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Report from the patriarch of Aquileia to the Holy See

In the period from April to the middle of September in the year of Our Lord 1596, I performed visitations in the Hereditary Lands of Inner Austria. Let me begin by noting the appalling disorder rampant throughout the provinces; I have, therefore, instructed the lesser Church authorities to deal quickly with this issue using all available means. I should stress that this will not be easy: so widespread are the various excesses that in some places they have become entirely routine practice. In the present report I do little more than mention certain forms of heresy, which require a separate discussion. My visitations, performed over a period of several weeks in the company of a retinue of aides and soldiers, were primarily intended to verify the work of the Catholic clergy, in which endeavour I frequently encountered heretical apostates and, at times, in place of God’s shepherds, people of entirely different professions and profiles.

The first stop on my visitations was a place called Mirna – a small settlement, more village than market town, even if it does pride itself on possessing market rights. As our road took us past the local church, dedicated to St Andrew, I ordered my retinue to stop. It was a Sunday, and I expected at the very least to see fresh flowers on the main altar. But that the House of God should not be open on the Lord’s Day – this was something I had not foreseen! After the soldiers dismounted and I set off for the church with my aides, it became clearer with every step that God’s house was poorly cared for. The main door was densely overgrown with a vine that would surely have been ripped off the wall had one of us even tried to open it. I asked my retinue how much time it would take for such a plant to grow so profusely that it covered the entire front of the church, but they just stared at me stupidly and mumbled something. I mention this only because it shows how little I could rely on my retinue for the explanation of natural phenomena. Surely one of them might have known something about a rather common plant and its cycle of growth. I stress this because, among other things, the description of the visitator’s tasks includes elucidating natural, unnatural and supernatural phenomena, so I advise my successors to include nature experts in their retinue. The Dominican and Benedictine monasteries have been educating such people for

centuries; the universities and Jesuit colleges also do this quite thoroughly.

Let me continue. When we were looking at the grounds around St Andrew’s Church, I saw further that some kind of red weed had grown into the cracks in the walls and that swallows were chirping noisily in a nest above the church door; they had clearly not been disturbed in a long time. Indeed, our visitation may well have been the first disturbing event to upset the swallows’ peaceful existence in Mirna (whose very name means ‘peaceful’). Someone proposed that we break into the bolted church, but instead, I ordered some soldiers to brace their backs against the church wall and lift me up so I could examine the interior. I saw nothing. The glass in the window was so filthy I saw only my own distorted reflection. I gave orders to proceed to the presbytery, which, as my retinue informed me, was next to the main square.

We knocked at the door and an elderly woman stuck her head out; she was so surprised and frightened to see me that she could hardly answer my questions.

‘The priest’s not here, not at home …’ she says in a trembling voice.

‘So where is he then?’ I ask.

The woman looks left and right while making some sort of grunts, until finally she tells me that he went out a little while ago.

‘Where did he go?’ I ask.

‘To give a peasant extreme unction …’

‘When do you expect him back?’

‘Hard to say, very hard to say.’ She is more and more flustered. ‘Up there, that’s where he’s sick, the peasant,’ she says, pointing to some hills in the distance. ‘The road gets bad sometimes, really bad, and Father has to move the rocks and stones all by himself. It’s hard work, can take hours, the whole day even …’

‘But up there, woman, where you’re pointing, I don’t see any village. Men!’ I say, turning to my retinue. ‘Do any of you who are younger than me, with sharper eyesight – do you see a house in those hills, even some ramshackle hut?’ They shake their heads as the woman visibly cringes from her lies and embarrassment.

I tell her we will wait for him.

‘What, now?’ she asks, alarmed.

‘If we had arrived yesterday, we would have waited for him yesterday, but as we are here today, we will wait now,’ I reply.

‘Inside? … Or here, outside?’

I had no patience left to communicate with this thick-headed underling, so I ordered my aides to do whatever they could to make us comfortable. There was a fine garden behind the house with some wooden benches, above which a leafy grapevine was growing, filtering the sun’s hot rays.

