Jerome of Colloredo (Archbishop)

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Colloredo as Prince Archbishop, oil painting by Johann M. Greiter, around 1780
Colloredo's coat of arms as Prince Archbishop of Salzburg
Thaler, Archdiocese of Salzburg 1803

Hieronymus Franz de Paula Josef Graf Colloredo von Waldsee and Mels , also Wallsee , (born May 31, 1732 in Vienna ; †  May 20, 1812 ibid) was Bishop of Gurk from 1761–1772 and the last ruling Prince Archbishop of the Prince Archbishopric of Salzburg from 1772–1803 , then from Vienna until his death, spiritual head of the Archdiocese of Salzburg . Colloredo worked and acted as a representative of the Catholic Enlightenment .

Colloredo's youth and the beginning of his career

Jerome was born the fifth of eighteen children. His father was the later controversial Vice Chancellor Rudolph Joseph Graf Colloredo-Waldsee and Mels , his mother's name was Maria Franziska Gabriela; a born Countess Starhemberg . Emperor Franz I. Stefan raised the family to the rank of imperial prince in 1763 . Jerome had a strict, religious upbringing from childhood. He was originally supposed to pursue a military career, but since he was ailing, his parents determined a spiritual one for him. Colloredo attended the Theresianum as a high school student, the University of Vienna as a philosophy student and the Collegium Germanicum in Rome for the study of theology , where he received his doctorate .

In 1756, Colloredo became a chapter in Salzburg with a seat and a vote. In 1759, at the suggestion of the Empress, he was appointed Auditor rotae romanae for the German nation by the Pope , which is why he went to Rome for several years. On April 14, 1762, Prince Archbishop Schrattenbach appointed him Bishop of Gurk. Colloredo increased the income of this diocese by more than half through particular economic efficiency, economical use of civil servants and through modernization of the iron and hammer works. As early as 1771, Colloredo created a small country house in front of the Mirabelltor in Salzburg.

When the Archbishopric of Salzburg became vacant in 1771, he was a candidate for the Habsburg bishopric , his opponent was the one popular with the Salzburg population and supported by the Bavarian Elector Maximilian III. favored cathedral dean Ferdinand Christoph von Waldburg-Zeil . Only on March 14, 1772, after more than ten votes, did the Chapter elect Colloredo as Archbishop of Salzburg. The election result caused consternation among many Salzburgers and consequently his solemn entry into the city of Salzburg, which he held on April 29, 1772, was boycotted.

Colloredo as Archbishop Hieronymus

Archbishop Colloredo was an advocate of reforms in the spirit of the Enlightenment , which he gradually tried to implement in the archbishopric. Throughout his life he was close to Jansenism , and he was also one of around 1,500 identified members of the Illuminati Order . In the spirit of the Catholic Enlightenment , he issued many church ordinances and thereby intervened in many religious and non-religious customs. He reduced the number of tranquil monasteries (especially the mendicant orders), abolished many brotherhoods , but increased the number of pastoral care offices significantly. Among other things, he forbade the burning of solstice fires , the baptism of the butcher's journeyman with water ( butcher's jumping ), the ringing of the weather , the carrying of living pictures (figures like Samson ), the shooting of firecrackers in processions and the donkey rides on Palm Sunday. In 1779 he also criticized the Passion Play : a stranger mixture of religion and antics cannot easily be conceived or seen! The common people faced the new developments with little understanding, they composed the mocking verse cited to this day: Our Prince von Colloredo has neither Gloria nor Credo .

In 1782 the 1200th anniversary of the Archdiocese of Salzburg was to take place, which gave Colloredo the opportunity to publish an extensive pastoral letter . In the wake of the pastoral letter, a number of the measures he had already taken were expanded and tightened: Colloredo prohibited pilgrimages and petitions in general, he restricted church decorations and church music, he had the so-called holy grave and church cribs abolished. Furthermore, the Corpus Christi processions had to be cleared of all splendor, and the weather bells and weather shooting, the herb and food consecration and the pictorial representation of the Ascension of Christ had to be stopped. Colloredo's reforms were shaped by the emphatic endeavor to remedy existing grievances and to introduce uniform regulations that corresponded to the new zeitgeist. In the area of ​​the new order of worship, this also included the introduction of German folk chants during mass. An already tried and tested collection of songs formed the basis for a suitable hymn book: the sacred chant for services in the Roman Catholic Church (Landshut 1777). After abdicating as Prince in 1803, he remained the spiritual head of the Archdiocese of Salzburg from Vienna until his death in 1812 .

