Between Migration and Assimilation

Research: Martin Arnold

Manifestations of migration that have significantly shaped the cultural transfer between Bohemia and Saxony in the 16th and 17th century, are the focus of this PhD project. After 1500, Saxon noble lineages increasingly settled in Bohemia while familiar, economical, and political connections to Saxony were kept up more or less intensively. However, this episode of Saxon-Bohemian relations was terminated by the expulsion of a large part of these families within the Habsburg Catholic confessionalization after 1620 and by the re-migration to Saxony as Bohemian exulants. With the example of the families von Brünau and von Salhausen, problems of noble interaction and communication in the border area of Saxony and Bohemia will be addressed in a micro historical study.