Bezpośrednia reakcja władz Torunia wobec tumultu wyznaniowego z 17 lipca 1724 roku

On 17 July 1724, the local Jesuit college was broken into and vandalised by a mob of Toruń Protestants. These events, the so-called tumult of Thorn, prompted a strong reaction from the Polish authorities. Under the court’s ruling, Mayor Johann Gottfried Rösner and nine other people who were found guilty were beheaded. This case resonated strongly in Europe. The prevailing opinion in the historiography is that the conduct of the municipal authorities following the tumult was slow and indecisive. In the light of the recently discovered sources (fragments of the drafts of city council minutes, originally destroyed during the siege of the city in 1813), it can be concluded that in the first days following the tumult the council did undertake an investigation, in which the blame for provoking the riots was quite explicitly placed on Jesuit students, and information about the incidents was sent to the council’s resident at the royal court in Warsaw. However, the decision to take any further steps was indeed procrastinated. The Jesuits were much quicker to disseminate the information about the harm done to their order in Toruń across the whole country.