¹ The author would like to thank Charles Ingrao for all of his help and support since they first met in 2009. He would also like to thank Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Michael Smith, Daniel Unowsky, and the two anonymous readers from Austrian History Yearbook for their advice and criticism of this article.

² Kohl, J. G., Austria. Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Danube; Galicia, Styria, Moravia, Bukovina, and the Military Frontier (London, 1843), 307Google Scholar. Griselini, Francesco, Aus dem Versuch einer politischen und natürlichen Geschichte des Temeswarer Banats in Briefen 1716–1778. Erschienen bei J. P. Krauss. Wien 1780 (1780; repr., Munich, 1969), 11Google Scholar.

³ Schwicker, Johann Heinrich, Geschichte des Temeser Banats. Historische Bilder und Skizzen (Zrenjanin, 1861), 380Google Scholar.

⁴ Paton, A. A., Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic; Or, Contributions to the Modern History of Hungary and Transylvania, Dalmatia and Croatia, Servia and Bulgaria, vol. 2 (London, 1862), 28Google Scholar.

⁵ Beschreibung des Banats, der Walachey, Moldau und der Königreiche Servien und Bosnien, aus den besten Schriftstellern gezogen. Ein Beitrag zur nähern Kenntniss des Gegenwärtigen Kreigsschauplazzes (Leipzig, 1790), 7Google Scholar.

⁶ Steube, Johann Kaspar, Von Amsterdam nach Temiswar. Wanderschaften und Schicksale, ed. Golz, Jochen (1791; repr. Berlin, 1984), 174Google Scholar.

⁷ My thinking on the subject of mentalities and worldview has been influenced by the possibilities and the perils inherent in the “history of mentality.” As Jacques Le Goff defined it, “The history of mentalities operates at the level of the everyday automatisms of behaviour. Its object is that which escapes historical individuals because it reveals the impersonal content of their thought.” Jacques Le Goff quoted in Chartier, Roger, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 27Google Scholar. One problem of this approach is explaining how mentalities change. This article presents at least one explanation for the phenomenon. For an introduction, see Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 162–82.

⁸ Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁹ Drace-Francis, Alex, “A Provincial Imperialist and a Curious Account of Wallachia: Ignaz von Born,” European History Quarterly 36, no. 1 (January 2006): 61–89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 70–72. Drace-Francis cited reviews of Ignaz von Born's work on the region, where many very clearly recognized an “Otherness” to the land and it inhabitants. One publisher even put an edited version of the account between one on sati in India and one on Native Americans, further highlighting the liminal position of the region in the educated European mind.

¹⁰ For the classic work on cameralism, see Small, Albion Woodbury, The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Polity (New York, 1909)Google Scholar. See also Raeff, Marc, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, 1983)Google Scholar. Tribe, Keith, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse, 1750–1840 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar. For a more recent reevaluation of the subject, see Wakefield, Andre, The Disordered Police State German: Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Vushko, Iryna, The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772–1867 (New Haven, 2015), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Wolff, Larry, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, 2010)Google Scholar.

¹² Modern scholars have recognized the connection between the physical and mental as well. In his description of public hydraulic works in France in the eighteenth century, historian Pierre Claude Reynard stated that such projects “do reflect an enlightened belief in the perfectibility of both nature and human practices.” Reynard, Pierre Claude, “Charting Environmental Concerns: Reactions to Hydraulic Public Works in Eighteenth-Century France,” Environment and History 9, no. 3 (August 2003): 251–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 263. George Revill similarly noted the importance of canals and transport in Britain in linking “industrial and agricultural economies, urban and rural societies in economically, socially and culturally complex ways.” Revill, George, “William Jessop and the River Trent: Mobility, Engineering and the Landscape of Eighteenth-century ‘Improvement,’” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, no. 2 (April 2007): 201–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 202.

¹³ While their success in reshaping the landscape was perhaps the most long-lasting and visible achievement, flooding in 2005 revealed that, given heavy enough rains, the old landscape could once again become visible. Timár, Gábor et al. , “Combination of Historical Maps and Satellite Images of the Banat Region—Re-appearance of an Old Wetland Area,” Global and Planetary Change 62 (2008): 29–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Büsching, Anton Friedrich and Ebeling, Christoph Daniel, Erdbeschreibung. 2 Zweyter Theil, welcher Ost- und West-Preußen, Polen und Litauen, Galizien und Lodomerien, Ungarn, die denselben einverleibten Reiche und Siebenbürgen, die Republik Ragusa und das osmanische Reich, enthält (Hamburg, 1788), 445Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Schwicker, Geschichte des Temeser Banats, 360.

