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The German Palatines were early 18th century emigrants from the Middle Rhine region of the Holy Roman Empire, including a minority from the Palatinate which gave its name to the entire group. Towards the end of the 17th century and into the 18th, the wealthy region was repeatedly invaded by French troops, which resulted in continuous military requisitions, widespread devastation and famine. The "Poor Palatines" were some 13,000 Germans who migrated to England between May and November 1709. Their arrival in England, and the inability of the British Government to integrate them, caused a highly politicized debate over the merits of immigration. The English tried to settle them in England, Ireland and the Colonies. The Palatine settlements did not prove to be viable in the long term, except for those settled in County Limerick and County Wexford in Ireland and in the colony of New York in British North America. In Ireland, less than 200 families remained after the original settlement in 1709. Nevertheless, they maintained their distinctive culture until well into the nineteenth century and Palatine surnames are now diffused across the country.〔http://irishpalatines.org/about/name.html〕 The largest concentration of descendants of Irish Palatine residents lives around Rathkeale, Co Limerick. The English transported nearly 3,000 German Palatines in ten ships to New York in 1710. Many of them were first assigned to work camps along the Hudson River to work off their passage. Close to 850 families settled in the Hudson River Valley, primarily in what are now Germantown and Saugerties, New York. In 1723 100 heads of families from the work camps were the first Europeans to acquire land west of Little Falls, New York, in present-day Herkimer County on both the north and south sides along the Mohawk River. Later additional Palatine Germans settled along the Mohawk River for several miles, founding towns such as Palatine Bridge, and in the Schoharie Valley. ==Origins== Throughout the Nine Years War (1688–1697) and the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), recurrent invasions by the French Army devastated the area of what is today Southwest Germany. The depredations of the French Army and the destruction of numerous cities (especially within the Palatinate) created economic hardship for the inhabitants of the region, exacerbated by a rash of harsh winters and poor harvests that created famine in Germany and much of northwest Europe. The migrants came principally from regions comprising the modern German states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, and northern areas of Baden-Württemberg along the lower Neckar. During the so-called ''Kleinstaaterei'' period when this migration occurred, the Middle Rhine region was a patchwork of secular and ecclesiastical principalities, duchies and counties. Consequently, a minority of the so-called German Palatines originated in the namesake Electoral Palatinate, with others coming from the surrounding imperial states of Palatinate-Zweibrücken and Nassau-Saarbrücken, the Margraviate of Baden, the Hessian Landgraviates of Hesse-Darmstadt, Hesse-Homburg, Hesse-Kassel, the Archbishoprics of Trier and Mainz, and various minor counties of Nassau, Sayn, Solms, Wied, and Isenburg. What triggered the mass emigration in 1709 of mostly impoverished people to England was the Crown's promise of free land in the American Colonies. Parliament discovered in 1711 that several “agents” working on behalf of the Colony of Carolina had promised the peasants around Frankfurt free passage to the plantations. Spurred by the success of several dozen families the year before, thousands of German families headed down the Rhine to England and the New World.〔Statt, Daniel. ''Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population,'' 1660-1760. Newark (DE): University of Delaware Press, 1995. pp. 122-130〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「German Palatines」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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