‘Why are there so many benches here? Does your master sometimes perform Mass outside? Since he apparently doesn’t do it in the church.’ I look at the woman.

‘There’s nothing I can tell you, not a thing,’ she says and is so uncomfortable she has almost glued herself to the door. The soldiers start arranging themselves nearby, and I cannot help noticing that three or four of them, leaning against the trees, have their eyes fixed on the presbytery’s upstairs windows and are elbowing each other in the ribs.

‘We are your guests, and guests should be accorded hospitality, all the more so as we’re here on official business,’ I tell the woman, who is now nervously swinging her arms back and forth. I basically had to force her to bring me and my immediate retinue something to eat and drink, which I did, not because we were rather hungry but because I am curious about the economic standards of our parishes. She hurried into the house, and I signalled one of my men to follow her. And it was a good thing I did, for he caught the woman at the back window telling some boy to run off somewhere and say such-and-such. My aide interrupted her and sent the boy to us so we could keep an eye on him. As I and my immediate retinue sat in the shade sampling the meat and the different kinds of bread and drinking water and wine – which was actually not bad, a white wine, probably a muscat – four male persons appeared in front of the house; they kept glancing back and forth between us and the upstairs windows of the presbytery.

‘So where are the four of you going?’ I ask, stopping them.

One of the men answers casually, ‘To have one.’

‘What kind of “one”?’ my aide asks, and another man volunteers that it could be long or short but it had to be a wet one, at which all four look at each other and wink.

‘But why come here, to the priest’s house?’ I ask.

‘Because it might be the priest’s house, but it’s also a winehouse and a whorehouse, too.’ Now they all burst out laughing. They are speaking German, and I can tell at once that they are Lutheran riff-raff from the north. I signal my soldiers to surround them.

‘Why? We haven’t done anything wrong,’ they protest. ‘We’re foundrymen from up north, and since it’s the Lord’s Day we thought we’d unwind a little and maybe have something wet.’

I told the soldiers to seize all four and lock them in the pigsty – on charges of vulgar behaviour, inane blather and disrespect for Church authority. And I again noticed that even more of the soldiers were glancing at the upstairs windows, where heads could be seen moving around.

Eventually, a large cart with a yoke of oxen rumbled into the garden; it was sagging under the weight of heavy oak barrels. A short and stocky middle-aged man jumped off and gave orders to his accomplices to roll the barrels off the cart. When he glanced over at the house and saw us beneath the pergola, and then saw the soldiers interspersed among the fruit trees, beads of sweat broke out on his bloated, well-fed face, which reflected the sun with an oily gleam. Although it was only noon, the day was already mercilessly hot. With his hands on his backside, the newcomer – obviously the parish priest and master – staggered over to us uncertainly and greeted us with ‘Praise Jesus!’

‘You must have drowned the entire village in extreme unction,’ I say, ‘considering the size of the barrels you just rolled off that cart.’

The man shifts his feet nervously and gives me a hangdog look. I gesture to my men to open the barrels. No heretical books, just wine – white, semi-dry, good quality, they tell me. The priest keeps looking at the house, where his housekeeper is now lurking behind a window downstairs, while upstairs, braids of black, brown and red can be seen bouncing in the windows.

‘When was the last time you served Mass in the church?’ I ask, peering intently at the priest.

‘Oh, I do it regularly …’ he replies.

‘Lying is a very grave sin, priest!’ I say sharply. Generally speaking, I have to repeat the same words regularly on my visitations. The priest bores his eyes into the ground, as I rapidly question him. Without prevaricating he confesses that he only gives Mass on feast days and at funerals (no one has been married here recently), that he operates a winehouse in the presbytery, and that there are three or four girls in the upstairs rooms who augment his income. When he has confessed everything, he repents. I prescribe him penance, which is partly of a financial nature, and one of my aides collects that part on the spot.