¹⁶ Ibid., 321.

¹⁷ Eimann, Johann, Der deutsche Kolonist oder die deutsche Ansiedlung unter Kaiser Josef II. in den Jahren 1783 bis 1787 besonders im Königreich Ungarn in dem Batscher Komitat, ed. Lotz, Friedrich (1820; repr. Munich, 1965), 97Google Scholar.

¹⁸ “Corn Trade with Austria,” The Morning Chronicle (London), 20 September 1839.

¹⁹ Griselini, Aus dem Versuch, 6, 20–21, 22.

²⁰ Griselini quoted in Schwicker, Geschichte des Temeser Banats, 321. Schwicker's very next paragraph referenced Governor Mercy's recognition of the “importance of a spiritual and moral improvement of the inhabitants.” These two ideas, the improvement of the landscape and the morality of the populace, worked hand in hand in both contemporary and later observations.

²¹ Gruber, Briefe hydrographischen und physikalischen Inhalt, 17.

²² Petri, Anton Peter, Der Hydrauliker Maximilian Emmanuel (de) Fremat und seine Wirken in der k.k. Monarchie (Mühldorf, 1992), 4Google Scholar. Menen had only recently joined the Austrian Netherlands as a provision of the Peace of Utrecht (1713). Veenendaal, Augustus J. Jr., “Menen,” in The Treaties of the War of the Spanish Succession: An Historical and Critical Dictionary, ed. Frey, Linda and Frey, Marsha (Westport, CN, 1995), 282Google Scholar. Herrschaft, Hans, Das Banat; Ein deutsches Siedlungsgebiet in Südosteuropa (Berlin, 1942), 103Google Scholar.

²³ Schwicker, Geschichte des Temeser Banats, 380.

²⁴ Petri, Der Hydrauliker Maximilian Emmanuel, 5.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Schwicker, Geschichte des Temeser Banats, 380–81.

²⁷ Petri, Der Hydrauliker Maximilian Emmanuel, 5–6.

²⁸ Ibid., 7.

²⁹ Gruber, Briefe hydrographischen und physikalischen Inhalt, 17, 145.

³⁰ For an article on the importance of mapmaking for the Habsburg administration, especially in Transylvania, see Veres, Madalina-Valeria, “Putting Transylvania on the Map: Cartography and Enlightened Absolutism in the Habsburg Monarchy,” Austrian History Yearbook 43 (2012): 141–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Evans, R. J. W, “Essay and Reflection: Frontiers and National Identities in Central Europe,” The International History Review 14, no. 3 (August 1992): 480–502 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 485, 487, 488.

³² Although Coen's comments deal with the impact of climatology on the “naturalness of the empire” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, her discussion of the connection between science, the natural world, culture, and the state is very relevant to the argument here. Coen, Deborah, “Climate and Circulation in Imperial Austria,” The Journal of Modern History 82, no. 4 (December 2010): 839–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 859–60.

³³ Evans, “Essay and Reflection,” 486.

³⁴ For more on this process in the Banat in the 1770s, see Landais, Benjamin, “Villages, Actors of Local Cartography? The Cadastral Maps of the Banat (1772–1779),” in History of Cartography: International Symposium of the ICA, 2012, ed. Liebenberg, Elri, Collier, Peter, and Török, Zsolt Gyözö (Berlin, 2014), 129–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv (1170–1918), Neue Hofkammer und Finanzministerium, allgemeine Abteilungen (1762–1876), Ungarisches Kamerale, Banter Akten, rote Nummer (Hereafter: AT-OeStA/FHKA NHK KaaleU BanaterA Akten r.Nr.) 151A, f. 19–20. This request for more engineers “with the necessary measuring instruments” to help survey the Banat also mentioned that the engineers Steinlein and Kostka were “sufficiently occupied with the hydraulic works.” Such issues reached the highest echelons of the Habsburg state. In 1767, Maria Theresa herself ordered that “for those inspectors employed in the settlement/concern of the colonists are continuously such subjects to be chosen who understand the land-surveying arts and civil architecture.” AT-OeStA/FHKA NHK KaaleU BanaterA Akten r.Nr. 149A, f. 473.

