A Church and a Castle. Centre and periphery of the Empire in duke Ottavio Piccolomini's self-representation

Abstract

Introduction On May 4th 1634 Ottavio Piccolomini Pieri d’Aragona (1599–1656), colonel general of the Habsburg army, received confirmation from one of his agents in Vienna that the estate of Náchod, in Eastern Bohemia, had been assigned to him by the Emperor Ferdinand II .1 The assignation proceeded from Piccolomini’s involvement in February 1634 in the elimination of the alleged traitor generalissimo Albrecht von Wallenstein, duke of Friedland (1583–1634) . The assassination of the Bohemian general, one of the notable episodes in Thirty Years War, had been ordered by the Emperor and carried out by the generals under Wallenstein’s command, Matthias Gallas (1584–1647), Johann Aldringen (1588–1634), Walter Leslie (1607–1667) and, remotely, Ottavio Piccolomini . All the generals involved in the event had been rewarded for their service and loyalty to the Emperor with a sum of money and the attribution of one of the estates formerly belonging either to Wallenstein, to his brother-in-law Adam Erdmann Trčka (1599–1634), or to his associate Christian Ilow (1585–1634), both killed together with him in Cheb . The delay in the attribution of the monetary reward, the expenses for the ceremony of investiture, the poor status of Náchod, amongst other reasons, prompted Piccolomini’s several attempts to sell the estate already by the end of the same year . At the same time, though, Ottavio Piccolomini started diverting his funds, including the pending credits that he had at the imperial court and that had not yet been fulfilled to him, for the foundation of the church of the Servite order in Vienna . Only towards the end of his military activity, just married and determined to finally establish a Piccolomini lineage in the Habsburg territories, Piccolomini reconsidered an investment in Náchod, never eventually sold, to make of it his and his spouse’s main residence . His involvement with the Servites remained constant throughout his life, more than with any other religious order he sponsored, and it enabled him to promote his patronage next to the one of the imperial court . The settlement of the Servites in Vienna took longer than initially hoped for and the church and convent – today the Servitenkirche in the Rossau quarter in Vienna – was not yet completed at the moment of Piccolomini’s death .