The Library, the City, the Empire: De-provincialising Vienna in the Early Seventeenth Century

My chapter examines the changing political and intellectual position of Vienna as capital city of the Holy Roman Empire, before and after the Thirty Years War, from the specific observatory of the Imperial library. More in particular, I try to single out the ways how the making of the library was influenced by its position within the city and within the Habsburg political agenda, in a crucial time of its history. At the core of my chapter there are the archives of the two Dutch imperial librarians, Hugo Blotius, in charge from 1575 until 1608, and Sebastian Tengnagel, from 1608 until 1636. The two men had much in common – both were Dutch, had a wide network of correspondents, and were interested in new techniques for systematizing knowledge. Nonetheless the library underwent crucial changes in the transition from one librarian to the other. The library had a new location, and a new regime of accessibility. Change also ensued with the return of the court from Prague to Vienna and the more absolutistic political program of the Habsburgs, including a stricter confessional agenda. This transition in the library will be analyzed by reconstructing the management of Arabic and Ottoman texts, from the bibliography on turcica compiled by Blotius in 1576 to Tengnagel’s project of a Orientalium linguarum Bibliotheca.