Frederick I

Elector of Brandenburg (r. 1688-1713) and king of Prussia (r. 1701-1713)

• Born: July 11, 1657
• Birthplace: Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia)
• Died: February 25, 1713
• Place of death: Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany)

Building on the achievements of his father, Frederick I continued to strengthen the army, to centralize the administration of his possessions, and to support Prussian cultural achievements. He enhanced Prussia’s position, obtaining additional jurisdictional powers at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire.

Early Life

Frederick I was the third son of Frederick William, the Great Elector, and of Louisa Henrietta of Orange-Nassau. As the result of an accident during infancy, Frederick had a deformed spine. His mother did her best to comfort the frail and asthmatic child, supervising his education and introducing him to the arts. She arranged for excellent tutors, notably Otto von Schwerin and Eberhard von Danckelmann. Danckelmann would serve as Frederick’s principal adviser until he fell out of favor in 1697. When Frederick’s mother died in 1667 and his father married Dorothea of Holstein-Glücksburg, Frederick’s position at court took a turn for the worse, as his new stepmother sought to promote the interests of her own children.

When Frederick’s older brother, apparently his father’s favorite, died in the course of a military campaign in 1674, the physically unimpressive Frederick became the crown prince. Still, relations between father and son remained cold and distant. To escape the hostile environment at court—his scheming stepmother allegedly had tried to poison him—Frederick spent a considerable amount of time away from home and returned only when his father’s health was deteriorating.

After his first wife died in 1683, Frederick married the sixteen-year-old Sophia Charlotte of Hanover. Although intelligent and witty, she was also openly contemptuous of her new environment and of the culture of the Hohenzollern court. In 1688, the Great Elector died after a lengthy illness, and Frederick now assumed the duties of the elector of Brandenburg as Frederick III.

Life’s Work

Frederick’s principal goal was to enhance the importance of his far-flung, disjointed possessions and forge them into a kingdom. Building on the financial and military legacy of his father, he strove to strengthen his army and to centralize his administration. He had a strong sense of loyalty to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Leopold I, and participated in several military ventures directed against the ambitions of Louis XIV of France.

Although Frederick’s well-trained troops performed with distinction in the Wars of the League of Augsburg, he was to be disappointed when the members of the Grand Alliance offered him only minor territorial awards at the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. Moreover, although he engaged in lengthy negotiations with the emperor over a royal title, he made little progress in actually acquiring such a title, a fact that contributed to the fall of his trusted adviser Danckelmann. Obtaining a royal title became all the more urgent when the elector of Saxony converted to Roman Catholicism and thereby became king of Poland.

An opportunity arose when, following the death of Charles II of Spain in 1700, Leopold I claimed the throne of Spain for Austria. The emperor needed Prussia’s troops in the coming conflict, which became known as the War of the Spanish Succession. Appreciative of the eight thousand well-trained Prussian soldiers with which he was provided, Leopold consented to Frederick’s assumption of a royal title. Prince Eugene of Savoy, for one, recognized the potential ramifications of a new kingdom in the north and suggested that those who had advised Leopold to agree to Frederick’s request should all be hanged.

In 1701, Frederick staged an elaborate coronation ceremony in Königsberg with all the pomp and splendor befitting a baroque prince. However, the new King Frederick I was only allowed to call himself “king in Prussia,” because West Prussia was still part of Poland: His royal title was based on the Duchy of Prussia, which lay outside the Holy Roman Empire and was a sovereign territory ruled by the Hohenzollerns. Frederick also emphasized his independence from the Church by placing the crown on his head with his own hands before he similarly crowned the electress.

Compared to the meager territorial gains he made—rewards for his substantial military contributions—Frederick’s efforts to raise the cultural level of Brandenburg Prussia met with far greater success. The University of Halle, now a center of Pietism, would train future administrators committed to serving the public good in the spirit of a tolerant Christianity. Here, August Hermann Francke introduced numerous reforms that had a significant impact on the future development of education in Prussia. The university attracted scholars such as the international jurist Christian Thomasius, who argued that an enlightened absolutist ruler’s only duty was to rule for the well-being of his subjects.

