In a 1683 portrait, Bohuslav Balbín (1621–88), the Bohemian Jesuit, scholar, and noble, was depicted with a list of his published works.Footnote 1 This list was not chronological, but rather organized according to perceived importance.Footnote 2 At the top were Balbín's four sacred topographies: Diva Wartensis (1655), an account of Our Lady of Warta (Bardo) in Silesia; Diva Turzanensis (1658), which described the statue of Mary in Tuřany, in Moravia; Diva Montis Sancti (1665), focusing on the statue at Svatá Hora in Bohemia; and Diva Boleslaviensis (1673), a history of Our Lady of Stará Boleslav in Bohemia.Footnote 3 Hagiotopographies – studies of the history and miracles of one or more holy images pertaining to a particular region – became a popular genre in the early modern period.Footnote 4 Each of Balbín's works focused on a single Marian image, and they were divided into two parts. The first recounted the history of the image, while the second recorded its miracles. Although Balbín is among Bohemia's best-known late seventeenth-century scholars, and despite the pride of place which his hagiotopographies occupied in his own estimation, these works remain understudied. Ranging between scholarly and popular, and often uneasily bridging the gap between the two, Marian hagiotopography has received scant attention.Footnote 5 Yet sacred topography is of great importance in the study of the role of scholarship in the continued process of confessionalization in Europe, of the interplay of Catholicism, patriotism, and identity re-formation in the late seventeenth century, and of the creation of a scholarly reputation in post-Westphalian Bohemia and Mitteleuropa.Footnote 6
Balbín was one of Bohemia's foremost intellectuals in the seventeenth century. His family, the Balbíns of Vorličná, belonged to the knightly class and had a literary heritage; one of his ancestors, Jan Balbín (1520–70), was a humanist poet and lawyer, and several of his forebears were painters and held prominent administrative roles in Hradec Králové in eastern Bohemia.Footnote 7 After his father's early death, he was brought up by his mother and spent time at Otto von Oppersdorf's castle, Častolovice.Footnote 8 He was educated by the Benedictines and Jesuits, entered the Jesuit novitiate in Brno at the age of fifteen, and studied at the university in Prague. His interest in history emerged early on in his life, and by the 1660s he had been asked to write the official history of the Jesuit order in Bohemia; when he moved into the Jesuit college in Jičín (north-eastern Bohemia) in 1661, he was listed as a ‘historian’ in the college catalogue.Footnote 9 From the 1650s onwards, he worked primarily on historical works about Bohemia; his history of the Jesuit order was never completed. Today, Balbín is best known for his defence of Slavic languages against the increasing use of German in Bohemia, which circulated only in manuscript during his lifetime.Footnote 10 His magnum opus was the Miscellanea (1679–88), an unfinished multi-volume encyclopaedic work about the geography, people, flora and fauna, towns, regions, rulers, noble families, and ecclesiastical foundations of Bohemia, of which ten volumes were published before his death.
As a result of the religious upheavals of the seventeenth century, hagiotopographies were of primary politico-religious significance. Bruno Maës and Damien Tricoire have demonstrated the role of the Marian cult in the creation of political, regal, and patriotic identity in France, Poland, and Bavaria.Footnote 11 The Virgin Mary played a key role in the recatholicizing programme which the Habsburgs undertook in many of their dynastic holdings, including Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, following the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), and she was believed to have intervened at important moments of Habsburg history.Footnote 12 At the battle of Lepanto (1571), she protected the Habsburg fleet against the Ottomans; during the defenestration of Prague (1618), she miraculously saved all three of the defenestrated; and at the battle of White Mountain (1620), she aided the Habsburg victory against the Bohemian Estates.Footnote 13 Marian veneration was often encouraged in religiously liminal spaces and religious borderlands, including Luxembourg, the Spanish Netherlands, and Bohemia; all these Habsburg territories had a fraught religious past and Protestant neighbours.
Despite the importance of hagiotopographies to the recatholicization of Bohemia after the Habsburgs regained control of the region in 1620, Balbín's Marian works have not been studied within the context of contemporary scholarly trends, from the perspective of intellectual history, or considered as part of the Jesuit effort to propagate the veneration of the Virgin Mary. His role within the Republic of Letters and his self-fashioning as a scholar remains to be studied; there has been little systematic investigation of his correspondence and of his place within early modern European developments in historiography and antiquarianism.Footnote 14 Yet Balbín's hagiotopographies were contributions and responses to the global Catholic renewal, as well as to the changing constitutional and geopolitical status of the Bohemian monarchy, and therefore interacted with a pan-European intellectual trend.
Balbín's sacred topographies are crucial to understanding his position on politics and religion in seventeenth-century Bohemia, although their political associations were oblique. This article will examine Balbín's hagiotopographies in a broader context of European scholarship and consider the interplay between scholarship and patriotism in early modern Bohemia. It will argue that Balbín reinterpreted hagiotopographies: he intellectualized the genre and used it to establish himself as a scholar in Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire. Further, I shall argue that the post-White Mountain conception of the monarchy championed by Balbín must be assessed within the context of contemporary European scholarship as well as within a local political context.Footnote 15 Balbín's reconceptualization of sacred topography as erudite scholarship allowed him to use the works to comment on the situation in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the post-Westphalian moment. In his Marian corpus, he presented an influential Jesuit and patriotic vision of Bohemia which was deeply entangled in his own status as a scholar. This expression of Bohemian patriotism contributed to the ongoing Habsburg efforts at the recatholicization of the composite monarchy, while simultaneously being critical of the outcome of the Thirty Years’ War and certain Habsburg policies.
