- [Narrator] April 11th, 1741.
It's the morning after the Battle of Mollwitz.
Frederick has had his first victory
and he's not happy about it.
See, his general had told him to flee,
that his army was about to be destroyed,
so he had done so.
Yet then that same general had turned the battle around
and delivered victory.
Meanwhile, Frederick had wandered in the dark,
nearly being captured and hiding in a house until morning.
He was embarrassed, but he had learned a great deal.
Mollwitz would be his school.
Never again would he abdicate command to another
or cut his losses when victory seemed possible.
His cavalry had performed poorly.
He needed to do something about that.
But he also saw how his advancing infantry
had terrified the enemy.
Huh. Something to note there.
And though improvements did need to be made,
he had his victory.
He had Silesia, and he would fight to keep it for 22 years.
(bright music)
Thanks so much to Wren for being a simple and effective way
to help make a difference in the climate crisis.
Learn more after the episode.
Frederick's invasion of Silesia on the thinnest pretenses
and without even a formal declaration of war,
catapulted him to international stardom across Europe.
People scrambled to learn all they could
about this rash and dynamic young King.
How would a nothing power like Prussia,
a scattershot part of the Holy Roman empire
caught the mighty Hapsburgs napping.
Sales of his book, the "Anti-Machiavell" shot up.
And his correspondence with Voltaire,
written on both sides with the intention that it be shared,
circulated among philosophers.
When Frederick had invaded,
he told his ministers that he wanted to see
his name in the Gazettes.
And boy did he get that.
But in truth,
this was not all about Frederick's enormous ego.
It was also about putting Prussia on the map.
When he came to the throne.
Prussia was neither a fully independent kingdom
nor a state in the Holy Roman empire.
It existed in the shadowland in between.
The soil was sandy and poor.
It's territory separated
and the population only numbered 2.2 million,
meaning forget a superpower like Habsburg, Austria.
Before the war, Prussia's biggest rival
was neighboring Saxony.
Yet by invading Silesia, he announced that Prussia
was attempting to join the great nations of Europe.
This wasn't some German state, this was a kingdom.
But despite his boldness crossing the border
when he entered Silesia, most of Europe assumed
Austria would crush this upstart.
But then Mollwitz proved them wrong and changed everything.
It exposed Austria's weakness.
And if you've ever watched any of our episodes
on the Siege of Vienna or Jewish pirates or the 30 Years War
you'd know that about 80% of Europe at this time
was spoiling to take a swing at the Habsburgs.
Many in Europe, including Frederick,
also fundamentally hated the idea of Maria Teresa,
a woman, heading one of the great powers.
Not only did they not want her ruling Austria
they also wanted to break the tradition of the Habsburg line
automatically being elected Holy Roman Emperor.
Of course, in this case a woman couldn't legally be elected,
but Maria was pushing for her husband's election.
So sensing weakness after Mollwitz,
France, Spain, Bavaria and Saxony, pounced.
And thus the first Silesian war became merely a part
of the much wider War of Austrian Succession.
And if all of that sounds complicated, it's because it is.
Sadly, we're going to have to gloss over a bunch of stuff
since this is a series about Frederick
and not this unbelievably convoluted war
where countries change sides
faster than Loki's in the M C U.
But basically what you need to know is that at Mollwitz
Frederick had rung the dinner bell.
- Hapsburg's back on the menu boys.
Get a piece while it lasts. (chuckles)
- [Narrator] A coalition formed around Prussia
with the hope of carving up Habsburg lands in a partition.
But Frederick worried that if that happened
these powers might get too powerful
and overwhelm Prussia as well.
So Frederick's diplomats contacted
their Austrian counterparts and cut a deal.
They signed a secret truce
so that both could recover strength
while their troops still pretended to be at war.
This lasted for a few months until Frederick,
worried Maria Teresa was coming back for Silesia,
reputed the treaty
and joined the Allied campaign in Bohemia.
But not long after Frederick arrived
the Allied march toward Vienna broke up.
So turned out it was Frederick's army that took the blow.
When Maria Teresa's brother-in-law, Charles of Lorraine
arrived with 30,000 troops
to take the invaded territory back.
And on May 17th, 1742, pursuing Austrians
caught half of the Prussian army.
Dug in around a village to meet the Austrian attack,
they were instructed to hold until the king's part
of the army could arrive and take direct command.
Frederick was not about to let a mere general
steal his thunder again, okay?
But once he arrived, it was still a confused engagement.
Frederick drove off the Austrian cavalry
with a mounted charge backed by artillery,
but it was a dry summer day, and soon huge banks of dust
obscured any vision of the battlefield.
Central command broke down, cavalry on both sides got lost,
then quit the battle to pillage the enemy baggage trains.
It then became a house-to-house brawl
of infantry and artillery through the burning town
that only ended when Frederick led a huge square
of 24 battalions into the Austrian flank.
Now, while technically a draw, the Austrians abandoned
to the field, giving Frederick the victory.
Not to mention diplomatically, he also won out,
for when the British pushed both parties
to the negotiating table, Frederick once again
was allowed to keep almost all of Silesia.
Two months later, the First Silesian War was over.
Yet he knew this was a temporary peace
and that there was work to do.
While the Prussian infantry was solid,
the cavalry had performed poorly in both battles.
So he went about restructuring and reforming
his cavalry forces to be more disciplined and aggressive,
so they'd serve him better
when Maria Teresa came for her captured province.
Oh and she was going to.
In fact, Maria Teresa had flipped the script.