That very day I had my suffragan write an order for that parish priest to be replaced by a new and well-verified member of the clergy.

We left there in the early afternoon and reached the village of Selo before nightfall, just as the bells were ringing for vespers. As we approached the Church of St Barbara, patron saint of artillerymen, builders, stonemasons and miners, I gave the order to stop so we could examine first-hand how God’s word was being proclaimed here. I was worried our resplendent entourage might attract too much attention, but such considerations proved groundless. There were only a few old women sitting motionless in the church, some of them, in the front rows, mumbling out prayers, while from the pulpit their elderly priest was similarly mumbling. He did not even notice us entering, and when we went up to him after the service, he asked, squinting in the direction of St Barbara’s statue, if we had come to make an offering for the Mass or wished to purchase indulgences, or perhaps one of us was getting married and wanted the banns announced at next Sunday’s service, or would we maybe like to bury someone? … I could not determine if he was merely old or demented, drunk or stupid, or all of the above. When I told him who I was and explained the nature of our visit, he still understood nothing. In that same order, the one just mentioned, I commanded that he, too, be replaced by a younger man.

We went on to a nearby manor where we had made arrangements to spend the night.

Here resided an old knightly family of the lower nobility, loyal to the prince – so I was briefly informed by the aides who had organized the logistical aspects of my visitations. Their ancestors, as well as those living here now, had distinguished themselves in a number of battles, especially the noble Sir Georg, whose sabre felled two dozen Turks in a single day at the Carinthian Gate in the defence of Vienna in 1529.

When we reached the courtyard of the hunting lodge and the family caught sight of us, they did not know what to do. ‘You’re here already? How did you get here so soon? We thought you were coming tomorrow!’ they cried, as panic spread. The staff bustled nervously past, avoiding our eyes, while we climbed the stairs to the main hall, which was decorated with the horns and antlers of hunting trophies; on one wall, a fat boar’s head stared out at us. As we took our seats at a round oak table, I heard tense activity in the courtyard, a swarm of male and female voices, despite the closed windows. When I motioned to my men to spread out in the courtyard and sniff around a bit, the lord of the manor, the noble knight, stood up anxiously; it was obvious he did not know how to prevent them from doing what they had been told.

At first I thought the knight was trying to hide Protestant preachers, but it turned out to be more complicated than that. We had indeed announced our arrival for the following day, explaining that on this leg of the journey there were no decent lodgings to be had – which was not entirely true. We could have stayed at a nearby Carthusian monastery, which, I am told, has degenerated in every respect and will soon be dealt with separately. In any case, we had long had this knightly manor in our sights. But how can a visitation be successful if those we visit are given time to prepare, to conceal all suspicious indicators before we arrive and in a single day transform themselves into honest Catholics? To make a long story short, it turned out that certain apostate madmen – Baptists or Anabaptists, or just plain Leapers – were holding gatherings at the manor. When I pressed our hosts a little, saying it would be better to divulge everything straight away rather than have us discover whatever was happening for ourselves, the knight flared into a rage, and I at once understood that he had very likely himself dispatched at least half the carrion, antlers and wild boar hanging on the walls of his lodge. Glassy-eyed, he started telling me in a high, piping voice about some apocalypse in which the world had recently almost been destroyed by a huge comet, which would have wiped the greater part of sinful mankind off the face of the earth. If this did not happen, it was thanks to them: their prayers and rituals had altered the comet’s course so it circumvented the earth.

‘Prove it!’ I say.

‘My faith is my proof,’ he replies.

‘But yours is not the true faith!’ I persist.

‘It’s truer than yours!’ he counters.

‘Have you personally jumped through fire and hurled yourself around?’

‘All that and much more,’ he answers without fear or shame.

What should I do now? I asked myself. I had no idea if these Leapers were violent, if they were capable of breaking into our rooms while we slept and slaughtering us like pigs.

