Page - 45 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

45The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces rebellion became intertwined with the wiping out of the independent Princi- pality of Transylvania in 1691, as well as with the campaign aimed at finally squeezing the Turks out of Hungary. This began after the failure of the last Ot- toman siege of Vienna in 1683, and ended with the peace of Karlovci (Karlóca, Carolovicium, Karlowitz) in 1699. However, a genuine settlement could not commence until a decade and a half later. In 1703, another revolt ensued, this time led by the scion of seventeenth-century Transylvanian princes and one of the wealthiest magnates of the country, Ferenc Rákóczi ii (1676–1735), who temporarily managed to unite disgruntled nobles, disbanded fortress soldiers, and well-to-do as well as indigent peasants, and to bring substantial parts of the country under his control. Though the Habsburgs were also kept busy on the western front by the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), the military odds favored them. The legislation of several diets that followed the 1711 Peace of Satu Mare (Szatmár, Szattmarinum, Sathmar) acknowledged their hereditary claim (even in the female line) to Hungary—though they were obliged to issue coronation charters, convene diets regularly, and respect the privileges of the nobility. While the main theater of the anti-Ottoman war effort was the triangular territory under Turkish control in the central and southern parts of the coun- try, northern Hungary was not spared by these hostilities. The eastern part of the area was the base of Thököly, who among others occupied and ransomed Banská Štiavnica, Banská Bystrica, and Kremnica in 1678 and 1679, and evicted the Jesuits from Banská Štiavnica in 1679 and from Košice and Levoča in 1682. In turn, an extraordinary court set up in Bratislava in 1674 sentenced a group of Protestant preachers to galley slavery,21 and another one in Prešov in 1687 had adherents of Thököly tortured and executed. The towns also changed masters several times during the Rákóczi war, resulting in various “calamities” experi- enced by the Jesuit communities of, for instance, Banská Bystrica and Levoča.22 As for Hungary as a whole, the vast and potentially fertile area that the “Holy League” of the papacy, Venice, Poland–Lithuania, Russia, Brandenburg, Sax- ony, Bavaria, and the Habsburgs conquered for the latter was barren and deso- late: Hungary’s plains were scorched earth, inhabited by fewer souls than two centuries earlier. In order to redress the situation, large-scale plans for the “ refurbishment” of the country, informed by cameralist sciences, populationism, 21 On this, see Marcell Sebők, “Victims of Reformations? 16–17th-Century Refugees and Their Impact on Artistic and Cultural Production,” in Expulsion and Diaspora Formation: Religious and Ethnic Identities in Flux from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. John Tolan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 135–48. 22 Paul Shore, Narratives of Adversity: Jesuits in the Eastern Peripheries of the Habsburg Realms (1640–1773) (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), 173–210.