Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (10 page)

Viewed against the background of the misery and hopelessness of 1640, Brandenburg’s resurgence in the second half of the seventeenth century appears remarkable. By the 1680s, Brandenburg possessed an army with an international reputation whose numbers fluctuated between 20,000 and 30,000.
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It had acquired a small Baltic fleet and even a modest colony on the west coast of Africa. A land bridge across Eastern Pomerania linked the Electorate to the Baltic coast. Brandenburg was a substantial regional power on a par with Bavaria and Saxony, a sought-after ally and a significant element in major peace settlements.

The man who presided over this transformation was Frederick William, known as the ‘Great Elector’ (r. 1640–88). Frederick William is the first Brandenburg Elector of whom numerous portraits survive, most of them commissioned by the sitter himself. They document the changing appearance of a man who spent forty-eight years – longer than any other member of his dynasty – in sovereign office. Depictions from the early years of the reign show a commanding, upright figure with a long face framed by flowing dark hair; in the later images, the body has swollen, the face is bloated and the hair has been replaced by cascades of artificial curls. And yet one thing is common to all the portraits painted from life: intelligent, dark eyes that fix the viewer in a sharp stare.
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When he succeeded his father at the age of twenty, Frederick William had virtually no training or experience in the art of government. He had spent most of his childhood cloistered away in the fortress of Küstrin enclosed by sombre forests, where he was safe from enemy troops. Lessons in modern languages and technical skills such as drawing, geometry and the construction of fortifications were interspersed with the
regular hunting of stag, boar and wildfowl. Unlike his father and grandfather, Frederick William was taught Polish from the age of seven to assist him in conducting relations with the Polish king, feudal overlord of Ducal Prussia. At the age of fourteen, as the military crisis deepened and a wave of epidemics spread across the Mark, he was sent to the
relative safety of the Dutch Republic, where he would spend the next four years of his life.

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Frederick William the Great Elector as Scipio,
painted c. 1660, attrib. to Albert van der Eeckhout

The impact on the prince of these teenage years in the Republic is difficult to ascertain precisely, since he did not keep a diary or write personal memoirs of any kind. His correspondence with his parents confined itself to the exchange of compliments in an extremely distanced and formal diction.
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Yet it is clear that the prince’s Dutch education did reinforce his sense of allegiance to the Calvinist cause. Frederick William was the first Brandenburg Elector to be born of two Calvinist parents, and the composite name Frederick William, a novelty in the history of the House of Hohenzollern, was devised precisely in order to symbolize the bond between Berlin (William was his father’s second name) and the Calvinist Palatinate of his uncle, Frederick V. Only with this generation of the Hohenzollern family did the reorientation launched by the conversion of his grandfather John Sigismund in 1613 come fully into effect. Frederick William consolidated the bond in 1646 by marrying the Dutch Calvinist Louise Henriette, nineteen-year-old daughter of Stadtholder Frederick Henry of Orange.

Frederick Williams’s long sojourn in the Dutch Republic was also influential in other ways. The prince received instruction from professors in law, history and politics at the University of Leiden, a renowned centre of the then fashionable neo-stoical state theory. The prince’s lessons emphasized the majesty of the law, the venerability of the state as the guarantor of order and the centrality of duty and obligation to the office of sovereign. A particular concern of the neo-stoics was the need to subordinate the military to the authority and discipline of the state.
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But it was outside the classroom, in the streets, docks, markets and parade-squares of the Dutch towns that Frederick William learned his most important lessons. In the early seventeenth century, the Republic was at the height of its power and prosperity. Over more than sixty years, this tiny Calvinist country had fought successfully to assert its independence against the military might of Catholic Spain and establish itself as the foremost European headquarters of global trade and colonization. In the process, it had developed a robust fiscal regime and a distinctive military culture with recognizably modern features: the regular and systematic drilling of troops in battleground manoeuvres, a high level of functional differentiation and a disciplined professional officer corps. Frederick William had ample opportunity to observe the military
prowess of the Republic at close hand – he visited his host and relative, Viceroy Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, in the Dutch encampment at Breda in 1637, where the Dutch recaptured a stronghold that had been lost to the Spaniards twelve years before.

Throughout his reign Frederick William strove to remodel his own patrimony in the image of what he had observed in the Netherlands. The training regime adopted by his army in 1654 was based on the drill-book of Prince Maurice of Orange.
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Frederick William remained convinced throughout his reign that ‘navigation and trade are the principal pillars of a state, through which subjects, by sea and by manufactures on land, earn their food and keep.’
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He became obsessed with the idea that the link to the Baltic would enliven and commercialize Brandenburg, bringing the wealth and power that were so conspicuously on display in Amsterdam. In the 1650s and 1660s, he even negotiated international commercial treaties to secure privileged terms of trade for a merchant marine he did not yet possess. In the later 1670s, with the assistance of a Dutch merchant by the name of Benjamin Raule, he acquired a small fleet of ships and became involved in a string of privateering and colonial schemes. In 1680, Raule secured for Brandenburg a share in the west African trade in gold, ivory and slaves by establishing the small colonial fort of Friedrichsburg on the coast of modern-day Ghana.
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It could be said that Frederick William reinvented the Electoral office. Whereas John Sigismund and George William had addressed themselves only sporadically to the business of government, Frederick William worked ‘harder than a secretary’. Contemporaries recognized this as something new and noteworthy. His ministers marvelled at his memory for detail, his sobriety and his ability to sit for an entire day in council dealing with affairs of state.
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Even the imperial ambassador Lisola, no uncritical observer, was struck by the Elector’s conscientiousness: ‘I admire this Elector, who takes delight in long and exceedingly detailed reports and who expressly demands these of his ministers; he reads everything, he resolves and orders everything [… ] and neglects nothing.’
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‘I shall manage my responsibility as prince,’ Frederick William declared, ‘in the knowledge that it is the affair of the people and not mine personally.’
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The words were those of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, but in the mouth of the Elector they signalled a new understanding of the sovereign’s role. It was more than a prestigious title or a bundle of rights and revenues; it was a vocation that should rightly consume the
personality of the ruler. The early histories of the reign established an image of this Elector as the model of an absolute and unstinting dedication to office. His example became a potent icon within the Hohenzollern tradition, a standard that the Elector’s reigning descendants would either emulate or be measured against.

