Arsonists in Women's Clothes

Louis XIV of France, the mortal enemy of the House of Habsburg, fell ill with rage when he heard that the Turks had been defeated before Vienna in 1683. He had all the towns of the Palatinate and the Rhineland burned, and meant to lay waste Prague and all Bohemia in the same way. He therefore hired, for considerable rewards, many of the prisoners of the imperial army held in the Rhenish fortress of Philippsburg, to go into Bohemia and set fires there. There were thirty of these incendiaries, and a Transylvanian captain led them into Bohemia; after that first expedition in 1689 others followed, some hundred and fifty men in all, it is said. The incendiary Vavřinec Procházka, who came from the neighbourhood of Rokycany, was later caught near Protivín and confessed that some of them went about in beggars' clothes, others in women's, some as priests and otherwise.