- [Narrator] The Rhine, April, 1734.
It's the War of Polish Succession
and Frederick, Crown Prince of Prussia,
is trying to be the man his father wants him to be.
Though court marshaled
after his attempted escape to England,
he's been restored to military rank
in order to gain battlefield experience.
But this is not how you run an army.
Frederick is embedded
with the forces of the Holy Roman Empire,
confronting the French
under the famed general Prince Eugene of Savoy.
Yet Eugene is a faded hero.
He can pass wisdom and experience to Frederick, sure,
but he's also 70, frail,
and can barely remember his last conversation.
He's cautious and defensive, afraid to act.
His body was still there, Frederick later observed,
but his soul had gone.
And the imperial army, well, it was weak,
disorganized, and fractious.
"I could defeat this enemy," Frederick muses
and he would get his chance,
for this terrorized prince was about to start a fire
that would burn through Europe and the world.
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At the end of last week's episode,
Frederick decided to play the role of the dutiful son,
and, you know, wait until his ill father died.
He submitted to a new regime of tutors
that focused on making him masculine,
agreed to marry a woman he detested, and went to war.
But a strange thing happened.
Frederick actually became a pretty good soldier.
As colonel of a regiment,
he developed a fascination with strategy,
battlefield tactics, and leadership.
And while he never truly saw any action
during the War of Polish Succession,
he acquitted himself honorably.
When he returned, his father Frederick William,
now confined to a wheelchair by gout,
reconciled with his son.
Proud of Frederick's progress,
He gave him a lakeside castle
where he could indulge in artistic pursuits in private.
Frederick and his wife Elisabeth Christine, moved in,
though in truth he largely kept clear of her.
There he read books,
staged plays with friends, played the flute,
set up a regular discussion group on military strategy,
and recruited architects to expand his new home.
It was the happiest time of his life,
though he was clandestinely doing something else as well,
preparing to become king.
See, some of those architects
started quietly taking trips on his dime
studying opera houses in Italy and France.
He also immersed himself in philosophical writing,
producing his first book, the "Anti-Machiavel,"
an idealistic refutation of Machiavelli's "The Prince."
In the book, Frederick argues in favor
of an enlightened absolutist monarch
who would provide a moral example to his people
and keep them healthy and happy.
He then sent the manuscript
to the French philosopher Voltaire,
who edited it and prepared it for anonymous publication,
though his identity did leak immediately.
It would eventually become a best seller,
with readers hoping to gain a window into Frederick's mind,
and perhaps the greatest insights could be found
in a section on the type of wars he considered just.
It contains some of the things you'd expect,
such as defensive wars or wars of last resort,
but also what Frederick called wars of interest.
In such a war, a king realizes an enemy
is going to declare war on him in the future
and preemptively attacks them
in order to gain the greatest military advantage.
Huh, was Frederick already considering the moves
he'd make during his reign?
Well, it's possible.
Though by this time,
he had become adept at keeping people at a distance,
hiding behind a series of masks and personas
that sometimes contradicted one another,
and more often than not
he adopted the part of misanthropic loner.
Some historians see this as a survival tactic,
a response to trauma, and an attempt to hide his sexuality.
But it did mean that even for close friends and ministers,
it was really difficult to get inside Frederick's head.
So it's hard to say exactly
how Frederick felt in May of 1740
when he got word that his father was dying.
Rushing to the palace in Berlin,
they had time for one last talk,
and it turned out that while opposite on all else,
their political ambitions aligned.
Both dreamed of uniting the scattered territories
of Brandenburg, Prussia,
currently sprinkled through the Holy Roman Empire
or embedded with Poland,
and both thought their kingdom
could be one of the great nations of Europe.
Then on March 31st, 1740,
Frederick William died
in the arms of the son he'd tormented.
But Frederick wasn't left alone,
for now he had the most efficient bureaucracy in Europe,
an unmatched recruitment system,
an army of 80,000, and an enormous war chest of funds,
an amount his father had amassed by avoiding foreign wars.
The Soldier King had, ironically,
relied chiefly on clever diplomacy
and never fully used the army he had built.
King Frederick II, however, would.
But first, some fun.
Frederick's immediate move after his father's death
was to build an opera house.