In December 1640, when Frederick William acceded to the throne, Brandenburg was still under foreign occupation. A two-year truce was agreed with the Swedes in July 1641, but the looting, burning and general misbehaviour continued.
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In a letter of spring 1641, the Elector’s viceroy, Margrave Ernest, who carried the responsibility for administering the ruined Mark, offered a grim synopsis:

The country is in such a miserable and impoverished condition that mere words can scarcely convey the sympathy one feels with the innocent inhabitants. In general, We think that the cart has been driven so deep into the muck, as they say, that it cannot be extricated without the special help of the Almighty.
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The strain of overseeing the anarchy unfolding in Brandenburg ultimately proved too much for the margrave, who succumbed to panic attacks, sleeplessness and paranoid delusions. By the autumn of 1642, he had taken to pacing about in his palace muttering to himself, shrieking and throwing himself to the floor. His death on 26 September was ascribed to ‘melancholy’.
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Only in March 1643 did Frederick William return from the relative safety of Königsberg to the ruined city of Berlin, a city he scarcely recognized. Here he found a population depleted and malnourished, and buildings destroyed by fire or in a parlous state of repair.
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The predicament that had bedevilled his father’s reign remained unsolved: Brandenburg had no military force with which to establish its independence. The small army created by Schwarzenberg was already falling apart and there was no money to pay for a replacement. Johann Friedrich von Leuchtmar, a privy councillor and the Elector’s former tutor, summarized Brandenburg’s predicament in a report of 1644: Poland, he predicted, would seize Prussia as soon as it was strong enough; Pomerania was under Swedish occupation and likely to remain so; Kleve in
the west was under the control of the Dutch Republic. Brandenburg stood ‘on the edge of the abyss’.
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In order to restore the independence of his territory and press home his claims, the Elector needed a flexible, disciplined fighting force. The creation of such an instrument became one of the consuming preoccupations of his reign. The Brandenburg campaign army grew dramatically, if somewhat unsteadily, from 3,000 men in 1641–2, to 8,000 in 1643–6, to 25,000 during the Northern War of 1655–60, to 38,000 during the Dutch wars of the 1670s. During the final decade of the Elector’s reign, its size fluctuated between 20,000 and 30,000.
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Improvements in tactical training and armaments modelled on French, Dutch, Swedish and imperial best practice placed the Brandenburg army close to the cutting edge of European military innovation. Pikes and pikemen were phased out and the cumbersome matchlock guns carried by the infantry were replaced by lighter, faster-firing flintlocks. Artillery calibres were standardized to allow for the more flexible and efficient use of field guns, in the style pioneered by the Swedes. The foundation of a cadet school for officer recruits introduced an element of standardized professional formation. Better conditions of employment – including provision for maimed or retired officers – improved the stability of the command structure. These changes in turn improved the cohesion and morale of the non-commissioned ranks, who distinguished themselves in the 1680s by their excellent discipline and low rates of desertion.
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The improvised forces assembled for specific campaigns during the early years of the reign gradually evolved into what one could call a standing army. In April 1655, a General War Commissioner (
General-kriegskommissar
) was appointed to oversee the handling of financial and other resources for the army, on the model of the military administration recently introduced in France under Le Tellier and Louvois. This innovation was initially conceived as a temporary wartime measure and only later established as a permanent feature of the territorial administration. After 1679, under the direction of the Pomeranian nobleman Joachim von Grumbkow, the General War Commissariat extended its reach throughout the Hohenzollern territories, gradually usurping the function of the Estate officials who had traditionally overseen military taxation and discipline at a local level. The General War Commissariat and the Office for the Domains were still relatively small institutions in 1688 when the Elector died, but under his successors they would play a crucial
role in toughening the sinews of central authority in the Brandenburg-Prussian state. This synergy between war-making and the development of state-like central organs was something new; it became possible only when the war-making apparatus was separated from its traditional provincial-aristocratic foundations.

The acquisition of such a formidable military instrument was important, because the decades that followed the end of the Thirty Years War were a period of intense conflict in northern Europe. Two foreign titans overshadowed Brandenburg foreign policy during the Elector’s reign. The first was King Charles X of Sweden, a restless, obsessive figure with expansionist dreams who seemed bent on trumping the record of his illustrious predecessor Gustavus Adolphus. It was Charles X’s invasion of Poland that started the Northern War of 1655–60. His plan was to subdue the Danes and the Poles, occupy Ducal Prussia and then march south at the head of a vast army to sack Rome in the manner of the ancient Goths. Instead, the Swedes became bogged down in a bitter five-year struggle for control of the Baltic littoral.