Page - 43 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

43The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces gifts and ambitious construction works, and the inventories list pieces of im- movable property, from houses and mansions through mills, arable lands, and vineyards to shops and inns; the convents had the means of employing their own surgeons, apothecaries, masons, carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, butch- ers, bakers, black- and coppersmiths, and so forth. Municipal councils and mining chambers sometimes provided for the payment of Jesuit schoolmas- ters.15 All of this was far from being politically innocent, nor free of severe con- flicts. In Banská Štiavnica, for instance, the Jesuit and Catholic revival was largely thanks to the influence of the superior Raimund Decker (dates un- known), formerly the confessor of Emperor and King Leopold i (1640–1705, r.1657–1705), under whom the town’s largest church, hospital, and other facili- ties were transferred by royal gift to the Jesuits. When the town council refused to comply, three hundred Catholics occupied the church, and the presence of seven hundred imperial mercenaries ensured an atmosphere in which, for the first time in a hundred years, Catholics returned to the municipal assembly.16 The variegated sources of patronage enabled the Society of Jesus to strike strong roots in the region, and they also demonstrate that, besides the un- doubtedly powerful leverage it received from the imperial and the Catholic hierarchy, this was also thanks to the recognition of the value of the services they provided among the local communities. As a result, the number of Jesuits active in Hungary grew—from 149 in 1650 to three times as many by the begin- ning and six times as many by the middle of the eighteenth century—and so did the number of their students: the Trnava college alone had 440 students in the year of its foundation, but within just a few years this figure had risen to 700.17 As well as the standard curriculum prescribed in the Ratio studiorum, the boarders had the opportunity to receive training in a wide array of other sub- jects and skills, in response to specific local or social needs. These may have 15 The Acta Jesuitica in the Hungarian National Archives (OL Kam. Lt. Acta Jes.) holds a wealth of relevant material. This brief and impressionistic glance is based on coll. Trench. no. 2151, fasc. 1, fol. 1–8; coll. Leucsov., no. 683, fasc. 7, pp. 185–90. No. 1; coll. Neosol., no. 808, fasc. 7, fol. 343–44. No. 27, fasc. 7, fol. 382–87. Nos. 44–45. 16 Vendelín Jankovič, Dejiny jezuitov v Banskej Štiavnici: Príspevok k náboženským dejinám mesta od xvi. storočia do konca xviii. storočia (Bratislava: Vydava Filozofická Fakulta, 1941), 82–87; Ede Richter and Ernő Király, “Selmeczbánya,” in Magyarország vármegyéi és városai: Hont vármegye és Selmecbánya sz. kir. város, ed. Samu Borovszky (Budapest: Apolló, 1984), 85–127, here 112; http://www.mek.oszk.hu/09500/09536/html/0011/8.html (accessed April 10, 2019). On the re-Catholicization of towns in general, see István H. Né- meth, “Unterdrückung oder Reform? Die Rekatholisierung in der ungarischen königli- chen Freistädten,” in Město v převratech konfesionalizace v 15. až 18. stoleti, ed. Václav Ledvinka et al. (Prague: Scriptorium, 2014), 435–50. 17 Gyenis, A jezsuita rend, 10.