³⁶ AT-OeStA/FHKA NHK KaaleU BanaterA Akten r.Nr. 154A, f. 44.

³⁷ For more, see Weidlein, Johann, Entwicklung der Dorfanlagen im donauschwäbischen Bereich (Stuttgart, 1965)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Arhivele Naționale ale României, Direcția Județeană Timiș (National Archives of Romania, Timis County Department), Nr. fond: 117, Nr. Inventar 1575, Nr. Nou 233, f. 2, 13.

³⁹ AT-OeStA/FHKA SUS KS, L 079.

⁴⁰ For mapped examples of town and villages designs, see AT-OeStA/FHKA (Sonderbestände, Sammlungen und Selekte (1170–1987), Sammlungen und Selekte (0963–2006), Karten- und Plansammlung (1540–1938), hereafter: SUS KS,) O-031, AT-OeStA/FHKA SUS KS, O-032, AT-OeStA/FHKA SUS KS, O-033.

⁴¹ This could create bad blood between herders who had leased the land and the government who wanted it back in order to implant settlers. In one case, the administration in the Banat told a man named Lajos, a “restless ox-trader,” that he and his animals had to vacate his leased lands to make way for incoming settlers. He was naturally very angry with this news, resisted, and promised to bring his complains to “higher levels.” Once he was removed, the area was to be surveyed and divided. AT-OeStA/FHKA NHK KaaleU BanaterA Akten r.Nr. 147, f. 32–33.

⁴² Roth, Erik, Die planmässig angelegten Siedlungen im Deutsch-Banater Militärgrenzbezirk 1765–1821 (Munich, 1988), 91Google Scholar.

⁴³ Weidlein, Entwicklung der Dorfanlagen, 12, 22.

⁴⁴ von Dorner, Joseph, Das Banat in topographisch, naturhistorischer Beziehung mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Herculesbäder nächst Mehadia und ihrer Umgebungen: Nebst einer ausführlichen Schilderung der Reise in die Bäder mit den Dampfschiffen und zu Lande, und einer Beschreibung der an den banatischen Donauufern vorkommenden Alterthümer (Bratislava, 1839), 60, 126, 129–30, 136Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Paton, Researches on the Danube, 31–32.

⁴⁶ Kohl, Austria. Vienna, Prague, 283.

⁴⁷ Joseph II quoted in von Bartenstein, Johann Christoph, Kurzer Bericht von der Beschaffenheit der zerstreuten zahlreichen illyrischen Nation in kaiserl. königl. Erblanden (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1802), xixGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Charles Ingrao noted their success in altering the landscape (canals, deforestation, agriculture). Ingrao, Charles W., The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1825 (Cambridge, 2000), 141–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ The exact nature of their impact on the behavior and mentality of indigenous inhabitants is debatable. See Roider, Karl Jr. “Nationalism and Colonization in the Banat of Temesvár, 1718–1778,” in Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich, ed. Banac, Ivo, Ackerman, John G., Szporluk, Roman, and Vucinich, Wayne S. (Boulder, CO, 1981), 87–100, especially 91–92Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Ignaz Born, Rudolf Erich Raspe, and Johann Jakob Ferber, Travels Through the Bannat of Temeswar, Transylvania, and Hungary, in the Year 1770. Described in a Series of Letter to Prof. Ferber, on the Mines and Mountains of These Different Countries (London, 1777), 9–10. “Not satisfied to have corrected the rough behour [behavior] of his officers, and to have habituated them to the German manners, he endeavours likewise to humanize his private men. He established schools and masters, and the soldier is obliged to have his children sent there” (emphasis in original).

⁵¹ Gerhard Van Swieten quoted in Arlaud, Daniel, “Vampire, Aufklärung und Staat: Eine militärmedizinische Mission in Ungarn, 1755–1756,” Gespenster und Politik: 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Gantet, Claire and d'Almeida, Fabrice (Munich, 2007), 127–44Google Scholar, especially 133.

⁵² Born, Ignaz von, “Vorrede des Herausgebers,” in Gruber, Tobias, Briefe hydrographischen und physikalischen Inhalt aus Krain an Ignaz Edlen von Born, k. k. wirklichen Hofrath (Vienna, 1781)Google Scholar.

