The Empire & Central Europe
State of Research
There is evidence to suggest the presence of Hibernian missionaries in the Rhineland from the seventh century. However, the analysis contained in this section of the web-site neither relates directly to these early connections nor is it limited to what today constitutes Germany. At the beginning of the early-modern period, Irish activities in central Europe can be more appropriately placed within the boundaries of a larger, if amorphous polity, the Holy Roman Empire which, until its dissolution in 1806, stretched northwards and southwards to the shores of the Baltic and the Adriatic and westwards as far as France. That said, to a great extent, the focus in this section of the site is on the activities of Irish men and women in an area towards the eastern frontier of the Empire. This latter region encompassed present-day Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia, in other words, the majority of the successor states of the hereditary and elective dominions that comprised the Patrimonial Lands of the Habsburg monarchy from 1526 down to 1918. Smaller sections of what are today Poland and Hungary have also been considered, specifically Silesia (a duchy of the Bohemian crown for some time, alongside the province of Bohemia itself, the margravate of Moravia and the two Lusatias) and, outside the Empire, the fluctuating area that constituted Habsburg Hungary. Although even this broad definition excludes parts of modern-day Romania and the Ukraine that were acquired by the dynasty after 1648, it comprises the agglomeration that made up the Emperor's hereditary lands and the two ancient kingdoms of St. Wenceslas (Václav) and St Stephen (István) for most of the period in question.
The results of the Irish in Europe project so far have made it apparent that the Patrimonial Lands and, more widely, both the Holy Roman Empire and central Europe as a whole, continue to lack adequate coverage. Nonetheless, current lines of research can be traced, especially for the period after 1618 when an uprising centred on Bohemia stimulated the movement of soldiers, clerics and intellectuals from Ireland into the region. From 1619, three separate contingents, namely the Imperial army, the Catholic League of German princes and the tercios provided by the Spanish monarchy, formed the basis of a pro-Habsburg alliance in the Patrimonial Lands. Many Irishmen arrived in that part of the continent in support and, in several cases, established a base there. Alongside The Irish Sword, the Journal of the Military History Society of Ireland, which continues to publish new findings on this theme, a widely-anticipated contribution to historical understanding of this movement eastwards is the forthcoming edited volume by Dr Declan Downey of University College, Dublin, The Irish in Austrian Colours. This publication will comprise the proceedings of a one-day symposium that took place in October 2002 at St Patrick's Hall, Dublin Castle. Participants in the conference - designed to coincide with the opening of a major exhibition at the Collins Barracks of the National Museum of Ireland on The Wild Geese in Austria - included guests from the Theresian Military Academy (Theresianische Militärakademie) in Wiener Neustadt and the Military History Museum (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum) in Vienna as well as a number of Irish and other experts.
Current research is not restricted to military endeavours. In the related field of diplomacy, David Worthington is carrying out work on the 1688 correspondence of Nicholas Taaffe, Second Earl of Carlingford (d.1690) from the Imperial court, part of a long-term project by the same author on Irish and British connections with the Habsburg monarchy. Regarding the much longer tradition of ecclesiastical and scholarly contacts, in recent years, important new articles by Benignus Millett and Matthaeus Hösler have appeared in Collectanea Hibernica, the journal of the Franciscan Fathers at Killiney. Focusing on Bohemia, some further detail came to light in 1998 following the appearance of the Helga Robinson-Hammerstein edited volume, Migrating scholars: lines of contact between Ireland and Bohemia. Perhaps the most outstanding recent contribution to that field has come by means of the publication of a book covering the history of the Irish Franciscan community in Prague, a work co-authored by one of the contributors to the Robinson-Hammerstein publication, Jan Parez, along with a fellow Czech, Hedvika Kucharová. Again from the Czech perspective, Iva Farrelova is researching on the theme of Irish doctors in Bohemia, while attempts to link the activities of the various Irish exile and emigrant groups in the same kingdom have been made by Mark James Lilley and in a chapter by Micheál MacCraith and David Worthington. On Ireland and Hungary - although mostly relating to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - the latest publication is that of Thomas Kabdebo (Ireland and Hugary: a study in parallels).