Salzburg Protestants

The Salzburg Protestants (German: Salzburger Exulanten) were Protestant refugees who had lived in the Catholic Archbishopric of Salzburg until the 18th century. In a series of persecutions ending in 1731, over 20,000 Protestants were expelled from their homeland by the Prince-Archbishops. Their expulsion from Salzburg triggered protests from the Protestant states within the Holy Roman Empire and criticism across the rest of the Protestant world, and the King in Prussia offered to resettle them in his territory. The majority of the Salzburg Protestants accepted the Prussian offer and traveled the length of Germany to reach their new homes in Prussian Lithuania. The rest scattered to other Protestant states in Europe and the British colonies in America.

The prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg was an ecclesiastical state within the Holy Roman Empire. The official religion was Roman Catholicism, and the state was ruled by a Prince-Archbishop. However, Lutheranism had gained a toehold in Salzburg, mostly in the Alpine mountains and valleys outside the city. In the early 16th century, Lutheran ideas quickly spread throughout the Salzburg lands along with miners recruited from Saxony by Archbishop Matthias Lang von Wellenburg (d. 1540). The mountain peasants were also in the habit of seeking seasonal work elsewhere in Germany, where they came into contact with the ideas of the Protestant Reformation. Literacy was widespread, and many Salzburgers owned Protestant books that had been brought in by travelers.

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