Great Powers, empires that expand their influence well beyond their own borders, tend to be
larger states with strong governments and centuries of diplomatic gravitas to draw upon.
In Europe, in 1740 they were France, Great Britain, Russia, and the Austrian Habsburg
domains under the Holy Roman Emperor, but a new state was about to make itself known.
The Kingdom of Prussia had none of those Great Power attributes, but still, within just over
a century it would dominate all of Germany.
Which just begs the question: how did Prussia transform itself from irrelevancy to Great
Power status?
Well, it was a top-down situation that combined the rational ideals of the Enlightenment,
with unquestionable autocracy.
In the 18th century, parliamentarianism was a rarity.
Powerful states were mostly led by powerful monarchs who headed influential dynasties.
The House of Hohenzollern inherited the then Duchy of Prussia in 1618, which would make
up about half of their later Kingdom.
The other parts being the Electorate of Brandenburg, in the Holy Roman Empire, as well as half
a dozen or so scattered smaller German territories, and a sliver of Switzerland.
Berlin, in Brandenburg, was the effective capital.
Frederick II, Frederick the Great, Prussia’s most influential king, ruled from there, but
he wasn’t its first absolute monarch.
The Hohenzollerns had been working to consolidate their possessions for a century before Frederick.
His great-grandfather redirected power from the feudal nobility to himself as he rebuilt
after the Thirty Years War, and achieved Ducal Prussia’s independence from the King of
Poland.
Though West Prussia remained Polish until later in Frederick the Great’s reign.
Next his grandfather, Frederick I, upgraded the family’s status from dukes and imperial
electors to King in Prussia, and his father Frederick-William (the so-called ‘Soldier-King’)
dedicated his life, and quite a bit of money, to building up Prussia’s already formidable
army.
What he did not do was invest in culture.
He had a deep dislike for French court traditions (then the norm across most of Europe) and
derided intellectualism and the arts as unmanly.
His son, on the other hand, spoke French with a relish, played the flute, and corresponded
regularly with the continent’s greatest thinker, Voltaire.
Obviously, they clashed.
The lowest point was when an 18-year-old Frederick tried to flee to Britain.
He was caught, and his friend, accomplice, and possible lover Hans von Katte was beheaded
in front of him on Frederick-William’s orders.
He did run the kingdom well enough though, and when Frederick-William died ten years
later, Frederick the Great inherited Prussia with a well-maintained treasury and a disproportionately
large army.
It also had no real international reputation, no real cultural identity of its own, and
was seen as just a sideshow to the imperial Habsburg dynasty.
Unlike his predecessors though, Frederick had no respect for the Holy Roman Empire and
knew very well that only the directly controlled Habsburg lands truly answered to Vienna.
To him, the empire wasn’t a titan, but a target.
So, when Emperor Charles VI was controversially succeeded by his daughter Maria Theresa just
months into Frederick’s reign, he decided to put the army his forefathers had left him
to good use.
The War of the Austrian Succession was a Europe-wide conflict between Maria Theresa’s Habsburg
domains, and her allies, against Austria’s enemies.
Frederick was in the latter camp, and his conquest of Silesia during the war was probably
his most impactful military victory.
But the campaign actually started off rather poorly, and Frederick fled from his very first
battle at Mollwitz, an experience that would humble him for the future.
By his own admittance, he owed the battle’s victory entirely to his father’s army.
Austria got in more trouble as Frederick’s French and Bavarian allies ran amuck in Habsburg
Bohemia, which gave him the opportunity to stab them in back, concluding a treaty with
Maria Theresa that saw Silesia ceded to him in 1742.
Once the Austrians had dealt with the French though, they came back at Prussia with a vengeance.
Far from running away as in 1741, the 1745 battles of Hohenfriedberg and Soor proved
the power of Frederick's cold analytical style of leadership.
In the first, he launched an early morning surprise attack, split the Austrians from
their Saxon allies, and smashed them.
In the second, the Austrians tried a similar ploy against him.
Despite being outnumbered two to one, tactful use of cavalry saw Prussia inflict nearly
twice as many casualties as it suffered.
Acquiring Silesia was a game changer.
It was the largest expansion made by the Hohenzollern dynasty to that point, increasing Frederick’s
subjects by 50% and his state revenue by a third.
Frederick the Great, though, was not the sort to rest on his laurels.
His Prussia grew strong by putting pragmatism and unrelenting un-sentimentality over tradition.
Frederick-William’s strict state-Protestantism was replaced by leniency for different Christian
denominations.
The king himself wasn’t really religious at all.
For the standards of the time, free speech in pursuit of the advancement of knowledge
was encouraged.
Frederick also reinvigorated the Berlin Academy, offering financial rewards to those who could
come up with theories addressing unsolved questions of the day.
The writings of Immanuel Kant, for example, would’ve seen him exiled or worse in most
of Europe.
Frederick applied a code of ethics reminiscent of the ancient ideal ‘Philosopher King”,
seeing himself less an absolute monarch appointed by God, as was pre-Enlightenment tradition,
and instead as the personification of the state, to which he had a responsibility to
govern as a good provider would his household.
{2.5seconds} First and foremost that meant defense.
Even with Silesia, Prussia was small, and Maria Theresa would’ve certainly retaken
the province if she could’ve.
Between the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the start of the Seven Years'
War, Frederick doubled the size of Prussia’s armed forces.
His friend Voltaire dubbed it, “the army with a state.”
That came in handy when he found himself at war with three powers simultaneously.
Those years were probably the worst of his life.
Frederick’s armies had no choice but to go from bloodbath to bloodbath, fighting for
their very survival.
Berlin itself was looted by Austrians and Russians twice.
Prussia should have been crushed, and it probably would’ve been under a different commander.
In 1762 Frederick though was saved.
The death of the Russian Empress and the succession of the German Peter III saw the coalition
opposing Frederick collapse.
With peace, he lost not a scrap of territory; and while his refusal to negotiate earlier
saw the deaths of many of Prussia’s best (even victories were costly), it cemented
its place as the newest Great Power in Europe.
Aside from prized Silesia, Frederick’s other major territory grab was West Prussia from
the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772.
Working with his former enemies to their mutual benefit he arranged for the first partition
of Poland, and without a shot being fired, Frederick became King of virtually all of
historical Prussia.
His status as an enlightened despot is well earnt—by the end of Frederick’s reign
the Berlin Academy rivaled institutions in Paris and London and while his forefathers
had all been military men, Frederick was also a skilled diplomat (a callous one), an intellectual,
and a strong proponent of rule of law in a time when crime and punishment was usually
just left to a monarch’s whims.
But in regards to Prussia’s rise, Frederick’s absolute authority was just as important as
his enlightenment ideals.
Constitutionalism, limits on a monarch’s power, were anathema to him, and he looked
down on Prussia’s peasants (most people) until his dying day.
It was Frederick the Great’s successors who built on his legacy and put Prussia at
the centre of the German Empire.
To find out how its enigmatic Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, a disciple of Frederick’s
school of cold pragmatism, controlled the other German states you should really check
out the video on that empire to the left.
And as always, I’ve been James, and hopefully, I’ll see you there.