I
Marian worship and hagiotopography were closely linked to politics in the seventeenth century, and the political and administrative developments in the composite state are crucial for the interpretation of Balbín's works.Footnote 16 The Bohemian monarchy was composed of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia (until 1740), and Upper and Lower Lusatia (until 1635, when they were ceded to Saxony).Footnote 17 Compared to the geographically fragmented Holy Roman Empire, and even to the decentralization of the Austrian lands, which were ruled by different branches of the Habsburgs until their final unification under Ferdinand II (1578–1637), the polity was dynastically, and even politically, relatively unified. After 1620, the Habsburgs embarked on a centralizing political programme that saw power, people, and institutions relocate from Prague to Vienna. The court never again rested in Prague for long, despite the requests of the Bohemian Estates that the emperor make Prague his seat.Footnote 18
If Prague became increasingly marginalized in this period, Silesia and Moravia experienced the regionalization of the composite monarchy more acutely; the Habsburgs passed through Moravia on their way to Bohemia, but no Habsburg monarch visited Silesia after 1617.Footnote 19 The throne of Bohemia became hereditary as a result of the 1627 Verneuerte Landesordnung (Renewed Constitution), and the Bohemian Estates’ role in the coronation was reduced to swearing loyalty to the new monarch.Footnote 20 The administration of all three constituent territories continued to be separate.Footnote 21 With the exception of the Royal Bohemian Chancellery, which had jurisdiction in all three, officials only exercised authority within a single polity. The administrations of the dynastic territories of the Bohemian kings were autonomous and separate before 1627, but this disunity was emphasized as a result of the battle of White Mountain.Footnote 22
The growing centralization and unification of the Habsburg Erblande (hereditary lands) following the Thirty Years’ War had a paradoxical consequence for the Bohemian monarchy: it became increasingly fragmented. Although the polity had been considerably administratively, religiously, and politically divided – notably during the Hussite wars, the reign of Jiří of Poděbrady (1420–71), and the struggle between Rudolf II and Matthias I – its administrative separation grew even as its religious landscape was more unified. Moravia's and Silesia's links to Bohemia were weakened.Footnote 23 Moravia, which had a pre-existing sense of regionalism and patriotism, drew politically and culturally closer to Vienna.Footnote 24 Moravia's and Silesia's links to Vienna were reinforced when Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614–62), the brother of Ferdinand III, was elected bishop of the sees there. The Habsburgs pursued a policy of episcopal appointments in both regions at odds with that in Bohemia. Whereas in Prague local noble families were appointed to the see, in Olomouc and Breslau the office was often given to the Habsburgs.
Habsburg recatholicization achieved only a partial success in Silesia, which further contributed to the religious fragmentation of the composite monarchy. Due to the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia, Protestant enclaves and churches were allowed to exist within the duchy.Footnote 25 Although the Habsburg regime suppressed many of these, a number of churches were handed over to Protestants after the intervention of Charles XII of Sweden in 1707–8.Footnote 26 The weakening of links between the composite territories of the monarchy was in contrast to the pre-White Mountain development which, in the 1619 Confederation, emphasized the inherent and eternal unity of all the aggregate territories on an equal basis.Footnote 27 As Petr Maťa has argued, this confederation inspired the Habsburgs to pursue a programme of decentralizing the Bohemian state, for the events of 1618–20 demonstrated the potential threat to Habsburg rule when multiple territories united in opposition.Footnote 28 Balbín's hagiotopographies were written against this political background, and in this article I shall examine how the vision of the monarchy which he championed in the Divae was influenced by and commented upon these developments.
II
In order to allow him to reflect upon the political situation of the composite monarchy in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Balbín structured his works in an innovative way within the genre of Marian hagiotopography. He sought to present his Marian oeuvre as scholarship; this, in turn, allowed him to champion his own political vision of the monarchy in these works. Being among his earliest published works, his hagiotopographies were instrumental in crafting his reputation as a scholar. All four works were written in Latin, and their status as works of scholarship and erudition was signalled by their form and content. Diva Wartensis included an index of sources, thereby alerting the reader to the status of the work as a learned and historically researched product, relying primarily on Latin-language literature.Footnote 29 Balbín's bibliography was notable. He drew on a number of Silesian historians, topographers, and astronomers, including David Origanus (1558–1628/9), Georg Katschker (1596–1627), Jakob Schickfuß (1574–1637), and Nicolaus Polius (1564–1632).Footnote 30 These scholars were writing at the turn of the sixteenth century, a time when Silesia, a politically and religiously fragmented region divided between Bohemian, German, and Polish influence, witnessed a rise in consciousness of its unity, and scholars such as Barthel Stein (1477–1520), Nicolaus Henel von Hennenfeld (1582–1656), and Franciscus Faber (1497–1565) wrote histories and topographies which contributed to an emerging Silesian identity.Footnote 31 Balbín, as we shall see, made use of Silesian scholarship to argue for a different view of the composite monarchy.
Balbín drew on a religiously diverse literature, and focused attention on his sources to demonstrate his erudition. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini's (1405–64) Historia Bohemica (1458) was one of his key historical sources. In office as Pope Pius II, Piccolomini was personally involved in the Hussite wars and had a complicated relationship with Jiří of Poděbrady, the utraquist king of Bohemia.Footnote 32 Balbín also drew on the Catholic historian Václav Hájek z Libočan (d. 1553), whose Kronyka Czeská (Bohemian chronicle, 1541) was reprinted continuously throughout the early modern period, and on Pavel Stránský (1583–1657), a Protestant émigré who supported the Estates’ uprising and authored Respublica Bojema (1634), an overview of the Bohemian kingdom. Of his Silesian sources, Schickfuß was a Lutheran with pro-Hussite sentiments who attempted to prove the formerly tolerated status of the Protestant religion in Silesia in his work.Footnote 33 Balbín's engagement with a religiously and politically mixed, international source base, alongside his choice to write in Latin, suggests that he intended his work to comment upon wider European as well as local Bohemian issues, and envisaged it as being read internationally and across the religious spectrum.
