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Letters from Salzburg
Correspondence of an anonymous traveller
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For more than eight hundred years, Salzburg had been a sovereign ecclesiastical state, governed by prince-archbishops who held both temporal and spiritual power. From the fortress of Hohensalzburg —never conquered— they administered a territory stretching across the Alpine valleys, minted their own currency, and maintained a court whose splendour rivalled the great European capitals.
It all ended with a decree. The Napoleonic Wars redrew the map of Europe and Salzburg, like so many other states of the Holy Roman Empire, was absorbed without resistance. There was no siege, no battle. The principality simply ceased to exist. The impregnable fortress proved useless against an enemy that had no need to scale its walls.
We publish these letters as they were found, without altering their order or content. We have only permitted ourselves to give each one a title to guide the reader.
Archive of the Provincial Library of Salzburg
Signatura Ms. 1803-VII/14