2

EARLY EMIGRATION


of Darmstadt and Hanau, Franconia (including the area around the cities of Nuremburg, Baireuth and Wurzburg), the Archbishopric of Mayence, and the Archbishopric of Treves. The Districts of Spires, Worms, Hess-Dannstadt, Zeibrucken, Nassau, Alsace and Baden are also mentioned. To this list Wurtemberg must be added, since a number of Palatines are known to have emigrated thence, notably John Condrad Weiser. The area, from which, the emigration poured, extended along both sides of the Rhine River and its Tributaries, the Main, and Neckar Rivers. It extended roughly from the junction of the Moselle and the Rhine south to Basle, Switzerland; and from Zweibrucken, alongside Lorraine, as far west along the Main as Baireuth, bordering the Upper (or Bavarian) Palatinate. Many causes were given for the unprecedented size of the emigration, That most frequently mentioned was devastation by war. The end of the Thirty 'years' war. left the people of the Palatinate prostrate. True enough a remarkable recovery from this visitation war achieved, due to the fertility of the soil and the cooperation of the ruler, but prosperity was short-lived; in the latter part of the seventeenth century the Palatinate was repeatedly the stamping ground of Louis XIV's armies, Marshal Turenne Thoroughly devastated the province in 1674. Moreover, protracted disputes among the neighboring princes, remaining from the religious wars of the early part of the century, gave rise to continuous warfare, in one instance between the Archbishop of Mayence assisted by the Duke of Lorraine, and the Elector Palatine. In 1688-9 partly to vent his malice against Protestants, the Grand Monarch had the Palatinate laid waste again. The military necessities following William III's "conquest" of England probably made this, step necessary. At, any rate over two hundred years later the Heidelberg ruins left by this invasion were described as "the most interesting ruins in Europe".

During the War of the Spanish Succession, Marshal Villars crossed the Rhine unexpectedly in May, 1707, terrorized southwestern Germany,



2