In order to further emphasize their erudite status, all four hagiotopographies contained citations indicating their sources. The scholarly appendages to his work were important to Balbín, and he was at some pains to publish Diva Turzanensis with the appropriate notes and list of sources.Footnote 34 This led him into conflict with the publishers in Moravia, who conceived of the work as a popularizing hagiotopography. Surviving correspondence relating to its publication shows that, although it was printed without a source index and without notes, Balbín originally conceived of the work on the same scholarly lines as Diva Wartensis, and that he was invested in the scholarly apparatus accompanying the works.Footnote 35 He threatened not to attach his name to the work if notes were not included, said the book would be an ‘embarrassment’ if it appeared without the appropriate referencing, and emphasized that ‘Lipsius, Garastius, Muretus, Casaubonus, Roverius, Toraentius and others’ all imparted important information in their notes.Footnote 36 Diva Montis Sancti and the first volume of Diva Boleslaviensis both included an index of people and places, which further codified them as works of scholarship, intended to be consulted for reference.Footnote 37 Balbín's works were therefore formally codified as works of erudition, and in this they differed from other examples of sacred topography, which only rarely made a comparable use of paratexts. Lipsius's Diva Virgo Hallensis (1604) and Diva Sichemiensis (1605) both contained a table of contents but, in contrast to Balbín's recommendations, no notes.Footnote 38 Most other hagiotopographies produced in Bohemia avoided the use of any ‘scholarly’ paratextual matter.
The contents of Balbín's hagiotopographies further emphasized their status as formal pieces of scholarship. Since Balbín vastly expanded the historical sections of his works when compared to other examples of the genre, giving piecemeal yet sophisticated histories of the regions under study, their length was considerable: Diva Montis Sancti stretched to more than six hundred pages. Few other sacred topographies were intended to be works of history. Maria Mater Dolorosa (1658), a German-language account of the Virgin Mary of Krupka written by members of the Jesuit College responsible for the site – no single author was specified – contained only the briefest historical account; the statue was brought there by a nun from near Bílina, but its origins were otherwise unknown.Footnote 39 Paradoxically, Balbín's Diva Turzanensis contained more information about the origins of the Virgin Mary of Krupka – he knew that the nun belonged to the order of St Mary Magdalene – than the book devoted to it.Footnote 40
The erudition of Balbín's Divae was also striking when compared to the work of Friedrich Ignaz Dörffel, a priest in Sokolov and the author of a hagiotopography of the Virgin Mary of Chlum. The title page identified Dörffel as a ‘Master of Liberal Arts and Philosophy, Candidate of Sacrosanct Theology’; the Jesuits of Krupka would have held similar qualifications.Footnote 41 Dörffel identified his sources, giving the names and origins of his informers – primarily local religious men and members of the Jesuit college – and gave details of books he drew on, including Aeneas Sylvius's history of Bohemia.Footnote 42 His account of the site's history was comparatively detailed, but his historical passages were confined strictly to the history of the church and parish, and he did not integrate the image into wider Bohemian history.Footnote 43 This German-language hagiotopography gave rise to a minor international scholarly controversy. A Protestant priest in Plauen, curiously also called Friedrich Dörffel, refuted Dörffel's work, resulting in the printing of a number of responses and counter-responses between 1651 and 1656. Another Lutheran theologian, Johann Adam Schertzer (1628–83), also attacked (Catholic) Dörffel's work. This exchange attracted some attention in Bohemia, and Balbín himself followed it.Footnote 44 However, Dörffel's work was fundamentally aimed at a popular and vernacular readership, and it did not aspire to the level of erudition which Balbín aimed to exhibit in his sacred topographies. Among Bohemian-produced hagiotopographies, therefore, Balbín's were unique because of their scholarly, historical, and topographical focus; unlike other local authors, he remained committed to the genre throughout his career, becoming Bohemia's foremost hagiotopographer.
Other European hagiotopographies, much like Bohemian ones, were rarely conceived of as works of historical scholarship, and Balbín's works were unusually scholarly in comparison to them. Balbín admired Lipsius, whose sacred topographies were his primary inspiration, and in calling all his works Divae he followed Lipsius's example.Footnote 45 In a passage in Diva Turzanensis where he defended his work against over-zealous, anonymous critics, Balbín wrote of ‘Lipsius, Tursellinus, Zylius and all those, who wrote Divae before me and who sparingly – if ever – declare oaths’, thereby locating himself firmly within a Lipsian and pan-European scholarly tradition.Footnote 46 In practice, however, there were few similarities. Lipsius's works were concise and were not intended as works of historical scholarship, despite the fact that he emphasized his position as royal historiographer in the preface to Diva Virgo Hallensis.Footnote 47 He gave only a streamlined history of the statue, which had previously belonged to St Elisabeth, and claimed to have written the book in fewer than ten days, compared to the years Balbín spent working on the Divae.Footnote 48 Emphasizing the role of Mary as the protector of the Spanish Netherlands, Lipsius discussed her role in saving Halle during the recent civil wars, but beyond that the work was confined to an account of miracles.Footnote 49 The historical account of Our Lady of Sichem was even more brief, merely mentioning that the statue had been found more than a hundred years earlier and that it had been lost in the 1580s.Footnote 50
Balbín's decision to pursue a different style of hagiotopography from other Bohemian and European writers was intentional. Fuelled in part by his attempt to establish himself as a scholar, the scholarly form and content of his sacred topographies allowed him to comment upon Bohemian politics and to express his views of the composite monarchy. Although, through his choice of title, Balbín consciously positioned himself within an international scholarly lineage dating back to Lipsius, in practice his Divae did not adhere to pre-existing models and fulfilled a different role. In contrast to the works of other hagiotopographers, Balbín's Divae were written as sophisticated Marian histories, although their Marian focus prevented them from discussing the monarchy's history systematically.
