TURMOIL IN THE PALATINATE
Unlike the Mennonites, Baptists, and many other sects of the 17th and 18th centuries, religious persecution could hardly have been the reason for our Fassnacht ancestors abandonment of their European homeland. Being Lutherans, the established Protestant denomination of Germany, they were probably more influenced by the 150 years of bloodshed, strife, and insecurity experienced in the Palatinate prior to 1749.The last of the European armed religious conflicts, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), left Germany in a shambles. Ruin was everywhere. Entire cities, villages, and farms had disappeared. The populace was racked by friend and foe alike, armies of mercenaries seizing the grain and animals of the farms, and appropriating homes as winter quarters for troops. What could not be used or removed was usually destroyed. The cities of Magedeburg, Heidelberg, Wurzburg, Neustadt, Beyreuth and others were laid waste. Epidemics of often fatal diseases broke out. Morals and morale collapsed after a generation of violence.
James W. Gerhard in My Four Years in Germany, states that in the Lower Palatinate only ten percent of the population survived. In June of 1674 the French invaded and again desolated the Palatinate, Lorraine, and parts of Alsace, renewing the miseries of the Thirty Years War. The peace that came in 1679 lasted only seven years. Then in September of 1688, Louis XIV's armies again invaded and within a month took the cities of Kaiserlauten, Newstadt, Worms, Bingen, Mainz, and Heidelberg. In March of the following year, the French sacked and burned Heidelberg, Mannheim, Speyer, Worms, Openheim, and parts of the archbishopric of Trier, and the margraviate of Baden.
No less a personage than Voltaire stated, "...For the second time this beautiful country was ravaged by Louis XIV; but the flames of the two towns and twenty villages which Turenne had burned (the 1674 devastation) in the Palatinate were but sparks to this conflagration." This latest outrage resulted in England, the Holy Roman Empire, United Provinces, Denmark, and Savoy uniting in arms to check Louis' ambitions. A bloody, costly nine-years war ensued before the Peace of Ryswick ended the War of the Palatinate.
Early in the 18th century (1702-1713), this region was again involved in armed conflict through the War of Spanish Succession, with Denmark, Prussia, Hanover, Savoy, Portugal and some minor German states as allies. And there were other disturbances right up to 1748, the year before our ancestors emigrated.
Such chaos, lasting several generations, would have been all the motivation required to cause our forebears to take the calculated risk of seeking a more placid environment in the New World.