Two years before,
she'd been fighting alone against a major coalition.
But now she'd set up a new anti-French alliance,
bankrolled by Britain
and with Russia and Saxony interested in joining.
Frederick worried she was about to seek revenge.
So then he built a rival alliance
between Prussia, Bavaria, Sweden, and two German states
with the goal of restoring the Bavarian lands
taken so far in the war.
France also declared its support.
Then on August 15th, 1744, Frederick crossed back
into Bohemia launching the Second Silesian War
which went sideways almost immediately.
The campaign depended on the French tying up
Charles of Lorraine and his Austrians in the west,
so he couldn't return to Bohemia.
But that went out the window when King Louis XV fell ill
leading the French army and Charles disengaged.
Then Saxony switched sides away from France
and allied with Austria,
meaning Prussia now had an enemy on its border.
Meanwhile, Austrian guerilla forces hounded Frederick
out of Bohemia by just savaging his supply lines.
And realizing this was unattainable,
he pulled back to defend Silesia.
Things got worse.
Austria formed a new alliance
with Britain, Saxony and the Dutch Republic,
with secret plans to partition Prussia,
the same way the powers had tried to carve up
the Habsburg lands.
Then Frederick's ally, the Holy Roman emperor dropped dead
and his son made peace with Austria.
And finally, in May, Charles of Lorraine
crossed the giant mountains into lower Silesia,
leading a force of 60,000 Austrian and Hungarian troops
plus their Saxon allies.
Frederick knew he had to act.
Battle of Hohenfriedberg.
June 4th, 1745, 7:00 AM.
Frederick told his troops to leave their campfires burning
when they performed the night march.
In darkness, they'd slipped out of camp
and crowded across a bridge right past the Austrian forces
for they were not the objective.
Instead, Frederick wants to hit the Saxons first
and destroy them before rolling up
on the rest of the Austrian forces.
Oh, but they've been spotted.
Shots ring out.
Prussian and Saxon cavalry clash together
in a vicious night battle.
Pistol flashes light up gleaming sword blades.
The Saxon camp begins to mobilize, but the infantry pushes
through and the Saxon formations start to dissolve.
By first light, the Saxon force is already routed
and Frederick's right turns to engage
the main Austrian force.
Hours of gunpowder and blood follow.
And the next day, Frederick sits on his horse
in the courtyard of the palace he's taken as his own.
He has won his greatest victory to date,
and now he is honoring the troops
that more than anything made it possible.
The Bayreuth Dragoons, his heavy cavalry.
At the climax of the battle
when things had still hung in the balance,
they had spotted a hole in the Austrian line.
And by charging through that gap
they had overrun 20 enemy battalions
and captured 2,500 prisoners.
They'd broken the Austrians
and only taken 94 casualties doing so.
Now they parade their war trophies into the square.
67 battle flags of Austrian and Saxon units
torn from enemy hands.
There was still fighting to do,
but when the king returned to Berlin
he would be doing so under a new name:
Frederick the Great.
And you know, actually on that note of fighting still to do
I kinda wanna switch gears and talk for a second
about how we can all help battle the climate crisis.
You know, as I've looked around for some
of the best practices to help out in this space
one method that kept coming up was carbon offset programs.
Though I've always been super skeptical of those.
I mean, sure they can theoretically work,
but their current marketplace is set up in such a way
that many programs seem to be either inefficient at best
or at worst, basically incentivize scams.
But then we learned that our Nebula friend,
Sam from Wendover, who actually made a awesome video
about said skepticisms by the way,
had been talking with a group called Wren
who he thinks is pretty much as good as it gets
in the carbon offset market.
So I wanted to learn more for myself.
Turns out Wren is a website where you can calculate
your carbon footprint then offset it
by funding a diverse portfolio of carbon reduction projects,
things like tree planting, mineral weathering,
rainforest protection, et cetera.
However, again, as I've learned in the past
these sort of services are really only as good
as the accuracy of their project evaluations,
which is why I really like to see that one
of Wren's key differentiating points
is actually how focused they are on these small details.
And not just at a project's inception, mind you,
but also how it progresses over time,
which is just really important.
For example, one of these well watched projects
that's near and dear to both my and our studio director,
Jeff's heart is Biochar in California
which helps prevent wildfires in old growth forests
by removing dead and flammable trees.
And then using a cutting edge process
to turn the trees biomass into biochar,
keeping carbon out of the air for like thousands of years,
which side note, is just very, very cool.
And you know, you can actually learn more about them
and all of Wren's projects for yourself
over on their super clear website
that goes into just a ton of fun minutia.
But you know what else you can do on their website.
Answer a few questions about your lifestyle
to help calculate your carbon footprint
and then learn some nifty ways to help reduce that.
Plus, you can even set up a monthly offset
to reduce your personal contributions
to the climate crisis, which turned out
to be less expensive than I thought it would.
And this is a cool thing.
Right now, Wren is offering the first 100 people
who sign up with our link in the description,
one month of carbon emissions offset for free.
Look, I wanna be very clear here.
We all know that our individual carbon emissions
are only one small part of the problem.
But it really is going to take a lot
to end the climate crisis.
And you can start helping out today
by learning more on wren.co/start/extracredits.
Thanks everyone.
What if I told you that Ahmad Ziad Turk,
Angelo Valenciana, Arkalight Games, Casey Muscha,
Dominic Valenciana, Joseph Blaim, Kuyacoy
and Skyler Holmes were all legendary patrons?
I'm not kidding.
(upbeat music)