The Virgin's connection to the polity's history was epitomized by the fact that she often wept when critical moments of history approached.Footnote 51 In Diva Wartensis, the passages about the conflicts between Bohemians, Germans, and Poles in Silesia, the battle of Liegnitz (1241), and Hussite onslaughts and plunder were chosen insofar as they related to the Virgin Mary of Warta. Our Lady appeared in Warta shortly before ‘the dreadful Tatar tempest and Famine’ and it was she who ‘had diverted the ferocity of the barbarians against the Moravians’.Footnote 52 The Hussites burned the parish church in Warta and frequently plundered the land, ‘which the holiest Virgin Mary saw and wept over long ago from her hilltop’.Footnote 53 Balbín depicted Mary as the organizing feature of Silesian and Bohemian history, and her centrality was made evident by the fact that he did not describe those historical events which did not touch upon her. This was also the case in Diva Turzanensis, where events such as the fall of the Moravian kingdom, the arrival of St Cyril and St Methodius, and the 1618 rebellion were mentioned because of their relevance to the Virgin Mary of Tuřany, without attempting to present a general overview of Moravian history.Footnote 54
Balbín partially abandoned this Marian overview of Bohemian history in Diva Montis Sancti. This sacred topography was a bridge between his hagiotopographical output and his later historical and geographical works. In the main text of the work, he continued to use the Virgin Mary as a prism through which to view Bohemian history. The statue's connection to Arnošt of Pardubice (1297–1364), the first archbishop of Prague – Balbín claimed that the image had originally belonged to him – led Balbín to include a brief history of his life.Footnote 55 The Marian statue thus allowed Balbín to expound on the piety of the age of Charles IV, and on Arnošt's great love for Mary.Footnote 56 He recounted the history and wealth of Příbram, the nearby town, from its origins to the present day, describing the silver mines and the machinery used in them, as well as the ways in which gold sand was collected there; although this had little bearing on the statue itself, the contents were presented through their connection to it: ‘Our Lady of Svatá Hora sits on gold and silver.’Footnote 57 In this way, Mary continued to be the organizing feature of Bohemian history in the main text of Diva Montis Sancti.
Unlike the earlier Divae, Diva Montis Sancti included two auctaria printed at the end of the work. These attested to Balbín's emerging status as a historian and genealogist. Auctarium I was a topography and history of the Podbrdský kraj, the historic district in which Our Lady of Svatá Hora was located. The history presented therein was only very loosely connected to the Virgin. Balbín focused at length on St Ivan (c. 800–c. 851), a Byzantine saint who followed an angel to Bohemia and resided there in caves as a hermit for forty-two years.Footnote 58 Another feature of this auctarium was its emphasis on local monuments and noble lineages. Balbín devoted chapters to the monastery at Zbraslav and to Karlštejn, the castle built by Charles IV, ‘than which one sees nothing more precious and more holy at any time in Bohemia’.Footnote 59 Concentrating on the Zajícové of Hazmburk family, Balbín claimed that this family had come to the region before ad 600, arriving with Čech (Bohemus), who was believed to have led the Slavs to Bohemia.Footnote 60 The Zajícové of Hazmburk remained Catholic during the Hussite and Estates’ rebellions, and had served as archbishops of Prague, and Balbín enumerated their many donations to Catholic institutions in the region, including their foundation of the Augustinian monastery at Ostrov.Footnote 61 In this sacred topography, therefore, Balbín partially moved away from a Mary-centric view of Bohemian history to one which was more systematic and categorized geographically by district. More so than before, his hagiotopographic oeuvre was conceptualized as historico-geographical scholarship to a degree not aimed at by contemporary hagiotopographers.
This scholarly development in the form and contents of Balbín's historiographies was further visible in Diva Boleslaviensis. This hagiotopography was not a stand-alone work but was included in Balbín's history of the town of Boleslav, the Epitome historica (1673 and 1677). Here, the historical account which Balbín crafted was systematic and chronological, as opposed to the earlier hagiotopographies, and the structure of the oeuvre was flipped vis-à-vis Diva Montis Sancti, as the Marian account came at the end of a wider and more general history. Paradoxically, as a result of this, the part of the work which Balbín called Diva Boleslaviensis (volume ii, book 7) resembled a more traditional hagiotopography than any he had written heretofore. The town's history was discussed at length in the first six books, but the historical section in Diva Boleslaviensis was brief and confined to the statue's origins and to a discussion of the reasons behind its choice of location, although that history had been mentioned in the other, earlier, books of the Epitome.Footnote 62 By placing Diva Boleslaviensis within a wider historical project, the overall structure of the Epitome emphasized Balbín's historiographical vision of sacred topography, to which he remained wedded throughout his career. As he argued, Our Lady of Boleslav was the literal centre of Bohemia, which was itself the ‘navel’ of Europe, and Mary remained at the centre of his conception of history: in the introduction to the first volume, Balbín asserted that Our Lady of Boleslav was not only at the centre of Bohemia but also ‘the centre of this very history and book’.Footnote 63 Moreover, Diva Boleslaviensis was listed far above the Epitome in the above-mentioned painting of Balbín, demonstrating both the work's and Mary's importance in Balbín's view of history, scholarship, and his own status as a scholar. His hagiotopographies were therefore conceived of as works of historical scholarship, much more so than other European or domestic sacred topographies. This, as we shall see, allowed Balbín to use the works for his political objectives.
