The commanderies of Alsace and German Lorraine were confiscated by the National Assembly in 1792; all the others west of the Rhine succumbed in the French annexation six years later. The losses similarly suffered by the German princes were to be made good by the wholesale confiscation of the ecclesiastical states, but the two military orders were exempted from this spoliation, and indeed enriched. During the first stage (1803—6) of the transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into the German Confederation, the Grand Prior of Heitersheim was granted the property of the Abbey of St Blaise, whose domain included the imperial county of Bonndorf with some 200 square miles and
180,000 guilders (?18,000) in revenue. These years therefore saw the curious scene of the German prior strengthened in his status as a reigning prince while the head of his Order lived almost a refugee existence in Catania.
This interlude was brought to an end by the Napoleonic conquest of the Empire. As the spoils were divided among the jackal princes
Of Germany, Heitersheim was awarded to the Grand Duchy of Baden (January 1806), and its last prince died the next year on a pension. Other rulers likewise confiscated the remaining German commanderies. The French onslaught gave rise in Prussia to the programme of harsh retrenchment that enabled the kingdom to counter-attack effectively in 1813; but among its victims were the commanderies of Brandenburg and Silesia, which were expropriated in 1810.
In Austria the properties of the Bohemian priory were saved from a similar fate by the diplomacy of their Prior, and the fall of the Napoleonic empire set the Order on the path of recovery. The Congress of Vienna confirmed the ill-gotten gains of the princes, but by a quaint survival one commandery of the German priory, that of Frankfurt, was preserved as an Austrian sovereign enclave, its commander at the time being Ritter Edmund von Coudenhove. Metternich, in his plans to control the Order, was contemplating moving its seat of government to Vienna. The result of his meddling was that neither the Grand Prior of Bohemia nor the Lieutenancy was in a position to keep hold of the disappearing fragments of the German Langue. One of these was the chaplains’ commandery of Fribourg in Switzerland, which had enjoyed a prosperous history under six successive commanders from the local family of Duding, two of whom had also been Bishops of Lausanne. Its last commander, evidently adrift from any prioral control, surrendered the commandery in 1825 to the city government. The only remaining Silesian commandery, Breslau, which had survived because it was a juspatronat of the Kollowrath family, was claimed by its patrons on the death of its last incumbent in 1828. A similar fate seems to have befallen the Radziwill juspatronat of Stolowitz in Poland, whose last commander was appointed in 1813.
Genuine recovery only began in the second half of the century. With the efforts to restore the Hospitaller character of the Order are preeminently associated three Austrian Knights of Justice: Gottfried von Schroter, who initiated the moves to found the hospital of Tantur in the Holy Land, Bernhard von Caboga, whose generosity brought the plan to fruition, and Othenio von Lichnowsky (Grand Prior of Bohemia 1874— 87), who represented the Sovereign Order at the second international conference of the Red
Cross. The establishment of a military hospital, a voluntary nursing service and a hospital train for the Army Medical Corps extended these endeavours in Austria itself in the last third of the century.
In 1881 Francis Joseph raised the Grand Prior of Bohemia to the rank of Prince of the Austrian Empire, with the style of Serene Highness. After i 860 Vienna remained the only European capital, other than the Vatican, in which the Order preserved diplomatic representation, the ambassador being normally the Grand Prior; and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the state in which it enjoyed the highest prestige and the most visible presence. The Grand Priory retained its com-manderies and its traditional ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the novitiate of Prague continued to train a numerous clergy for the Order’s churches. For fifty-two years the restored Grand Mastership was held by representatives of two of the most illustrious families of the Austrian nobility.
After the First World War - during which the Austrian knights performed notable work in the service of the wounded - the Grand Priory’s properties were scattered in three different countries, and the founding of the Polish and Hungarian Associations reflected the frag* For these events and the contemporary attempts to revive
Mentation of the cosmopolitan aristocracy of the empire. In 1938, in the brief interval between the Nazi annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia, a new Grand Priory of Austria was created, in the fear that an institution that proclaimed itself Bohemian would invite expropriation. Despite this precaution the commanderies of both Priories were confiscated during the war, only the priestly community of Prague remaining. That too was suppressed by the communist rulers of Czechoslovakia in 1950.
In Austria the Grand Priory recovered its status after the war; its principal possession, Mailberg, is still administered by a professed knight and is the only commandery of the Order that has enjoyed a virtually continuous existence since the twelfth century. Diplomatic relations were restored when Austria regained full independence, and this example was followed by Czechoslovakia on the fall of the communist regime. The new Czech government also returned to the Order’s possession the magnificent prioral palace and church in Prague. The human renewal, after a period of abeyance, had already taken place in 1980, when the Grand Priory reconstituted itself in exile with three Knights of Justice.
World History