As I was tired, I decided that we should spend the night here anyway and gave orders for the door of the bedroom allotted me to be well guarded and also told my soldiers to position themselves around the bed. Every castle, manor and lodge, after all, is riddled with secret doors and panels, and rooms contain various chests that can be opened by levers invisible to unknowing eyes.

‘You can be perfectly at ease,’ the knight says, as if reading my thoughts. ‘You are safe with us. We condemn violence – unlike you papists, who persecute people whose beliefs are different from yours; you blow up their temples and prayer halls and drive Lutherans from their homes.’

‘Oh, interesting. You’ve taken up with the Lutherans now?’ I look at him in surprise. ‘From what I know, if the Lutherans had just a little more power, they would accuse you and your sort of witchcraft and, sooner than us, have you roasting on those hot coals of yours, where you leap about and flagellate yourselves and fornicate with each other. You are naïve if you think you’ll find allies in the Protestants! They have their own vicious quarrels as it is. The Lutherans get on the Calvinists’ nerves, and those Flacians get on the Lutherans’ nerves – in fact, those ignorant Flacian peasants get on everybody’s nerves. But you and your sort are just plain deluded pagans – that’s something even the Lutherans, Calvinists and Flacians have got right.’

‘So you think there’s no paganism among you papists?’ The knight looks at me with contempt. ‘What about that bishop of yours who says Mass and consecrates Capuchin monasteries wearing a scarlet vestment made from the military coat of the Beylerbey of Bosnia, Hasan Pasha Predojević?’

To this charge, I honestly confess I had no answer. I have no explanation for the coat of Bishop Thomas Chroen, which this Flagellant, Leaper, warlock, or whatever he is, served up to me. I know that in distant lands people can go so far as to use the desiccated heads of their enemies in their rituals, or they ride with them in parades, a fate that tragically befell Herbard von Auersperg and Friedrich von Weichselberg, high commanders of the Military Frontier, whose embalmed heads were impaled on long spears and carried alongside Ferhad Pasha when he marched triumphantly into Constantinople after his victory at Budački. But the Ottomans are famous for being arrogant, cruel savages. Thomas Chroen’s coat, of course, is not in the same heinous category, but in my view, it is no less pagan than the superstitions of the populace. I mention my humble opinion in this report so that I might receive your clarity as to how I should reply in the future when heretics start waving Chroen’s Turkish coat in my face.

Otherwise, there is not much we can do at present to the nobility, a point I wish particularly to underscore in my report. The greater part of the nobility is an obstinate bulwark for the new religion and religious apostates, sheltering preachers so they can go into towns and even into villages, despite such activities being strictly forbidden there. From what I have heard, the political hotheads in our nobility are to be tolerated for some time yet. But let me note that among the voices of those present that evening, who kept glancing at the windows of the Knights’ Hall and had quite clearly been preparing some barbarian rite, there were people of various ranks and tongues. It was only our own presence that evening which prevented the sectarian ceremony from taking place. I heard not only German and Slovene being spoken, but I also detected, in the cacophony of voices, echoes of Italian and even Bohemian (unless perhaps it was Croat), which means they are all organized and joined in heretical alliance – consequently, we need a less subtle plan to control them. With heretics of this sort the

simplest thing would be to deal with them at a single stroke and accuse them all of treason, even if such types of heresy are rare in our parts. Superstition and witchcraft, on the other hand, are everywhere, and special visitations are required to uncover and combat them. For both the one and the other, I suggest that the quickest way to dispose of them is the tried-and-tested method of inquisition.