III
The erudition of Balbín's works was visible not only in the historical sections of each work but also in the sections where he listed the miracles performed by the Marian images, in which he continued his scholarly-historical reinterpretation of the genre. Greater attention to the sources and proofs of miracles was a feature of Catholic Reformation writing and a response to Protestant criticism of the cult of saints.Footnote 64 Balbín emphasized his sources for every miracle, giving the names and origins of the people involved and citing the manuscripts where the occurrences were recorded and letters sent to him by witnesses, or, in cases where only oral record survived, explaining why no written proof could be given.Footnote 65 Recounting the story of a blind man from Bohemia whose sight was restored by the Virgin of Warta, he noted that he had asked the locals why no written record of this miracle existed; the reason given was that the man had departed before the priest could record it.Footnote 66 The chapter in which this miracle was recorded was entitled ‘Certain miracles gathered from rumour and report’, further demonstrating that here Balbín was not relying on his usual standard of evidence.Footnote 67 Diva Turzanensis included a disquisition on the plight of the historian. Balbín complained about the growing necessity to provide written proofs for each miracle, stating that ‘there are those, who … want everything they hear and read from us to be fortified by oaths’.Footnote 68 This complaint implied that there was opposition to his projected hagiotopography; Balbín, referring to post-Tridentine standards of proof, wrote of those who ‘with a greatly holy and nonetheless fastidious scorn, as though they were sat in a tribunal of justice … with a nose raised high, breathing insult … admonished me not to speak of any miracle unless it be proved by at least three oaths’.Footnote 69 This lament further demonstrates Balbín's self-positioning as a scholar, being the only Bohemian hagiotopographer to express his frustration in a meditation on the nature of history and proof.
Moreover, the miracle sections of Diva Wartensis and Diva Montis Sancti were structured as more than simple enumerations of attested miracles. Organizing them by the type of illness cured, Balbín prefaced certain sections with contemplations on the illnesses in question. These passages were often scholarly and dealt with both ancient and modern authors. In a chapter devoted to those who had been cured of madness by Our Lady of Warta, Balbín began by discussing Erasmus's work. His view of Erasmus was critical: ‘the critic Erasmus wrote the praises of folly; that praise of the author himself was folly’.Footnote 70 Erasmus was ‘a heretic, … who … from his Grammatica and sacred writings, is seen to be nothing but wretched with folly’.Footnote 71 Recounting the Virgin's appearance on a hilltop near Warta in c. 1400, when she wept for the crownland's difficulties, Balbín briefly attacked Copernicus.Footnote 72 Calling him ‘no doubt false and an author of no example’, Balbín denied that the Earth moves while the heavens stand still.Footnote 73 Balbín's hagiotopographies were therefore written as works of scholarship and represent his attempt to curate for himself a reputation as a scholar and intellectual. They were carefully researched and Balbín drew on the intellectual traditions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, on Protestant and Catholic authors, on unpublished manuscripts, and on his own research, as well as on classical authors. His works expressed opinions on the scholarly and religious controversies of early modern Europe. Historical and topographical in nature, they presented the Virgin as the lens through which Bohemian history was viewed, thereby sacralizing Bohemia and representing it as a pious state.
Balbín's attempts to establish himself within an international scholarly context were further visible in his contributions to existing Marian studies outside Bohemia. He responded to Gumppenberg's call for correspondents for the Atlas Marianus, supplying him with information about the images of Warta and Stará Boleslav.Footnote 74 Balbín mentioned Gumppenberg in his own works, calling him a ‘brilliant historian of the Blessed Virgin’ and publicizing himself as a contributor to the Atlas.Footnote 75 Balbín's self-presentation as a member of a worldwide scholarly Catholic endeavour was further mirrored in the aims he set himself in his writing. In Diva Wartensis, he wrote that the Silesian image deserved to be as well known as ‘Halle, Sichem, Oettingen, Zell, Einsidel, Herzogswalde, Czestochau, Serrat, Buonsucces …’, all Marian pilgrimage sites, thereby positioning the work and image in a wider context.Footnote 76 Gumppenberg criticized the frequent localism of Marian literature, and the Atlas was an attempt to present Mary, and the Catholic Church, as truly catholic – global and universal.Footnote 77 Balbín mirrored these efforts in his own work, which, as the next section will demonstrate, deliberately evaded localism. His sacred topographies were therefore constructed as works of historical scholarship, which differentiated them from other early modern hagiotopographies. They established Balbín's growing reputation as a scholar and historian and allowed him to gather regional historical knowledge which he would later deploy in writing his Miscellanea. The scholarly orientation of his Divae was crucial because it enabled him to advance a particular – political and patriotic – vision of Bohemia.
IV
In intellectualizing hagiotopography, Balbín deployed his Divae for political purposes and to argue for his own patriotic vision of the composite monarchy. His hagiotopographies eschewed localism, for he did not write about his local shrines. Unlike the accounts of Our Lady of Krupka and Chlum, which were written respectively by the local Jesuits and a local priest, and which relied almost entirely on regional sources and on the surrounding community, Balbín was not closely associated with his images. Although he lived in Brno during his novitiate, venerating the statue at that time, and was there again while writing Diva Turzanensis, he did not have close ties to either Warta or Svatá Hora beyond residing in the Jesuit College in Glatz before writing Diva Wartensis.Footnote 78 Svatá Hora was a Jesuit site, but Balbín did not stay there for a prolonged period. He relied both on local sources and manuscripts and on printed histories and classical authors, so that these works emerged from the encounter between localism and universalism. In part, this was the result of his own peripatetic lifestyle. Balbín frequently moved between various colleges in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, and he travelled through the whole monarchy with Rodrigo de Arriaga (1592–1667), a Spanish Jesuit philosopher who became a professor at the university in Prague, so that it is possible to speak of him as someone without close ‘local’ ties.Footnote 79 The Bohemian Jesuit province in this period encompassed all three crownlands and was one of the few administrative institutions which united the whole composite monarchy.Footnote 80 This influenced Balbín's own view of the polity, and crucially also the patriotism which his Marian works exhibited, which was centred on the monarchy as a whole rather than on regional identities.
