‘Unruly, fractious, disreputable’ – Irish Franciscans in Prague

"The story of the waves of emigration forced on the Catholic Irish by the consolidation of English Protestant power in Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries is well-known.

Members of the Gaelic and Old English aristocracies, soldiers, priests and students fled largely to the Catholic monarchies of France, Spain and Austria. The Holy Roman Empire, a vast complex of around 1,000 semi-autonomous political units under the loose rule of the Austrian Hapsburg emperors, was particularly welcoming.

Many of them ended up in Prague, capital of the kingdom of Bohemia where, after the 1620 Battle of White Mountain ended the first phase of the Thirty Years War, a parallel process of trying to suppress Protestantism was taking place."

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