We set off the next morning, and at our first stop found a priest who, it turned out, could neither read nor write. At our next stop, we faced what we most often encounter on these visitations: church altars originally dedicated to a saint are now empty, lacking even a statue of the Holy Mother of God, while Mass is offered in not one, but both kinds. Catholic teaching is virtually unknown among the local populace. In all such places, therefore, I announce that I will give a sermon and order everyone who lives there, regardless of estate, age, sex or mental soundness, to present themselves in two days’ time at Mass, where God’s truth will be waiting for them – and I add that all absences will be individually investigated and penalized. These educational measures are effective. The people assemble for Mass. At first, they look uncertainly at the altar and struggle to keep up during prayers and find the right words, but then I bring out a well-proven recipe: the Virgin Mary, whose cloak is large enough to cover and protect all of sinful mankind. I speak of her miracles and appearances, which I illustrate with an example that never fails. I tell in my sermon how, far, far away, on the other side of the great sea in New Spain, the Virgin Mary once appeared to the Indian peasant Juan Diego – Johann in German, Ivan in Slovene. ‘Behold,’ I say, ‘even to them, to those red-skinned people across the ocean’ – colourful adjectives can be used to good effect, as vivid images are the best way for the populace to understand our stories, and the more exaggerated they are the better; playing on feelings brings results, while abstract reasoning, categories and concepts are nuts too hard to crack, given the populace’s limited abilities – ‘even there, far away in the New World, which is so very different from here, a world where forests are so thick that once you set foot in them you can never find your way out, where animals are so wild and dangerous they make our bears and wolves seem like cats and dogs, where snakes are so venomous and vicious they no sooner see you than attack you from pure beastly malice – yes, even there, where until recently no one had ever heard of Jesus and people worshipped their own vicious and venomous animal gods and offered to them not only crops and farm animals but people, too – yes, yes, living people!’ (I underscore the point.) ‘Even there the Virgin Mary appeared, to lead those people out of darkness, to pluck them from their savage, bestial kingdom and bring them to the kingdom of the spirit.’

I know that at this moment my proselytes are not thinking very much about the kingdom of the spirit, for they still have hissing snakes and roaring beasts before their eyes, and most of all they are wondering about those cruel Indian sacrifices. So I go on to paint them a wonderfully vivid picture that is based on what I have heard from Dominican missionaries and the Jesuits. ‘A young maiden, or several, is dragged by force,’ I continue, ‘to the top of a high stone pyramid not unlike the wooded hills around here, or children, even infants, are carried up, or adults are herded in droves, regardless of sex, if they are enemy captives, and there may be dozens of them, perhaps hundreds. The chosen victims are stripped of their clothes, their bodies are painted with blue dye and they are placed on the altar. The high priest runs his eyes from north to south and from east to west, invoking his cruel deities, then, turning his gaze to the victim on the altar, who in mortal terror is held in the firm grasp of his assistants, with one hand he plunges his dagger into the victim’s breast while with the other he pulls out his heart, which for a time is still alive and beating even after the body is dead. There is so much blood it streams down from the altar in specially made grooves; if there are several victims, the entire pyramid is swimming in blood.’

Whenever I include such Indian adventures in my sermons, whether we are in a church or in the open air, in springtime or winter, I feel the atmosphere thicken. People unwittingly grab at their hearts and cross their arms over their chests, as if trying to protect themselves from my words, which, like the red man’s weapons, might do injury to their bodies. The populace never tires of these crude, cruel pictures; they hold a special magnetism for them, so even if their ears are hurting, they want more and more. ‘Now do you understand?’ I ask, looking at them severely. ‘Even to these savages, whose only excuse is that they never heard of Jesus, for they never had the opportunity to hear of him before the Dominicans and Jesuits arrived – even to these savages Mary is ready to appear. Even to them God is merciful, although he could strike them all down in one fell swoop. As they performed their bloody rituals, a volcano could erupt nearby and pour down on the pyramid and the dwellings below it; or in the midst of their slaughter, the earth could shake so horribly that everybody, altars and pyramid, too, would go tumbling in all directions far and wide. But no, Jesus is merciful and sends his mother to open her cloak of infinite mercy wide above them and let these cruel creatures know the sort of wicked delusion they have been living in and to tell them that from this time forth they, too, who have been languishing in the sin of ignorance, will have the opportunity to repent, that Jesus is ready to forgive all their sins if only they begin to live as true Catholics, with salvation and everlasting life awaiting them after death.

