Austria as considered in this essay does not include all the lands under the authority of the Habsburgs of Vienna, but what we have elsewhere termed the ‘Austro-Bohemian Complex’, or what might be described after 1620 as the Hereditary Lands. Together with the Austria of today, the kingdom of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, it was an elongated territory stretching from the Rhine to Poland, and from Prussia to the Adriatic, where Germans and Czechs predominated with a population at the opening of the eighteenth century of around five and a half million. After the great plague of 1713 the population did not stop expanding notwithstanding the loss of the largest part of Silesia in 1745. The time limits for a study of the eighteenth-century church in Austria are best set between 1683 and 1780, from the end of the siege of Vienna to the death of Maria Theresa, for this was a period of triumphant Catholicism reinforced by the 1683 victory over the Turks and which Joseph II tried to end by his radical reforms.

Three special features of the Hereditary Lands should be kept in mind: (1) We are concerned with areas of reconquista with the exception of the Tyrol. The impact of Lutheranism had been very strong in Austria; in 1560 Vienna was in the main a Lutheran city. Since the fifteenth century and the Hussite wars, Bohemia was generally receptive to heterodox currents which led to the development of the Utraquist church, the Unity of the Brethren and the Lutheran churches.