Balbín's self-presentation as a scholar therefore shaped the form and content of his hagiotopographic oeuvre, making it unique within seventeenth-century Marian literature and allowing him to present his own vision of the composite monarchy. Choosing Mary, a universal Catholic symbol, for his subject matter, he contextualized his work within a pan-European form of scholarship and eschewed localism, creating texts that together treated the history and geography of the entire polity. This allowed Balbín to articulate his own vision of the place, status, and form of the monarchy in post-Westphalian Mitteleuropa, and to define how he conceived of it. He presented a vision of the monarchy influenced by his status as a Jesuit which was at odds with the Habsburg conception of it, emphasizing, as Josef Válka has suggested, the links between the territories of the Bohemian monarchy.Footnote 81 This was a vision much closer to the 1619 Confederation, in which the Bohemian, Lusatian, Moravian, and Silesian Estates agreed to the unity of all the monarchy's territories.
It was with this political aim – to emphasize Silesia's inherent place within the composite monarchy – and against the political developments set out in section II of this article that Diva Wartensis was written. From its first pages, Balbín positioned Warta between Bohemia, Germany, and Poland, and Bohemo-German relations emerged as nuanced but fraught. Discussing the geography of Silesia, Balbín presented it as part of Germania.Footnote 82 The mountains around Glatz, he argued, were not only ‘the highest mountains which stretch across Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia’, but ‘the highest in all of Germany’.Footnote 83 The rivers that sprang from these mountains ‘flow through all of Germany’.Footnote 84 The positioning of Warta between Bohemia and Germany was crucial given the politico-territorial situation after the Thirty Years’ War, as Prussia and Sweden had gained influence in the region.Footnote 85
Balbín's hagiotopographies also commented upon the contemporary linguistic struggles between Bohemians and Germans. The Verneuerte Landesordnung established Czech and German as languages of equal status in Bohemia, where previously Czech and Latin had been the primary languages of administration and rule.Footnote 86 The composite monarchy was a linguistically varied state where Czech, German, Moravian, Polish, and Silesian dialects were spoken.Footnote 87 The etymological question was therefore current and controversial. In his unpublished writings, Balbín complained about the growing Germanization of the polity and defended the status of Slavic languages.Footnote 88 He was connected to the contemporary Czech movement of linguistic purism, which attempted to reduce German influence on the Czech language, and Diva Montis Sancti was translated into Czech by Matěj Václav Šteyer (1630–92), a Jesuit, noted grammarian, and purist.Footnote 89 Positioning Warta within the context of a wider struggle between the Bohemians and Germans over the territory, Balbín assessed the etymology of the name Warta. He suggested that it was Czech, possibly derived from the name of a castle, Bardo, and emphasized that ‘the greatest part of Silesia uses the Slavonic language’.Footnote 90 He presented a brief history of language and migration in the region, mentioning Aelurius's theory that Silesia was German-speaking until the reign of Charles IV, but siding with Albert Krantz (c. 1450–1517), claiming that many peoples who were initially called Saxons were renamed Slavs or Winds, and adopted the Slavic language.Footnote 91 He asserted that Czech was the main language in Bohemia until the Luxemburg kings, when ‘so many foreigners came to Bohemia, that the streets, roads, churches and town halls rang with the German language’.Footnote 92 Balbín's sacred topography of Warta was therefore a contribution to a contemporary debate about German influence in the Bohemian region, in which he took a decisive stance in favour of the Bohemians.
The status of the Bohemian composite monarchy vis-à-vis the Holy Roman Empire was complex, and, in locating Silesia within Germania, Balbín touched upon a crucial political issue of the seventeenth century.Footnote 93 Writers such as Melchior Goldast (1576/8–1635), who claimed the kingdom was historically hereditary rather than elective, argued that it was fundamentally a part of Germania.Footnote 94 Balbín frequently criticized Goldast but, as Diva Wartensis demonstrates, his position on the political standing of Bohemia was nuanced and, despite his virulent critique of Germanization in his unpublished pamphlets, he nevertheless located Silesia and the composite state within a German geographic and political context, and not as a wholly autonomous polity.Footnote 95 Although he criticized the immigration of foreigners under the Luxemburg dynasty – the fact that he chose a medieval dynasty to criticize, rather than the contemporary influx of new nobles taking place under the Habsburgs, was significant – Balbín nevertheless did not uncritically oppose all immigration, or advance a vision of Bohemia as a linguistically or ethnically ‘pure’ place. His portrayal of Germanization in Diva Wartensis was less straightforwardly negative when closely assessed. It was under the Luxemburg dynasty that the first Germanizing wave took place; but the most famous Luxemburg king of Bohemia was Emperor Charles IV (1316–78), whose reign was considered a golden age by Balbín.Footnote 96 Thus, even the first wave of German immigration into Bohemia was not presented as entirely negative, taking place as it did in a historical epoch when Bohemia was considered to be at the peak of its power. ‘Bohemia is everybody's Fatherland’, Balbín wrote, and congratulated the ‘Fatherland’ for its love of foreign ingenuity and the eager welcome it extended to foreigners.Footnote 97
Moreover, Balbín presented a complex history of the original settlement of the area. In Diva Wartensis, he touched on its settlement by the Celtic Boii; only later was it settled by Slavs.Footnote 98 In ‘Liber ii Decadis i’ of the Miscellanea, he attempted to reconcile the founding legend concerning Čech with ancient sources about late antique and early medieval migrations, concluding that the dynastic territories had first been settled by the Boii, Vandals, and Marcomanni – all Germanic and Celtic tribes.Footnote 99 The Epitome was published with Balbín's famous map of Bohemia as a rose growing from Vienna, and in this map Bohemia was presented firmly within a German context: the Bohemian rose was adorned with leaves representing Silesia, Moravia, Austria, Bavaria, and Saxony.Footnote 100 Thus, although Balbín presented Bohemian history as a struggle between Germans and Bohemians in his Silesian sacred topography, it was nevertheless a complex view; he did not consider Bohemia and its aggregate lands to have ever been un-German spaces, and he acknowledged the crucial role of migration in Bohemia's earliest history. Bohemia was an intrinsic part of Germania; but this relationship and belonging was a difficult one.
