Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (13 page)

The most contentious issue of all was taxation. The Estates insisted that monetary and other levies could not legally be raised without prior agreement with their representatives. Yet the increasingly deep involvement of Brandenburg in regional power politics after 1643 meant that the administration’s financial needs could not be satisfied using the traditional fiscal mechanisms.
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During the years 1655–88 the Great Elector’s military expenditures totalled some 54 million thalers. Some of this was covered by foreign subsidies under a succession of alliance compacts. Some derived from the exploitation of the Elector’s own domains, or other sovereign revenues, such as the postal services, coinage
and customs. But these sources together accounted for no more than 10 million thalers. The remainder had to be raised in the form of taxes from the population of the Elector’s territories.
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In Kleve, Ducal Prussia and even in Brandenburg, the heartland of the Hohenzollern patrimony, the Estates resisted the Elector’s efforts to secure new revenues for the army. In 1649, the Brandenburg Estates refused to approve funds for a campaign against the Swedes in Pomerania, despite the Elector’s earnest reminder that all his territories were now ‘limbs of one head’ (
membra unius capitis
) and that Pomerania ought thus to be supported as if it were ‘part of the Electorate’.
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In Kleve, where the wealthy urban patriciate still regarded the Elector as a foreign interloper, the Estates revived the traditional ‘alliance’ with Mark, Jülich and Berg; leading spokesmen even drew parallels with the contemporary upheavals in England and threatened to treat the Elector as the parliamentary party were treating King Charles. Frederick William’s threats to apply ‘military executive actions’ were largely futile, since the Estates were supported by the Dutch garrisons still occupying the duchy.
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In Ducal Prussia, too, the Elector encountered determined resistance. Here the Estates had traditionally ruled the roost, meeting regularly in full session and keeping a tight grip on central and local government, the militia and the territorial finances. The traditional Prussian right of appeal to the Polish Crown meant that they could not easily be bullied into cooperating.
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It was the outbreak of the Northern War of 1655–60 that brought the confrontation over revenues to a head. First, coercion and force were used to break resistance. Annual levies were raised unilaterally and extracted by military ‘executive action’ – especially in Kleve, where the annual contribution rose more sharply during the war years than anywhere else in the Elector’s lands. Leading Estates activists were intimidated or arrested.
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Protests were ignored. In the struggle over revenues, the Elector benefited from changes in the broader legal environment that helped to undermine the pretensions of the provincial elites. In 1654, under pressure from the German Electors, most of whom were locked in conflicts of one kind or another with their Estates, the Emperor decreed that the subjects of sovereigns within the Holy Roman Empire were ‘obliged obediently to give the necessary assistance to their Princes [… ] for the support and occupation of fortified places and garrisons’. While it is perhaps an exaggeration to describe this document
as the ‘Magna Carta of absolutism’, the decree of 1654 was an important point of departure. It signalled the advent across the Holy Roman Empire of a political climate unfavourable to the assertion of corporate rights.
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Of all the conflicts over Estates’ rights, the one in Ducal Prussia was the most bitter. Here too, the outbreak of the Northern War was the catalyst for confrontation. The Elector summoned the Prussian Diet in April 1655 but even in August, when the threat posed by Sweden was evident, the Estates refused to promise more than 70,000 thalers – a small sum if one bears in mind that poorer and less populous Brandenburg was at this time providing an annual military contribution of 360,000 thalers.
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The situation changed dramatically in the winter of 1655 when Frederick William and his army arrived in Königsberg. Forced payments soon became the rule and the annual military contribution rose sharply to an average of 600,000 thalers over the years 1655–9. A string of administrative reforms was put in place that allowed the Elector to circumvent the Estates. The most important were the foundation of the War Commissariat, with extensive fiscal and confisca-tory powers, and the installation of an Electoral viceroy, Prince Boguslav Radziwill, whose task was to oversee the powerful and independent Supreme Councillors (
Oberraäte
), who had traditionally ruled Prussia on behalf of the Estates.

With the issue of his full sovereignty resolved by the Treaty of Wehlau (1657) and the Peace of Oliva (1660), the Elector was determined to achieve a lasting settlement with the Prussian Estates. But the Estates contested the validity of the treaties, arguing that changes to the constitutional machinery of the province could only be made on the basis of trilateral negotiations between the Elector, the Ducal Prussian Estates and the Polish Crown.
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During the year-long Great Diet convened in Königsberg in May 1661, the Estates unfolded a far-reaching programme of demands including a permanent right of appeal to the Polish Crown, the removal of all Electoral troops except for a few coastal garrisons, the exclusion of non-Prussians from official posts, regular diets, and automatic Polish mediation in all disputes between the Estates and the Elector. It proved extremely difficult to reach an agreement over these issues, the more so as the mood among the citizenry of Königsberg grew steadily more restless and intransigent. In order to insulate the
negotiations from the turbulence in the ducal capital, the Elector’s minister, Otto von Schwerin, ordered that the diet be moved southwards to the more tranquil setting of Bartenstein in October 1661. Only after March 1662, when a mission to Warsaw failed to secure concrete assistance from Poland, did the corporate nobility begin to back down.

