Page - 338 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 7338 establish his whereabouts in the interval from 1775 to 1780, in which year (or early in the next one at the latest) he emerged as the adjunct of Hell in Vienna. Von Triesnecker was to stay in this role throughout the 1780s and early 1790s. After Hell’s death in 1792, he inherited the position of imperial astronomer, and kept it until his own passing in 1817. As an editor of the Ephemerides and its appendices, von Triesnecker loyally followed the principles that had been laid out by his predecessor until the series eventually had to be discontinued in 1806 as a result of financial problems caused by the Napoleonic Wars.80 Unlike Mayr, von Triesnecker appears to have been a success as an adjunct. Exactly who taught him astronomy is not known, but it is tempting to conjecture that he learned the rudiments of astronomy in Graz before he was called to Vienna at the age of thirty-five. Like Liesganig, von Triesnecker was to become an ac- tive surveyor in the service of the state: in the 1790s and 1800s, he took part in field works in both Galicia and Lower Austria.81 In the Kingdom of Hungary, developments for former Jesuits were slightly more auspicious than in Austria.82 The leading astronomer on Hungarian soil, Franz Weiss, remained the director of the university observatory in Trnava un- til 1777, when it was decided that the university itself was to be moved to Buda. A new observatory was then constructed at the new Royal Palace in Buda, with the imperial astronomer taking part in the construction process by personally traveling to Buda and providing advice in the spring of 1777.83 By 1779, con- struction works were finished. Observations began in 1780, with Weiss the un- disputed director. Sajnovics was to remain in the background, and although he did publish a textbook of astronomy in 1778,84 he never received a chair as a professor of astronomy, far less the title “royal astronomer,” which he had dreamed of a few years earlier. Whether Sajnovics formally took over as director 80 On von Triesnecker’s career, see Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon (1883) 47:197–99; Schörg, “Die Präsenz der Wiener Universitätssternwarte,” 83–86; Nora Pärr, “Wiener As- tronomen: Ihre Tätigkeit an Privatobservatorien und Universitätssternwarten,” Diplom- arbeit (Vienna: Geisteswissenschaftliche Fakultät der Universität Wien, 2001), 41–43; Kastner-Masilko, Triesnecker, passim. Kastner-Masilko’s biography should, however, be used with caution, see Per Pippin Aspaas’s review in Beiträge zur Astronomiegeschichte, ed. Wolfgang R. Dick and Jürgen Hamel, 9, Acta historica astronomiae 36 (2008): 269–73. 81 Kastner-Masilko, Triesnecker, 116–23. 82 For an overview, see Paul Shore, “Enduring the Deluge: Hungarian Jesuit Astronomers from Suppression to Restoration,” in Jesuit Survival and Restoration: A Global History 1773– 1900, ed. Robert A. Maryks and Jonathan Wright (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 148–61. 83 Hell to Bernoulli in Berlin, dated Vienna, June 20, 1777 (ubb). 84 János Sajnovics, Idea astronomiae (Buda: Landerer, 1778); reprint with a Hungarian trans- lation, ed. Rezső Nagy (Székesfehérvár: n.p., 1993).