He wanted to invest in the arts and sciences,
which ironically enough his father had defunded so badly
that they actually had to borrow soloists from Saxony
to sing at his funeral.
Next up, no longer requiring a wife to mollify his father,
Frederick sent poor Elisabeth Christine
to a palace outside Berlin.
She wasn't even invited to his coronation.
Instead, he brought an Italian philosopher
who was likely his lover,
and the pair followed it up with a foreign trip together
where they met Voltaire.
Then, with all of that out of the way,
Frederick prepared for a war of interest.
October 20th, 1740, Vienna.
Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor,
and sovereign of the Habsburg Dominions, is dead.
All his life, Charles had been terrified
that he would only have daughters,
and because the laws of the Habsburg Dominion
said women could not inherit,
his scattered territories would fragment
in a succession crisis when he died.
To prevent this,
he'd issued the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713
declaring that a woman could inherit the Habsburg lands,
and he spent most of his reign
trying to get his neighbors to agree to it.
Good thing too, since his daughter Maria Theresa
proved his most viable heir,
ironically, a woman Frederick tried to marry
when he was searching for a bride.
Now that would be an alternate history novel worth reading.
Charles had essentially bankrupted Austria
in trying to bribe the great states
into accepting the Pragmatic Sanction,
a document they immediately backed off of
as soon as he was dead.
Austria's military was also weakened
from a series of major wars,
meaning the vultures were circling,
seeing what they could pick off the Habsburg corpse.
Of course, Austria also had something Frederick wanted,
Silesia, a province that made up 1/3 of Austrian revenue
and sat right across the border from Brandenburg.
But Frederick needed to make his move soon.
Wait too long and Saxony might take Silesia first,
blocking Prussian expansion south.
In six weeks, lightning speed in 18th century standards,
Frederick had mobilized his army
and crossed the border into Silesia.
It was so easy at first,
so much so that he could not have imagined
that this act would set in motion a chain of events
that would bring bloodshed not just to Central Europe,
but to places as far away as Senegal, Brazil,
India, and the Philippines.
The First Silesian War
and the War of Austrian succession had begun.
Prussian forces were practically unopposed,
sweeping up the lightly defended province and taking forts.
But Maria Theresa,
who would become Frederick's lifelong rival,
raised an army and began to oppose him.
And so Frederick II fought in his first battle,
Mollwitz, April 10th, 1741.
As the Austrian cavalry comes at his right flank,
Frederick realizes his mistake.
He'd tried to run this battle like an exercise,
like he was drilling troops.
When they'd come upon the Austrians,
they could have simply charged
into the smaller unready army,
but instead he'd formed up,
putting his grenadiers between his cavalry
like the great Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus did
in the 30 Years War,
a formation that would let the infantry
murder cavalry with shots
before his own mounted troops could countercharge.
A battle plan out of a history book.
It isn't working.
Instead, the Austrian horse
crashes into the right wing of his army and envelops it.
His cavalry are standing still when the charge connects.
The units mix in a battle of swords and pistols,
and Frederick's in the thick of the fighting.
It's confused and bloody.
There's driving snow and fog,
and both sides have white uniforms.
The Prussian infantry and artillery
keeps firing into their own ranks,
mistaking comrades for the enemy,
and the Prussian cavalry are starting to rout.
"Oh, Gustavus Adolphus," he thinks.
"Oh God, this is how Gustavus Adolphus died,
mixed with the enemy, lost in fog."
Suddenly a man grabs his reins.
It's his general.
He tells Frederick to flee the field.
The battle seems lost, and if he falls,
Prussia will too, for he has no heir.
So Frederick turns his gray charger
and bolts toward the nearest town,
and he doesn't see that behind him
while his cavalry has broken,
the well drilled Prussian infantry
starts to move across the field like solid walls,
firing in steady volleys,
driving off the Austrian cavalry attack.
It is Frederick's first battle, and he's running away,
but his infantry, the great gift from his father,
will stand and fight.
Oh man, Zoey, what a cliffhanger!
You know, I don't think I'm gonna be able
to wait a whole week
to find out what happens to Fritz and his army!
(Zoey meows)
- [Narrator] Nah, too expensive.
I'm still paying off that trip to West Point for eggnog.
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