Brandenburg in the year 1640 was a country in which roughly one out of every two people was dead. The Thirty Years' War, which had been grinding back and forth across central Europe for twenty-two years already and would grind for another eight, had reduced the population of the Mark Brandenburg from approximately three hundred thousand to approximately one hundred and seventy thousand. Whole villages had been abandoned. The capital, Berlin, contained perhaps six thousand inhabitants — a fishing town, basically, with churches and a derelict palace. The countryside was largely sand. The Spree was full of unrecovered corpses. The Hohenzollern elector was a sickly forty-five-year-old man in declining mental health.
This was what Frederick William, twenty years old and known to his subjects almost immediately as the Great Elector, inherited on the 1st of December 1640. He would rule for forty-eight years. In that time he would not make Brandenburg-Prussia rich, but he would make it solvent, defended, religiously tolerant, and — for the first time in its existence — taken seriously by the powers around it. He would also build, almost from nothing, the institution that would dominate European politics for the next two and a half centuries: the Prussian army.
The inheritance
The territories Frederick William had to govern were not a country in any sense familiar to a modern map-reader. They were a collection of scattered fragments, none of them touching, held together only by Hohenzollern dynastic descent. The largest was Brandenburg itself — a flat, sandy electorate around Berlin and the lower Oder. Far away to the east, separated by a long Polish corridor of Polish-ruled Royal Prussia, lay the Duchy of Prussia — still a Polish fief. Far away to the west, on the Rhine, lay the small but unexpectedly prosperous Duchy of Cleves and the County of Mark. There were a few other crumbs: parts of Pomerania, the Lutheran bishopric of Halberstadt, a corner of Magdeburg.
The whole, drawn on a single map, looked less like a country than like spilled coins. To rule it was to live in three time zones at once. To defend it was nearly impossible. Any major continental army could march from one end of Brandenburg to the other in eleven days; the Swedes had done so twice in the previous five years. Any major continental army could march into the Duchy of Prussia at almost no cost; the Polish army had every right to do so, since it was the duchy's overlord.
Frederick William's response to this geography, when he could afford it, was to build forts. When he could not afford it, he made alliances. When he could afford neither, he kept his territories quiet and waited for opportunities. He was a patient man, by Hohenzollern standards, and he understood, in a way that almost no Brandenburg elector before him had understood, that survival was the precondition for everything else.
The army
The Brandenburg army in 1640 consisted of perhaps two thousand men, scattered across fortresses, mostly unpaid. By 1688, the year of Frederick William's death, it numbered around thirty thousand, with proper pay, proper uniforms, proper officers, and — for the first time in the history of the dynasty — proper barracks.
The way the elector built this army is the single most important administrative story of the seventeenth century in Germany. He did it not by recruiting more soldiers but by inventing the apparatus to pay them. He created a central war ministry — the Generalkriegskommissariat — which could levy taxes directly from the towns and the noble estates, bypassing the traditional regional parliaments. He created a permanent professional officer corps, recruited from the lesser nobility and trained in service. He created a quartermaster's department, a logistics office, a military hospital system, and a network of arsenals.
The taxes that paid for all this were, at first, bitterly resisted. The estates of Brandenburg — the local gentry who had traditionally controlled fiscal policy — fought a long quiet war against the elector's centralisation. They lost. By 1660 the major estates had accepted, with grumbling, the principle that taxes for the army would be levied without their consent. By 1680, they had accepted a more important principle: that they themselves would serve as officers in that army, would be educated for the purpose, and would in exchange be granted permanent control of their peasants and an honoured place in the social hierarchy. This bargain — Junker estates traded for officer commissions — is the bargain that would, for two and a half centuries, make Prussia what it was.