‘So now do you at last understand,’ I say to the populace, ‘the infinite mercy of God? And if such is his mercy to Indians, how much more will he be merciful to you, who were once of the true faith but were led astray by lying Lutheran lips. At this very moment, you have the opportunity to repent sincerely of your erring ways and sinful lives and return to the flock, to come home. O people,’ – by now they are quite moved by such powerful images – ‘do you think all the attacks of plague, not to mention other diseases that have been assailing you for centuries – do you think they are without cause or purpose? Do you think stopping the Turks would truly be so impossible if it were God’s will? Are the Turks not perhaps a warning to you, so you realize at last the terrible error of your ways?’ At this point, some clever Dick usually pipes up with something like, ‘We’re not the only ones starving because of the Turks – Catholics are, too!’ to which I reply, ‘How could it be otherwise? It’s not just Lutheranism that is sinful; there are many other heresies, too, lurking among the people. And now do you at last understand why you are afflicted by these terrible misfortunes? So start by walking the Catholic path, and if you are faithful and disciplined in following Jesus and the true doctrine – because it’s not so very easy to understand the Gospel! Oh, no! Otherwise, Jesus would not have chosen Peter from among his disciples and said, “Peter, you are the rock on which I build my Church,” and he would not have handed him the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven – so if you walk the Catholic path, things will be better for you than before. I know the preachers taught you how to read a little, but for the right understanding of the truth it is not enough to move your finger from letter to letter. As difficult as the Gospels are, the Old Testament is even more confusing, and some of its stories must be interpreted with particular care. Especially Genesis, the First Book of Moses, from the time before God gave Moses the Law. Because I don’t want to hear some patriarch tell me again, “What did I do that was so wrong? Lot’s daughters, too, had a drink with their dad and then, before the eyes of God, they all got drunk and fooled around, and the two girls gave birth to their own brothers.” ’

By this point the populace has considerably softened. People are looking at each other, looking around, glancing a little at the altar and then staring at the floor, lifting their eyes again and looking at the side altars, as if checking to see if there might still be a statue or picture of a saint somewhere, if maybe not all of them had been demolished. And then they look at each other again and slowly start nodding their heads, as if to say, you know, he’s right. ‘Because I admit it,’ somebody speaks up, ‘the last time the plague was ravaging this area, we never closed the Gospel for a second – I mean the one in our own language, in Slovene. Our eldest son would turn the pages backwards and forwards, and we’d repeat after him what he was reading, all the while caring for our sick and then carrying out their bodies. We also fumigated with sage and juniper, but things kept getting worse, so one of us went into the cellar and pulled out the little statues of St Roch and St Rosalia, and we lit candles to them, fumigated the house with dried herbs and brought gifts to the saints.’

‘What? What do you mean, gifts?’ Such foolish, superstitious customs always infuriate me.

‘Well,’ they start squirming, ‘so the saints will hear us and grant our prayers.’

‘And if you didn’t give them these stupid gifts but only the pure prayers of your hearts, you don’t think they’d listen to you?’

‘The plague takes such a terrible toll. When plague comes, death strikes us down left and right. Sometimes it lays waste to almost an entire village, sometimes, literally, to entire families,’ they answer me.

‘But what sense does it make that instead of praying humbly before the holy images you perform magic and witchcraft? Things that Leviticus, the Third Book of Moses, strictly forbids!’ I scold them.

So sorcery, too, will have to be beaten out of their heads, but only when we have brought order to our priestly ranks and dealt with the Lutherans. Personally, however, I think this step-by-step strategy is too slow and we would do well to consider introducing foreign approaches and have more frequent witch trials. Witchcraft is like the plague. And just like physical plague, plague in the soul cannot be driven out by fine words. It would be easier and more effective to use force. This, as well as the concrete methods of implementation, deserves our careful consideration.