In the Silesian hagiotopography, furthermore, Balbín aimed to combat the view of Bohemia as a heretical polity. Owing to its high mountains, Warta was conceptually located as a crucial part of the empire, and as the part of Germania closest to heaven. Balbín wrote of its proximity to ‘heavenly air’, which the breeze around Glatz ‘attracted from nearby’.Footnote 101 This geographical portrayal of the region allowed him to position the composite monarchy as a whole vertically atop the empire, and to depict it, contrary to contemporary stereotypes concerning Bohemian impiety and rebelliousness, as loyally Catholic. Quoting Aeneas Sylvius, he wrote: ‘there is no empire which has in our time seen more changes, more wars, more miracles, than have happened in Bohemia, and there is no province which has produced more Christian martyrs in our time’.Footnote 102 In writing about Warta, Balbín aimed to prove the piety and holiness of the composite monarchy, and it was this which caused him to widen the geographic scope of his first sacred topography and pushed him to argue for a strong union – geographic, political, religious, and historical – between the three dynastic lands. Geographically, he demonstrated their unity through their river network. The Elbe and the Morava both rose in the Silesian mountains and the polity did not contain any rivers except those whose source was within it.Footnote 103 In nature, therefore, Moravia, Bohemia, and Silesia were united and self-reliant.
The hagiotopographies also emphasized the inherent unity of the Bohemian monarchy. Balbín depicted Warta as historically and religiously connected to Bohemia from the beginning of its existence. The first church built there was called the ‘Bohemian church’, having been built by a Bohemian after the Virgin Mary healed his broken leg.Footnote 104 Balbín advanced the theory that Warta was constructed by ‘Bohemian soldiers’, and that Břetislav II (d. 1100), a Bohemian duke, built a castle there in 1096 from which the town took its name.Footnote 105 Břetislav also built a church dedicated to St Procopius (d. 1053), a Bohemian patron saint, in the nearby village of Kamenz (Kamieniec Ząbkowicki in Poland), which was set on fire by the Hussites in 1427.Footnote 106 Silesian religious life was thus depicted as being both created and undone by the Bohemians, who were also presented as being among the most pious pilgrims to the sanctuary. They organized yearly pilgrimages and went up the hill on which Mary appeared on their knees, and the path leading to the chapel was called the Bohemian footpath.Footnote 107 Balbín used this to stress his key argument – the Virgin Mary's predilection for the composite state – and he presented Silesia as a place existing in relation to Bohemia, and the composite state as a united polity.Footnote 108
Balbín opened Diva Wartensis with a historical account which commented on the linguistic and political problems of contemporary Bohemia. Locating Silesia within a broader geographical context, he portrayed a struggle over influence between Germans and Bohemians, which the Bohemians ultimately won in Silesia, but which continued to threaten the duchy. Silesia was depicted not as an autonomous region, but rather as connected to Bohemia. Silesian Marian sites formed by far the greatest number of the sites Balbín recorded in the list of the monarchy's Marian sites in Diva Montis Sancti, suggesting yet again that he perceived Silesia as the most threatened part of the state.Footnote 109 This list also included a Lusatian site: Our Lady of Rosenthal.Footnote 110 Upper and Lower Lusatia were ceded to Saxony in 1635, and Balbín's inclusion of a Lusatian site in his enumeration of Marian images within the Bohemian lands criticized the outcome of the Thirty Years’ War and its territorial impact on the monarchy. Balbín continued to emphasize the rightful place of Lusatia within the composite monarchy throughout his career: in the Miscellanea, his enumeration of Bohemian saints and martyrs also included Lusatians.Footnote 111 His critique of the monarchy's fragmentation was implicit in passages describing Mary's love for the whole territory: in Diva Montis Sancti, she wept for the whole monarchy when any danger befell it.Footnote 112 In arguing this, Balbín spoke out against the consequences of the Thirty Years’ War, which had further weakened links between the Bohemian lands and enabled continued Protestant and foreign influence in Silesia, as well as the Habsburg policy of undermining connections between the various Bohemian territories.Footnote 113
The intrinsic unity of the monarchy was also emphasized in Diva Turzanensis, which followed a similar pattern of integrating Moravia into a wider context. The statue at Tuřany resembled those images made by St Luke and brought from Byzantium. Balbín suggested that it came to Moravia while it was still a kingdom, probably in the time of Cyril and Methodius, two Byzantine saints who brought the Christian faith to Great Moravia.Footnote 114 The statue hid in a thorn bush between Methodius's death in 907 and 1050, only revealing itself once Moravia became a Bohemian margraviate and order and peace were restored.Footnote 115 This was during the time of St Adalbert (c. 956–97), the Bohemian patron saint, as bishop of Prague (Balbín's chronology here appears to post-date Adalbert's time as bishop by about a hundred years).Footnote 116 Moravia was a less threatened part of the composite monarchy than Silesia – no foreign power had made claims to it at Westphalia – but following its brief split from Bohemia during the struggle between Matthias and Rudolf, their unity nevertheless needed emphasizing. The clearest utterance of Balbín's concept of the unity of the composite monarchy came at the end of the work, where he included a brief list and histories of Marian images across all three polities, a project reminiscent of Jesuit Marian undertakings such as the Atlas Marianus, Bavaria sancta (1615–27), and Bavaria pia (1628). The list of thirty-six shrines presented Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia as a united polity and as a single region, but Balbín went further, arguing that the location of these Marian shrines defined this united region even cartographically, because Mary ‘enclosed and defended us with so many garrisons and such great fortresses’.Footnote 117 Mary, described in these works as loving and protecting the monarchy, was therefore portrayed in a defensive, near-militaristic guise. Such a portrayal was at odds with contemporary depictions of the Virgin Mary of Victory at White Mountain, and as patroness of the Habsburg dynasty.Footnote 118 In Balbín's oeuvre, Mary defined the physical unity of the Bohemian monarchy against Habsburg centralization and foreign intervention, and functioned as a barrier against the weakening links between the lands.
