archbishopric held roughly 190,000-200,000 people in the early eighteenth century. About 20,000 crypto-Protestants, drawn overwhelmingly from the Pongau, Pinzgau and Lungau valleys, were expelled under the emigration edict of 1731; most were resettled in East Prussia.

The expelled were concentrated in a few Alpine valleys; against the population of those valleys the share was a large fraction rather than the tenth the territory-wide ratio suggests.

Where the baseline comes from

Expulsion of the Salzburg Protestantsopen-edited
Archbishopric of Salzburgopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no mass killing. Deaths occurred among the very young and old on the winter march north and on the Atlantic passage to Georgia, and are recorded individually in the Prussian settlement registers and the Ebenezer records rather than as a total.

Documented forms of violence

DenationalizationAbduction of Children

The stripping of residence rights from a subject population on grounds of confession, and the retention of emigrants' children by the Salzburg authorities for Catholic upbringing, are recorded in the emigration patent and in the diplomatic correspondence of the Corpus Evangelicorum, and are treated in Mack Walker's study of the expulsion.

Movements mapped

Salzburg → East Prussia (Gumbinnen district)17,000
Salzburg → Ebenezer, Georgia300

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Austria, Russia, United States of America

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.