In most cases, my visitations have turned up the following: Catholic parish priests who are poorly educated and often drunkards, many who are vile whoremongers, quite a few who are senile and incap­able of the least intellectual thought and, most importantly, none with the passion or fervour needed to kindle the true Catholic faith in believers. For if you want to inflame another, you must yourself be on fire! This sort of passion have I rarely found within the Catholic ranks, so I have ordered the replacement of a number of the Church’s representatives. Some parish priests, during my visitations, promised and swore on the Latin Scriptures that henceforth they will more zealously undertake God’s service. But sadly, I find that the Protestant clergy are better educated and more fervent in their religion, and so, too, are their sheep, who are regularly sheared by their shepherds and taught not only Lutheran bleating but even some meagre reading skills. The Protestants’ sermons, too, are more colourful in comparison with what is mumbled out by our Catholic sluggards. I am, therefore, delighted by the great attention that is being paid to the homiletic training of young Jesuits – and more recently Capuchins – for with the proper rhetorical skills they will easily prevail over the preachers. We must not forget that what the populace loves is drama, not bland parables delivered in drab churches plucked of every adornment. The populace loves chubby cherubs and their supernatural hornèd adversaries; they like being terrified by angels with swords and spears and demons with protruding tongues, and then, if they but slightly shift their gaze, being instantly comforted by the benevolent eyes of a saint with a white lily in his hand – but for every care and misfortune, the best panacea of all is the Virgin Mary.

The populace does not like abstractions; they prefer simple, solid things. And if, by rough estimates, at least half of them turn to superstition and witchery, they are also disposed towards eccentrics, who in these parts present themselves under such names as Founders, Leapers and Ecstatics. From what I have learned, there are not many of this last group in these provinces and they do not arouse the sympathies of the people, who think them too fanatical if not outright deluded, so they are neither popular nor dangerously widespread.

To conclude, allow me to offer yet another example of something we encountered time and again on our visitations. If the parish priest is not very old – by which I mean the forces of nature are still pumping blood to his head, although it often does not get there as it is first trapped in his loins – the presbytery door will be opened by a girl, and not some skin-and-bones waif either, but a wench with ample curves who is suggestively dishevelled. When we ask to see the priest, she almost always becomes flustered and evasions follow, which amount to: ‘The master is sleeping’.

‘What do you mean he’s sleeping? The sun is approaching midday!’ I say to her sternly.

At this question, the girls usually say the priest had been out during the night giving someone extreme unction and so was lying in a little.

‘Extreme unction or not, it’s time he gets himself out of bed!’ I persist. ‘It may happen that a man stays up all night, but it’s only sluggards who rise when the sun is pouring out its light on the earth and, in the summer, its heat, too.’ I don’t mince my words.

Then we push the girl aside and march into the presbytery. We open all the doors, while she fidgets, probably wondering how to slip away and warn her employer about the intruders. ‘What! Isn’t this where he sleeps?’ I ask when we open the door to a room with a bed that is completely untouched. By then, almost all the girls are blushing, but some are still spinning lies in their heads, hoping to cover up the priest’s shame.

‘Didn’t you say, girl, that the priest is asleep? So where is he sleeping?’ I give her a merciless stare.

Then the stories vary: there was such an infestation of fleas in his bed that she had to do a total disinfection, or the bed needed a

thorough cleaning after the cat crapped on it, or the priest’s willy got leaky from a bloating in his belly so, again, everything needed washing.

‘How’s that? A bloating in his belly? You foolish woman, are you sure the bloating wasn’t below his belly?’ I am unsparing with her. And all the while we’re tramping through the presbytery opening doors. But not to overplay it, I should say that, in fact, there are not very many doors to open and only two or three rooms, and in the smallest one, the attic, a modest, quite ordinary little room, we find a modest little bed and, in it, the parish priest, who is either snoring deeply in his drunkenness from the night before or our noise has wakened him enough for him to be wondering, underneath the goose feathers, how he can escape from this embarrassing position: whether he should slip out of the window (which is not a good idea, since our soldiers are waiting for him below) or hide in a chest (which in a room of this size is either non-existent or too small for his portly parochial body).