Colloredo as a prince

Colloredo's goal was to make Salzburg a model spiritual territory in the empire, the vanguard of the Enlightenment in the Catholic German-speaking and cultural area. As a rule, he did not hire Austrians or Bavarians as his immediate helpers, but rather personalities from the Catholic Rhine-Franconian and Swabian countries. He reformed the Catholic liturgy, the cultural and social areas and the school system. The first goal for Colloredo was the elimination of the debts of the archbishopric, which he soon achieved through a clever austerity policy, combined with tax increases. In addition, he invested the then already increased state reserves on the Vienna Stock Exchange , whereby on the other hand a lot of capital was lost again due to price falls.

The progressive spirit attracted leading scientists, writers and musicians from the German-speaking area to Salzburg. Alongside Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Michael Haydn was a church musician much appreciated by Colloredo (Mozart composed, for example , a piano concerto for Colloredo's niece Antonia Gräfin Lützow , pupil of his father Leopold Mozart, KV 246 ). Colloredo called or surrounded himself with people such as: Johann Jakob Hartenkeil (physician, reformer of the health and midwifery sector), Albert Christoph Dies (landscape painter), August Franz Heinrich von Naumann (engineer, painter), Franz Michael Vierthaler (school reformer, writer), Mathias Pockh (1720–1795, cartographer and mathematician, created the first Salzburg road atlas) and Lorenz Hübner (1785–1799: publisher of the “Oberdeutsche Staatszeitung”). In order to introduce a tax system that was as fair as possible, he had all properties measured and recorded in what is now known as the »Hieronymus Cadastre« , a first systematic land register in the state of Salzburg.

In addition to the conflicts that Colloredo evoked with the publication of his famous pastoral letter in the interior of Salzburg in 1782, the situation of the archbishopric was gradually threatened from outside, so that he had to deal more with these agendas. So he had to z. B. urge compliance with the Emser punctuation decided in 1786, which had the purpose of restricting the intervention of the papal curia in the archbishopric rights, or oppose the new territorial divisions in the empire envisaged by Emperor Joseph II . In the field of tension between Vienna, Berlin, Mainz, Munich and Rome, Colloredo had to endure considerable stress tests between 1787 and 1790, a first phase of war with France followed in 1792 ( First Coalition War ), for which Colloredo had to recruit soldiers for the Rhenish front the following year, which led to uprisings, especially in the countryside. Under Colloredo Salzburg had developed into a special kind of education and science center in which ingenious scholars and publicists worked. Against a threatening backdrop, which can be illustrated with the terms dangers of war, threats of secularization and popular unrest, Colloredo's domestic political concerns gradually faded into the background, and his projects in the sense of the Enlightenment were in the long run unpopular and not very successful in Salzburg.

Colloredo's grave in Salzburg 2003

On December 10, 1800, after the unfavorable course of the Battle of Hohenlinden , Colloredo had to flee from the advancing troops . In 1803 the prince archbishopric was secularized , and the prince archbishop , now living in exile in Vienna , renounced all secular claims to rule. He was buried at his own request in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, but in 2003 his remains were surprisingly transferred to Salzburg and buried in the cathedral's crypt .

personality

Colloredo's workflow was characterized by consistency and energy. The prince possessed a high intelligence, a quick judgment, an excellent knowledge of human nature as well as a cosmopolitan and skilful way of negotiation. Business never stood idle, the mostly handwritten resolutions prove a precise and quick business view.

In addition to German and Latin , Colloredo spoke French , Italian and Czech . He was a good violin player and loved music. The always sickly Colloredo led a simple and simple life and always kept a strict diet.

His achievements for the Enlightenment made Prince Archbishop Colloredo widely known and established his fame in this sense, but remained unpopular in large parts of the Salzburg population.

literature

Web links

Commons : Hieronymus von Colloredo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Public address of the Salzburg Cathedral Dean, and Capitulars of Augsburg, Mr. Ferdinand Reichs-Erb-Truchses, and Count of Zeil ec. In: Bayerische Staats Bibliothek, digital ( MDZ ), [1] , accessed on September 28, 2016.
  2. Hieronymus Joseph Colloredo: Pastoral letter of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. The elimination of unnecessary religious expenditure; the laudation of diligent Bible reading; the introduction of a German church hymn book; then various pastoral ordinances and admonitions to pastoral workers to properly conduct their important office. Salzburg 1782.
  3. ^ Archbishop Colloredo and his cadastre. A tax reform at the end of the Archbishopric of Salzburg. Edited by the Salzburger Landesarchiv 2012 (series of publications by the Salzburger Landesarchiv No. 19).