In 1696, Frederick founded the Prussian Academy of Arts, which attracted the Gdańsk sculptor Andreas Schlueter, the architect of the Charlottenburg Palace. A few years later, Frederick created a society of sciences under the leadership of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had been called to Berlin on the urging of Sophia Charlotte. Another of the many distinguished personages at his court was the international jurist Samuel von Pufendorf, who made major contributions in the field of historiography.

Unfortunately, all these efforts, as well as the increasingly costly trappings of royal power, required substantial funds, which had to be obtained as subsidies from other powers. Following the dismissal of the fiscally conservative Danckelmann, Frederick’s administration was marked by gross mismanagement, wasteful projects, and a series of corrupt officials. These officials took advantage of a king who seemed to be more interested in maintaining a splendid representational court than in the day-to-day operations of his government, resulting in an ever-worsening financial situation.

After the death of Sophia Charlotte in 1705, Frederick, apparently prompted by fears that Crown Prince Frederick William might not be able to produce any more offspring, decided to marry the twenty-three-year-old Sophia Louisa of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. As it turned out, the birth of a grandson, the later Frederick the Great, soon laid his fears to rest. However, the worsening financial situation in the country, exacerbated by bad harvests and the outbreak of the plague in East Prussia in 1709, resulted in a major crisis, which the government was powerless to meet. During the last year of his life, Frederick’s health rapidly deteriorated and he died at age fifty-five with his son and successor at his bedside.

Significance

Compared to the achievements of his father, as well as those of his son and of his grandson, Frederick I’s record appears to be modest. Obsessed with maintaining the image of a proper Baroque prince in the style of Louis XIV of France, “crooked Fritz,” as the Berliners called the small hunchbacked man, relied on foreign subsidies, greatly limiting his freedom of action. Still, although often poorly served by corrupt officials and pursuing ruinous financial policies, he managed to achieve all of his major objectives.

Acquiring a royal crown clearly enhanced the prestige of Prussia, while establishing primogeniture protected the indispensable foundations for the future growth of Prussia under his son, the so-called Soldier King. Assisted by Sophia Charlotte, he helped to elevate the cultural level of Prussia by attracting intellectuals, artists, and architects to his court. By extending his royal patronage to universities and academies and by supporting the creation of a variety of educational institutions, Frederick had a decisive impact on the future growth and development of Prussia.

Bibliography

Dwyer, Philip G., ed. The Rise of Prussia, 1700-1830. Harlow, Essex, England: Pearson Education, 2000. Of particular interest in this collection is the essay by Christopher Clark, which analyzes Frederick’s role in the establishment of Pietism in Prussia and its influence on society and its institutions.

Fischer-Fabian, S. Prussia’s Glory: The Rise of a Military State. Translated by Lore Segal and Paul Stern. New York: Macmillan, 1981. The first three chapters of this lively account offer a good description of Frederick’s efforts to obtain a royal crown and of the general nature of his rule. Useful genealogical and chronological tables.

Frey, Linda, and Marsha Frey. Frederick I: The Man and His Times. Boulder, Colo.: Eastern European Monographs, 1984. Based on extensive archival research, this comprehensive biography of Frederick differs from earlier highly critical assessment by offering a more balanced treatment of Frederick. Excellent discussion of Frederick’s foreign policy. Extensive notes but no bibliography.

Gawthrop, Richard L. Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth Century Prussia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Offers an excellent analysis of the evolution of the Hohenzollern state under Frederick I and of the reform efforts of August Hermann Francke. Comprehensive bibliography.

Koch, H. W. A History of Prussia. New York: Longman, 1978. This general history of Prussia offers a concise and thoughtful treatment of Frederick as elector and king. Contains excellent maps and genealogical tables.

Neumann, Hans-Joachim. Friedrich I. Berlin: Quintessenz Verlag, 2001. This volume focuses on Frederick’s contributions towards raising the cultural and intellectual level of his kingdom, including his impact on the architecture of Berlin. The author, a professor of medicine at Humboldt University in Berlin who has written extensively on the Hohenzollern dynasty, also analyzes Frederick’s various afflictions.