5. A view of the city of Königsberg
(c.
1690
)

In the meanwhile, the mood of the city had grown more radical, following a pattern that can also be observed in other parts of Europe. There were daily protest meetings. One of the foremost activists for urban corporate rights was Hieronymus Roth, a merchant and president of the court of aldermen of Kneiphof, one of the three ‘cities’ of old Königsberg. Hoping to persuade Roth to adopt a more moderate position, Otto von Schwerin invited him to a private meeting at the ducal castle in Königsberg on 26 May 1661. But the encounter went horribly wrong. According to a report by Schwerin, Roth adopted a seditious and confrontational tone, declaring among other things that ‘every prince, be he ever so pious, bears a tyrant in his breast’ – words that would later be cited in the alderman’s indictment. Roth for his part recalled that he had defended the ancient liberties of Königsberg in a polite and reasonable way – it was Schwerin who had flown into a rage and threatened him with raised arm.
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Despite a sustained campaign of harassment, Roth continued to agitate against the Electoral administration, protected by a city government that refused to arrest him or limit his activities. He travelled to Warsaw,
where he met with the King of Poland, presumably in order to discuss the possibility of Polish support for the Estates. In the last week of October 1661, the Elector ran out of patience and entered Königsberg with 2,000 troops. Roth was arrested, tried, summarily convicted by an Electoral Commission and imprisoned in the fortress of Peitz, far away in Cottbus, a Hohenzollern enclave in Electoral Saxony. The prison regime was not particularly arduous in the early years – Roth was served six-course lunches, had comfortably appointed rooms and was allowed to take walks along the upper walls of the fortress.

New restrictions were imposed in 1668, however, when it was discovered that he had been carrying on a secret correspondence with his stepson in Königsberg, in which he railed against the ‘arrogant Calvinists’ who now governed his city on behalf of the Elector. The go-between who had conveyed his letters, a Königsberg-born soldier serving on the fortress garrison, was also punished. Frederick William had initially declared that he would release Roth if the latter would acknowledge his ‘guilt’, show true remorse and beg for mercy. But Roth stuck to his guns, objecting that he had acted not from any ill will but out of duty to his ‘Fatherland’. After the scandal of the intercepted letters, the Elector resolved that the turbulent alderman should never be released. Only some years later, at the age of seventy, did Roth write to Frederick William begging for his liberation and commending himself as the Elector’s ‘loyal and obedient subject’.
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But there was no pardon and the alderman died in his fortress in the summer of 1678, after seventeen years in confinement.

The imprisonment of Hieronymus Roth cleared the way for an interim settlement with the Prussian Estates. There were further clashes over taxation in the early 1670s, during which troops were called in to enforce payment. In January 1672 there was even a political execution in Ducal Prussia – the only one of the Elector’s reign.
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But the Prussians did eventually come to accept the Elector’s sovereignty and the fiscal regime that came with it. By the 1680s, the political rule of the Prussian Estates had come to an end, leaving nothing but nostalgic dreams of the ‘still unforgotten blissfulness, liberty and peaceful tranquillity’ they had enjoyed under the mild overlordship of the kings of Poland.
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The Electoral administration gradually extended its independence from the provincial elites. Since the Elector owned nearly one-third of Brandenburg and about half of Ducal Prussia, he could greatly expand his revenue base simply by improving the administration of the crown domains. During the Second Northern War, the management of these properties was streamlined under the oversight of the new Office for the Domains (
Amtskammer
). A further important step was the excise tax, an indirect duty on goods and services introduced piecemeal in the towns of Brandenburg during the late 1660s and later extended to Pomerania, Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Ducal Prussia. After local disputes over the mode of its collection, the excise was placed under the control of centrally directed tax commissioners (
Steuerraäte
), who soon began to accumulate other administrative functions. The excise was an important tactical asset because it divided the different corporate elements within the Estates against each other and thus weakened them
vis-à-vis
the central administration. Since the excise applied only to the towns, it placed rural enterprises at a competitive advantage over their urban rivals and enabled the Elector to milk the commercial wealth of the regions without alienating the powerful landed families.

Frederick William also reinforced his authority by appointing Calvinists to key administrative offices. This was not just a matter of religious preference – it was a policy consciously directed against the pretensions of the Lutheran Estates. Several of Frederick William’s most senior officials were foreign Calvinist princes. The long-serving viceroy of Kleve, John Moritz von Nassau-Siegen, fell into this category, as did Count (later Prince) George Frederick von Waldeck, the flamboyant ruler of a minor Westphalian principality who had served in the Dutch army and became the most influential minister of the first half of the reign. Another was John George II of Anhalt, commander of the 1672 campaign and sometime viceroy of Brandenburg. The Polish-Lithuanian Prince Boguslav Radziwill, appointed as viceroy in Ducal Prussia during the Second Northern War, was another imperial Calvinist grandee. The Brandenburg minister Otto von Schwerin, leading office-holder at the Berlin court after 1658, was a Pomeranian nobleman who had converted to Calvinism and whose activities on the Elector’s behalf included the
buying up of noble estates and their incorporation into the crown domains. In all, some two-thirds of senior office-holders appointed during the Great Elector’s reign were of the Reformed faith.
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The use of foreign officials was another important development; in Brandenburg, scarcely any of the leading ministers appointed after 1660 was actually a native of the Electorate. The employment of gifted commoners (mainly lawyers) in the upper echelons of the civilian and military administrations widened the gap between government organs and the provincial elites. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Junker nobility of the Brandenburg hinterland had become a marginal presence within the nascent Hohenzollern bureaucracy, a trend accelerated by the deteriorating financial condition of an elite that was slow to recover from the disruptions of the Thirty Years War. Of all the appointments made to senior court, diplomatic and military posts between the accession of Elector Frederick William in 1640 and that of his grandson Frederick the Great one hundred years later, only 10 per cent went to members of the Brandenburg noble landowning class.
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What emerged as they retreated was a new office-holding type, less bound to the provincial nobilities than to the monarch and his administration.