In 1820 Archbishop Alexander Rudnay moved the seat of the archbishopric back to Esztergom, at the emperor's personal request. Trnava had now lost both the things that made it: the university in 1777, the church in 1820. Rudnay is worth knowing anyway — he was born at Považany, he made sure Slovak parishes got Slovak priests, and the sentence attributed to him is one every Slovak schoolchild meets: Slavus sum, et si in cathedra Petri forem, Slavus ero, 'I am a Slav, and I shall remain a Slav even if I sit in the chair of St Peter.' The decades that followed were hard: between 1 August and 24 September 1831 a cholera epidemic killed over 800 people in the town in two months. The one bright thing was that the citizens paid out of their own pockets for a theatre in 1831 — the oldest purpose-built theatre of its kind in Slovakia, still working today — and in December 1848 Austrian troops drove the Hungarian revolutionary army of Richárd Guyon back from the town.V roku 1820 preniesol arcibiskup Alexander Rudnay sídlo arcibiskupstva späť do Ostrihomu — na osobnú žiadosť cisára. Trnava tak prišla o obe veci, ktoré ju robili Trnavou: o univerzitu v roku 1777 a o cirkev v roku 1820. Rudnaya si aj tak treba pamätať: narodil sa v Považanoch, dbal na to, aby slovenské farnosti mali slovenských kňazov, a veta, ktorá sa mu pripisuje, patrí k tým, čo pozná každý slovenský školák: Slavus sum, et si in cathedra Petri forem, Slavus ero — „Slovák som, a keby som mal sedieť na Petrovom stolci, Slovákom zostanem.“ Ďalšie desaťročia boli ťažké: od 1. augusta do 24. septembra 1831 zabila v meste epidémia cholery za dva mesiace vyše 800 ľudí. Jediné svetlé miesto bolo, že si mešťania v roku 1831 z vlastných peňazí postavili divadlo — najstaršie účelovo postavené divadlo svojho druhu na Slovensku, ktoré hrá dodnes — a v decembri 1848 odrazili rakúske vojská od mesta maďarskú revolučnú armádu Richárda Guyona.