‘Whose room is this?’ I ask the girl.

‘The priest’s,’ she mumbles.

‘The priest’s? Does he have two bodies so he needs two beds?’

‘Well, everything here is the priest’s,’ many of them will say, now with an adorable sniffle. As the priest is pulling on his shirt and

trousers, you can see something bouncing beneath his big belly (nearly all the whorish priests are thickset, while the older, more senile ones are gaunt), the very thing that, according to the girl’s testimony, gets bloated at night.

‘This is a vile and wicked sin, priest, especially for one who is wed to Holy Church!’

And now the excuses start – ‘Really, you’ve got the wrong idea!’ – which are soon followed by begging for forgiveness. At my relentless gaze, every one of them is ready to confess and repent, after which come promises to be different from now on and explanations that he has nothing to do with the Lutherans, whom he truly despises, and if you don’t count this one sin, of which he is profoundly ashamed, he has no other blemishes on his conscience, and that he serves Mass regularly, on Sundays and feast days, and no longer preaches in Latin but, as is recommended, in the vernacular, that is, in Slovene, which everyone can understand. Finally, he ends by begging me to let him stay here, in this area, in this village, in this house, and not to send him away.

‘Fine,’ I tell him, ‘but under one condition: get rid of your maidservant and hire a new one, a woman at least twenty or thirty years older. So what do you say?’ I look him up and down, and he assures me, promises me, that he will, and then we say farewell and leave. It’s best not to look back. I know very well that as soon as our carriage and retinue and soldiers disappear on the horizon, the priest will wipe his sweaty brow, take a few deep breaths and then call for the maid and everything will be the same as before. Harder! We must be harder with the populace! And I do not mean just the peasants – they are the easiest; they have nothing to bargain with. No, the Provincial Estates are the problem. The towns, too, are a major problem, but the biggest obstacle is the nobility, who are blackmailing the prince with their Lutheranism and making the right to their religion a condition for collecting and transferring taxes and special tribute payments for the defence against the Turks. We must be harsh! Harsher measures are needed with them, otherwise the provinces of Inner Austria will splinter away from us and the Patriarchate of Aquileia will crumble before our eyes. Disunity brings neither order nor strong defence. And only order ensures prosperity and peace. So harder, harsher!

*

Georg Stobaeus von Palmburg, Counsellor and Bishop of Lavant, in a memorandum dated August 20 1598, to the Prince of the Provinces of Inner Austria, Archduke Ferdinand II:

Neither hard nor harsh – everything may be arranged without an inquisition. The war with the Turks means that Catholic reform must begin without delay. Among the many in Styria, Carinthia and Carniola who have publicly and freely declared themselves Lutherans are those who hold some of the most critical posts in the army and administration. When it comes to religion, nothing is more harmful than armed force. The archduke should decree that all his vassals must be Catholic. Whoever does not submit to this command must leave the provinces. To achieve this more easily, the archduke should, if necessary, win his subjects’ devotion and filial love with cheap food. Let the reform begin in the capital of the Inner Austrian provinces – in Graz. Protestant preachers should be forbidden to preach and banished from Graz under penalty of death, and the town should be guarded by Catholic soldiers.

Fears that the reform might trigger violent resistance are baseless. We must not forget that most of our Lutherans are real cowards. A sermon or two, threats of banishment and the forced sale of property at below cost, and they will soon admit the error of their ways. Let us proceed slowly and persistently, and the populace will gradually see the light. Not many will be willing to stake their lives on God and their world views and even fewer to renounce their comforts. This is where they live, this is their home; anywhere else they would be

foreigners. And being a foreigner takes courage – courage most of them do not have. So let us be neither hard nor harsh, but slow, persistent and gradual, and we will succeed.