⁵³ Born, Travels, 21.

⁵⁴ Joseph Anton Schönbauer, Geschichte der schädlichen Kolumbatczer Mücken im Bannat, also Ein Beytrag zur Naturgeschichte von Ungarn (Vienna, 1795).

⁵⁵ Born, Travels Through the Bannat, 21, 15.

⁵⁶ Steube, Von Amsterdam nach Temiswar, 180.

⁵⁷ Patterson, Arthur J., The Magyars: Their Country and Institutions, vol. 2 (London, 1869), 323–24Google Scholar. Patterson was a “Foreign Member of the Kisfaludy Society.”

⁵⁸ See, for instance, Bailey, Michael D., Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, 2007)Google Scholar. Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar. Neusner, Jacob, Frerichs, Ernest S., and McCracken Flesher, Paul Virgil, Religion, Science, and Magic in Concert and in Conflict (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Gábor Klaniczay similarly noted the “enlightening mission” that came “from ‘above’ in the social sense and from the ‘West’ in the geographical sense” in connection with vampires in the Habsburg realms. Klaniczay, Gábor, “Decline of Witches and Rise of Vampires in 18th-Century Habsburg Monarchy,” Ethnologia Europaea 17, no. 2 (1987): 165–80, especially 177Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Bräunlein, Peter J., “The Frightening Borderlands of the Enlightenment: The Vampire Problem,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012): 710–19, especially 712CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁶¹ Gerhard Van Swieten quoted in Daniel Arlaud, “Vampire, Aufklärung und Staat,” 139–40.

⁶² Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives), E303: I. a/, 9. E/f, f. 7. This case is also covered in less detail in Baróti, Lajos, Adattár Délmagyarország XVIII századi történetéhez [Repository of eighteenth-century history of southern Hungary], vol. 5 (Temesvár, 1900), 135Google Scholar.

⁶³ Baróti, Adattár Délmagyarország, 136, 50, 150, 75, 140.

⁶⁴ Klaniczay, “Decline of Witches,” 166.

⁶⁵ Steube, Von Amsterdam nach Temiswar, 180, 185.

⁶⁶ Brace, Charles Loring, Hungary in 1851; With an Experience of the Austrian Police (New York, 1852), 177Google Scholar. Patterson, The Magyars, 324.

⁶⁷ Bräunlein, “The Frightening Borderlands of the Enlightenment,” 711–12.

⁶⁸ Tallar, Georg, Visum repertum anatomico-chirurgicum, oder, Gründlicher Bericht von den sogenannten Blutsäugern, Vampier, oder in der wallachischen Sprache Moroi, in der Wallachey, Siebenbürgen, und Banat: welchen eine eigends dahin abgeordnete Untersuchungskommission der löbl. k. k. Administration im Jahre 1756 erstattet hat (Vienna and Leipzig, 1784)Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Klaniczay, “Decline of Witches,” 167.

⁷⁰ The earliest accusation of blood libel in the Hungarian lands occurred in 1494 in Nagyszombat (today's Trnava, Slovakia). When a Christian child disappeared, suspicion fell upon the Jewish community after a witness placed the child in the Jewish neighborhood. Under torture, some of the men admitted to the crime. They claimed that the blood not only had medicinal qualities, but that there was also an organized program among Jews throughout the world to ritually kill Christians, and the Jews of Nagyszombat had been selected for that year. The authorities burned fourteen Jews at the stake and gave others monetary fines. Patai, Raphael, The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Detroit, 1996), 112–13Google Scholar.

⁷¹ AT-OeStA/FHKA NHK KaaleU ältere BanaterA Akten r.Nr. 42, January, f. 491.

