Counter-Reformation 85probably not intervene on behalf of their co-religionists in the lower
orders. Moreover the Turkish war was actually helpful in this respect, as
many of the nobility were away on campaign with the Imperial armies.
The Protestant preachers themselves were the weakest link, opined the
bishop, and after them the peasantry and the citizens of the towns.^6
The starting point was the Styrian capital city of Graz, where
in September 1598 an order was issued to all Protestant preachers,
schoolteachers and academics, that they were to leave the city forthwith
and to be out of the archduke’s territory within eight days or face severe
punishment. Taken by surprise, those affected were in no position to
resist, appeals for help to the local nobility achieved nothing, and some
nineteen of them departed hastily into what they hoped would be a
temporary exile across the Hungarian border. Naturally there were com-
plaints, but these received little sympathy from the emperor in Prague
and even less from Ferdinand, who moved troops into Graz to quell
any opposition in advance of an Estates meeting early the following
year. Again there were wordy protests but nothing more, and Ferdinand
declared himself immovable in his resolve to stand by his actions.
Encouraged by this initial success and the lack of any effective resis-
tance, Ferdinand and his advisers sent reformation commissions, each
headed by a senior cleric and backed by a detachment of troops, to
tour northern Styria during 1599. They descended upon towns and
villages one after another, closing Protestant places of worship and
cemeteries, confiscating and burning Lutheran books, and obliging the
population individually to swear obedience to the archduke in both
civil and religious matters, while any who hesitated were threatened
with banishment. The great majority complied, even in an area where
a couple of years before a government official sent to enquire into reli-
gious disorders had been met with hostility bordering on open defiance,
another example of the link feared by the authorities between religious
and political non-conformity. By the end of the year the commissions
had completed their work in northern Styria and moved on south,
and by mid-1600 the whole of Styria had been recatholicised, at least
outwardly.^7
The process, duly extended to the other provinces of Inner Austria,
was completed in under two years, forcibly enough but without open
resistance or bloodshed. An estimated 2500 Protestants were forced into
exile, including most of the wealthiest, as Ferdinand himself admitted,
but this was a price he was prepared to pay. Among them was the famous
astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, ironically to better
himself soon afterwards by gaining an appointment in Prague with