Beyond the Battlefield: Discovering My Heritage in the Wars of King Louis XIV
The Crossing (Part I)
King Louis XIV of France, 1659. Public domain. (By Abraham van Diepenbeeck/ Adriaen Millaert - Peace Palace Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33046335)
Good morning, readers!
Today, and for the summer, I’m going to try some new things, something different. First, I’ll send shorter posts (or, newsletters, if you prefer), and as paid subscribers know by now, these will include voiceovers, so you can listen rather than read.
Second, I’m going to serialize a series of posts. That is, I’m going to attack some bigger stories, and breaking them up will allow me to economize my time. This will be helpful to me because I’ll be going to Europe in a few weeks (I have a grant for an artist residency in Sweden through much of July).
Third, I will end each post with a bonus for paid subscribers, which will detail how I manage to find the information about ancestry. That begins today, as I discuss the wars that France waged against the states and princes of the Holy Roman Empire, particularly the region known as the Palatinate, which is now part of Germany.
I hope you enjoy these posts!
You probably know, like me, about the history surrounding your twentieth century ancestors: what distant family was doing during the two World Wars, the Great Depression. Maybe you even know as far back as the Civil War. It seems, doesn’t it, like these historical epochs were more available.
But what about people from hundreds of years ago? On another continent, in a country that wasn’t even yet a country? Such is the case for Germany.
There’s only so much history one can learn in school. European history, for one, is an area I know I’m deficient in. But genealogy, if done right, can not only teach you history, it can also contextualize your family within it. Atrocities that happened in Europe, it turns out, directly influenced mass emigrations to North America.
Take the directives of the Sun King, for example.
Louis XIV—also known as Louis le Grand and le Roi Soleil—was king of France from 1643, when he was four years old, until he died in 1715. It wasn’t until 1661 that he assumed full power, and he would come to lead one of the most powerful and aggressive states in Europe. One of its enemies was Germany, then only a conglomerate of states in the Holy Roman Empire.
To begin, it’s important to understand the region known as the “Palatinate,” or in the German, Die Pfalz. It is known today as the Rhenish Palatinate, the Rheinpfalz, lying along the Rhine River in the southwest of Germany.
Until 1792, and beginning in the Middle Ages, it was a region of some 45 territories. It was heavily forested, bordered by mountains, and home to a number of cities, towns, and villages, some of them fortified. It has long been known for its production of wine.
If you have German roots in America, and especially if your German ancestors were from the Palatinate, and if they arrived in the eighteenth century, it is likely that they came in the aftermath of devastation wrought by this King’s armies.
France had been at war for a long time, even prior to Louis’ birth. The Thirty Years’ War as a moniker is testament to the duration of these conflicts, and there was a civil war in France itself, as well. But it was the Sun King’s campaigns in the Palatinate that contributed to the mass migration from this corner of Germany—Baden, Württemberg—to, especially, Philadelphia. At least, in part. Other factors played in as well.
In 1674, for example, France’s army’s general method was to take from the region what it needed to keep its troops fed—and that meant largely from villagers and farmers—and to destroy the rest so that armies in pursuit, those of the German princes, could not sustain themselves. What the French did, effectively, was a scorched-earth campaign. Their plundering, however, was not viewed favorably by Louis himself, and he tried to end it. It made no difference. That summer of 1674, the French forces, led by Louis’ general, the viscount Turenne, occupied the Palatinate.
The seizure of the town of Phillipsburg accomplished what the king wanted—the closing of the frontier of Alsace, which lay west of the Rhine, giving France a buffer against the Germans—but the seizing of Phillipsburg made enemies of those same Germans regardless. “Throughout the summer of 1674,” writes John A. Lynn in The Wars of Louis XIV, “the Palatinate suffered, for Turenne supplied his army by exploiting its resources. Making war feed war by living off enemy or natural resources was a goal of seventeenth-century commanders, and in his long years of campaigning in Germany, Turenne had become expert.”
Another tactic was called contribution, essentially an extortion where the villagers would pay for protection from the very armies that invaded them. If they refused, the villages were burned—what was called execution. Many villages suffered—in only two weeks time, thirteen towns and villages were reported burned. This led to enraged villagers engaging in guerrilla warfare, with schnapphahns attacking French soldiers, to which the French responded with contempt and violence.
But it was the campaign that began in 1688 that truly wrecked the villages of my ancestors.