Balbín's focus on defining Bohemia and on creating a patriotic identity for it was unique among sacred topographies and it was enabled by the scholarly status of his Divae. Dörffel's hagiotopography of Chlum exhibited a form of regional patriotism, stressing the fact that Emperor Ferdinand III (1608–57) heard the bells of the church chiming in 1647 and declared them to be so fine that even an ‘imperial town’ would not be ashamed of them.Footnote 119 He also cited Aeneas Sylvius's comments about the wealth and number of churches in Bohemia.Footnote 120 It was not, however, a work of regional or patriotic feeling beyond these two passages. Neither Maria Mater Dolorosa nor Kašpar Arzenius of Radbuza's (d. 1629) history of Our Lady of Stará Boleslav exhibited a patriotic tone. Nor was the extent of Balbín's patriotism mirrored outside Bohemia. Although Lipsius's Diva Sichemiensis ended with a prayer for the patria of the Habsburg Low Countries, there was no attempt to draw as close a connection between Mary and the territory as in Balbín's oeuvre.Footnote 121 While Gumppenberg's Atlas Marianus stressed the link between Mary and the Habsburgs, because of its universalist aims it was not a work structured to advance patriotic claims.Footnote 122
Balbín's baroque patriotism in his Marian sacred topographies was therefore complex. He was not straightforwardly opposed to Bohemia's increasing openness, or to German influence, instead depicting the histories of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia as intimately bound up with Germania. The polity whose piety and loyalty he defended against foreign denigration in his hagiotopographies was a specific, politically defined entity. Balbín conceived of the composite monarchy as territorially, if not administratively, united, and as consisting of all the five lands of which it had been composed during the reign of Charles IV. In this, he appealed to a 1619 view of the state, and to the Golden Age of Charles IV, an era that was renowned for its piety and political, economic, and cultural growth. Harking back to Charles's reign, Balbín implicitly criticized the situation in the polity under the Habsburgs. He portrayed Upper and Lower Lusatia as parts of the composite state, continuing to include the territories in lists of Marian images and in enumerations of Bohemian saints and martyrs. He emphasized Silesia's close historic and geographical links to Bohemia, alluding to its centuries-old status as a fief of the Bohemian kings, to Bohemia's role in its earliest history, to its Slavic inhabitants, and to the rivers and mountains which linked it to Bohemia. This amounted to a criticism of the results of the Thirty Years’ War and of the regime which enabled the monarchy's slow disintegration. Balbín would continue to explore these themes, first developed through his intellectualization of hagiotopography, in his other major historical works.Footnote 123 Loyal to the Habsburgs, to the processes of confessionalization, and to the Jesuits, Balbín's hagiotopographies attempted to rewrite the history of the Thirty Years’ War and to reconstitute the Bohemian monarchy as a united, Catholic space.
V
The patriotism of Balbín's sacred topographies was made possible by his attempt to establish himself as a scholar and must be studied within the wider context of European scholarship. It was in writing a new style of Marian pilgrimage literature – one that historicized Marian images to an unprecedented degree, reinterpreted sacred topography as historical scholarship, and interacted with pan-European scholarly trends – that Balbín could express, within a genre that did not otherwise frequently articulate complex patriotic sentiments, his own view of the composite monarchy, of Bohemian identity, and of its place within a wider European framework. By intellectualizing sacred topography, he transformed the genre into an extension of early modern atlases and encyclopaedias, thereby enabling him to use the genre to craft a patriotic and political portrait of the state which surpassed other hagiotopographical endeavours in its detail.
The vision of the polity which these sacred topographies presented was at odds with, and subtly critical of, Habsburg policy in the mid-seventeenth century. The territories, as Balbín saw them, were historically closely united, intrinsically bound together by language and migration even before their final dynastic union. Critical of the outcomes of the Thirty Years’ War, Balbín continued to portray Lusatia as a territory of the Bohemian monarchy, and stressed Silesia's close links to Bohemia, despite the increasing influence of Prussia and Sweden within the duchy. While the Habsburgs pursued a policy of ruling each territory of the composite Bohemian state largely separately and increasing their links to Vienna at the expense of the existence of a united composite state, Balbín, drawing on the Virgin Mary, harked back to an idealized vision of the polity ruled by Charles IV, and to a catholicized Confederation of 1619, in defining Bohemia in Jesuit and patriotic terms: as united.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers of the Historical Journal for their helpful comments on this article. I would also like to thank Veronika Čapská, Michael Edwards, Suzanna Ivanic, Zoë Jackson, Petr Maťa, and William O'Reilly for their feedback on earlier versions of this work.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Open access