⁷² AT-OeStA/FHKA NHK KaaleU ältere BanaterA Akten r.Nr. 43, April, f. 178–80. The mother and boy, Catharina and Jörgel Müllerin, are named only in the medical report. This incident was not the only expression of medieval anti-Judaism in the record in the region. In 1752, the government ordered the investigation of all Jewish merchants implicated by a certain Simeon Spagano of selling poison. Initially, any Jew found in possession of poison was to be placed under arrest and the poison confiscated. A later order lessened the penalty to 5 Thaler. Baróti, Adattár Délmagyarország, 163. Spagano might have been playing on an old anti-Semitic idea of Jews as “poisoners” when he made his accusation. During the Black Death in the fourteenth century, for instance, Jews faced accusations that they poisoned wells. Efron, John M., Weitzman, Steven, and Lehmann, Matthias B., The Jews: A History (Boston, 2014), 194Google Scholar. It is worth noting that Spagano was being interviewed about something when he made the accusations, though it is unclear what. He might have been attempting to pass the blame, or at least mediate his involvement in some crime, and the Jews were an easy scapegoat.

⁷³ While professionals and those in the government were loath to believe in such superstitions about the Jews, such beliefs died hard among the general populace. When a Christian servant girl went missing in Tiszaeszlár, Hunagry, in 1882, accusations of ritual murder again surfaced and were accompanied by antisemitic violence. For more, see: Nemes, Robert, “Hungary's Antisemitic Provinces: Violence and Ritual Murder in the 1880s,” Slavic Review 66, no.1 (Spring 2007): 20–44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ Adler, Philip J., “Habsburg School Reform Among the Orthodox Minorities, 1770–1780,” Slavic Review 33, no. 1 (March 1974): 23–45, esp. 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁵ Patterson, The Magyars, 323. According to Born, the Wallachs “have scarce more religion than their domestic animals.” He went on to support the contention that the lower clergy was as mired in superstition and ignorance as the people they were supposed to be leading. Born, Travels Through the Bannat, 17.

⁷⁶ Bräunlein, “The Frightening Borderlands of the Enlightenment,” 715. Born likewise noted that the clergy could and did accept money to “discharge” the sins of peasants and the deceased. He described the “spirit of slavery wherewith they [Wallach peasants] are subject to these spiritual masters.” Born, Travels Through the Bannat, 17–18.

⁷⁷ Beschreibung des Banats, 50.

⁷⁸ German Catholics, on the contrary, were well taken care of by Maria Theresa. She ordered that state funds cover the cost for teachers and preachers, the construction of churches, and the “acquisition of vestments” in new German colonial villages. AT-OeStA/FHKA NHK KaaleU BanaterA Akten r.Nr. 149A, f. 473.

⁷⁹ Bartenstein, Kurzer Bericht, xxi–xxii.

⁸⁰ Roider, “Nationalism and Colonization,” 95. The local administration rejected the proposal and stated that punishment was the only effective way of making them more dutiful Christians and changing their behavior.

⁸¹ Kann, Robert A., A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley, 1974), 192–95Google Scholar.

⁸² Adler, “Habsburg School Reform,” 23.

⁸³ Szelényi, Balázs A., “Enlightenment from Below: German-Hungarian Patriots in Eighteenth-Century Hungary,” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2003): 111–43, especially 133–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “In the clearest terms, the schools were to be the training ground for the shock troops of the Enlightenment, and those troops were expected to fill the expanding administrative branches of the state, as well as be involved in modern industrial and financial development.” Echoing this sentiment, Arlaud claimed that Georg Tallar “recognized himself as a missionary of the Enlightenment and not only as a neutral observer.” Arlaud, “Vampire, Aufklärung und Staat,” 136.

⁸⁴ Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 192–95.

⁸⁵ Roider, “Nationalism and Colonization,” 93.

⁸⁶ Though Eimann here was talking about the Batschka, there is no reason to believe the same did not hold true in the Banat. Eimann, Der deutsche Kolonist, 57.

⁸⁷ See, for instance, Banater Zeitschrift für Landwirthschaft, Handel, Künste und Gewerbe (1827–28).

⁸⁸ Paton, A. A., The Bulgarian, the Turk, and the German (London, 1855), 22Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ A small part went to Hungary, though the peace treaties divided the vast majority of the region between the Romanians and the Serbians.

⁹⁰ “Horsemeat Scandal: Romanian Abattoirs ‘Not to Blame,’” BBC, accessed 19 August 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-21413376.

⁹¹ In fact, the only parts of the Habsburg monarchy of 1914 to remain outside of the European Union in 2016 are its extreme borderlands: parts of Galicia and neighboring Ukraine, the western Banat and Batschka (Serbia's Voivodina), the Montenegrin enclave of Herceg-Novi, and the late addition to the empire, Bosnia-Herzegovina.