Fehrbellin
The army's first real test came on the 28th of June 1675, in a marshy field north of Berlin called Fehrbellin. A Swedish army of around eleven thousand men, having occupied much of Brandenburg while Frederick William was campaigning on the Rhine, was caught in the open by a Brandenburg force of around six thousand cavalry under the elector himself. The battle was small, by the standards of contemporary European warfare. The casualties were small. But the political consequence was enormous: it was the first time Brandenburg had defeated a major European power in open battle. The Swedes — the most-feared army in Europe since Gustavus Adolphus — had been driven from the field by an electorate that, thirty-five years before, had been an exhausted Swedish protectorate.
Frederick William entered Berlin in triumph three weeks later. The court chroniclers gave him the name he would carry into history. Even his enemies began, grudgingly, to use it.
The Huguenots
The Great Elector's most far-sighted single decision, however, was not a military one. It was a refugee policy.
On the 18th of October 1685, Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, ending nearly a century of legal toleration for French Protestants. Within hours, the Huguenots — perhaps four hundred thousand of them, in a France of twenty million — began to leave. They fled to Switzerland, to the Netherlands, to England, to America. Frederick William, in Potsdam, called for a quill.
The Edict of Potsdam was issued nine days after the French revocation. It was a document of almost provocative generosity. It offered French Protestant refugees: free passage to Brandenburg-Prussia by way of state-funded relay houses; ten years' exemption from all taxes; the right to practise their professions without joining the guilds; the right to worship in French; the right to be naturalised by the state on arrival; and grants of houses and land for any who agreed to settle in the depopulated countryside.
Around twenty thousand Huguenots accepted the offer. They were, for a country the size of Brandenburg-Prussia, an enormous demographic injection — perhaps four per cent of the entire population at a stroke. They were also, on average, better educated, richer, and more skilled than the population they joined. They brought silk-weaving to Berlin. They brought velvet-making. They brought goldsmithing, banking, instrument-making, French haute cuisine, watch-making, and — most consequentially — the techniques of large-scale wool manufacture that would, within fifty years, make Berlin the largest textile producer north of Lyon.
One in five Berliners by the year 1700 spoke French at home. The French Cathedral on the Gendarmenmarkt — finished a decade after the Great Elector's death and still standing — is the architectural memorial to this policy. Modern Berlin has Huguenot family names in its phone book. So does Potsdam.
"We will receive these poor people, oppressed for the cause of religion, into our lands, that all the world may know We have ever held it a duty to relieve them." — Edict of Potsdam, 29 October 1685
It is one of the very few moments in European statecraft when a calculated act of self-interest was also a great act of moral seriousness. Brandenburg-Prussia needed people. The Huguenots needed safety. The Great Elector recognised the symmetry and acted on it within nine days. Nine days! It is hard to think of an administrative decision in early-modern Europe taken so quickly that turned out, three centuries later, to have been so right.
The road to a crown
Frederick William died on the 9th of May 1688. He left to his son, Frederick III, a Brandenburg-Prussia that was no longer a junior power among the German states. It was solvent. It had an army of thirty thousand. It had a swollen, partly French capital. It had a defended frontier. It had — in 1660, by the Peace of Oliva — finally freed the Duchy of Prussia from its Polish overlordship, becoming sovereign there for the first time in a hundred and thirty-five years.
What it did not have was a royal title. The Hohenzollerns were electors of Brandenburg, dukes of Prussia, counts of Mark, dukes of Cleves and Magdeburg, princes of Halberstadt, and a dozen lesser things. But of all the German princes ranked above the Empire's free cities, almost all the major ones held a royal title somewhere — the Saxons in Poland, the Hanoverians soon to be in Britain, the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria as electors. Frederick III, an unsteady and slightly absurd man who had been hunched from birth and was vain about almost everything, decided that his country needed a crown.
The story of how he got one — by way of a long, expensive diplomatic negotiation with the Habsburg emperor in Vienna, a freezing winter journey to Königsberg, and a ceremony in a brick chapel on the 18th of January 1701 — is the story of the next chapter. The Great Elector would not have approved of the spectacle. But his son understood something his father had not: that a country, having become serious, must also become legible. And in early-modern Europe, royalty was the most legible language anyone spoke.
End of Chapter IV