Frederick William, the Great Elector

Prussian military leader and ruler

• Born: February 16, 1620
• Birthplace: Berlin, Brandenburg-Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: May 9, 1688
• Place of death: Potsdam, near Berlin, Brandenburg-Prussia (now in Germany)

Frederick William was the first gifted ruler of the Hohenzollern family. He was the founder of the Prussian army and bureaucracy, and laid the basis for the future strength of the Brandenburg-Prussian state.

Early Life

Frederick William was born in Berlin, the son of the elector of Brandenburg George William of the House of Hohenzollern, and Elizabeth Charlotte, the granddaughter of William I of the House of Orange. Frederick William’s early years were clouded by Brandenburg’s financial exhaustion and military vulnerability during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). When the electorate of Brandenburg was threatened by Albrecht Wenzel von Wallenstein’s imperial soldiers, Frederick William, then seven years old, was moved for safety into the fortress of Küstrin. For five years, he remained at the fortress, growing both physically and intellectually under the direction of his Rhenish tutor. When Frederick William was fourteen, he was sent to continue his education in the security of the Netherlands, where his relative, Frederick Henry of Orange was stadtholder.

Frederick William became elector of Brandenburg upon his father’s death on December 1, 1640. The prospects of the twenty-year-old elector were dim. His territories had been devastated by the Thirty Years’ War, the population of Brandenburg had been cut nearly in half, agriculture and commerce had collapsed, and much of his land was occupied by foreign armies. The local estates in all the elector’s territories continued their resistance to any increase in taxation or strengthening of the central government. This sad state was compounded by the fact that the army that was passed on to the young elector consisted of only five thousand largely worthless men.

Life’s Work

Even before his father’s hated Catholic adviser Adam von Schwarzenberg died in March, 1641, Frederick William reappointed Schwarzenberg’s Lutheran and Calvinist opponents to the Privy Council. To these the new elector added his young and energetic friends, Conrad von Burgsdorf, Joachim Friedrich von Blumenthal, Count Georg Friedrich von Waldeck, and Otto von Schwerin. In the face of overwhelming Swedish power, Frederick William placed his army on the defensive. At the same time that he sought an armistice with the Swedes, he purged the chaff from his army and, with a remaining core of about twenty-five hundred men, began rebuilding his army numerically and morally. By the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the force had grown to almost eight thousand disciplined, loyal, and well-paid men. This credible army won respect for Brandenburg in the deliberations leading to the Treaty of Westphalia.

Frederick William, at the beginning of his reign, had gone to Warsaw and given homage to Władysław IV Vasa to ensure his status in the duchy of Prussia, which was held as a fief of Poland. He then went to Königsberg and, after confirming the traditional rights of the Prussian Estates, received their support. After winning a truce with Sweden in July, 1641, he attempted to gain Swedish-occupied Pomerania and the Baltic coast by marrying the Swedish queen Christina. Rebuffed by her, Frederick William in 1646 turned to the Netherlands, from which he gained an alliance and a wife, Louise Henriette, the daughter of Frederick Henry of Orange.

At Westphalia in 1648, Frederick William was able to win legal recognition for his fellow Calvinists and the termination of the princes’ right to compel religious conformity. He failed, however, to secure his claim to all of Pomerania. The Swedes retained western Pomerania and the port of Stettin, while Frederick William received only the eastern half and the lesser port of Colberg. He did receive some compensating parcels of territory, including Minden and a future claim to Magdeburg, which contributed to the expansion and strengthening of Brandenburg.

During the Northern War between Sweden and Poland, Frederick William pursued a vacillating and self-serving course, switching from neutrality to the side of Sweden and finally to that of Poland. As a result of these maneuvers, he was able to win from Poland the recognition of his sovereignty in Prussia, which was confirmed in the Treaty of Oliva in 1660. With his expanded army, which had grown to twenty-seven thousand men during the war, and the recognition of sovereignty in Prussia, which lay outside the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick William increased his stature to that of a European sovereign.

Realizing the importance of his army for both his external and internal policies, Frederick William maintained a strong standing force in peace time, which could be doubled in size at time of war. The elector’s army in 1686 numbered thirty thousand, second only to the Austrian army among the German states. During peace, the soldiers were utilized for public-works projects, such as the construction of the canal linking the Oder and Elbe rivers, which made Berlin the center of transportation in north Central Europe. Frederick William established for the army a central command, which developed into a permanent general staff. The officials and bureaus, which he initiated to provide financial support for the army, developed into a centralized and professional bureaucracy.

State interest and shifting alliances continued to characterize Frederick William’s subsequent military policy but with much less success than in the Northern War. During the Franco-Dutch Wars, Frederick William ran Louis XIV’s Swedish allies out of western Pomerania, winning for himself the appellation “Great” for his victory at Fehrbellin on June 28, 1675. However, he was betrayed at the peace conference by his Dutch and imperial allies. Forced to return his conquests, the great elector turned to the French, until he was repelled by Louis’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and Louis’s increasingly aggressive anti-German policy.

If the Northern War raised Frederick William’s external status, it also enabled him to augment his power within his territories and advance the cause of centralization. When he assumed the electorship, Frederick William had conciliated the local estates. Taking advantage of the unsettled foreign scene in 1653, he was able to extract a six-year tax grant from a united Diet of the Brandenburg Estates. In 1655, at the outbreak of the Northern War, when the Brandenburg Estates refused an additional tax, Frederick William used his army to collect his desired tax and to extort additional funds from the chastened estates. When the six-year tax of 1653 expired in the middle of the war, Frederick William merely continued to collect the tax, and never again called together the Brandenburg Diet.

Frederick William coopted the district directors, who had acted as elected representatives of the estates, by simultaneously appointing them war commissioners. These local administrative officers were thus gradually transformed into loyal agents of the central government. He also appointed war-tax commissioners to collect taxes in the towns. These officials gradually took total control over the town administration and thus destroyed the self-government that the towns had exercised. The western territories of Kleve and Mark were able to resist this centralizing destruction of local traditional rights and representation somewhat more successfully than Brandenburg, but Frederick William asserted his right to station troops permanently in those territories, and their estates, though they continued to meet, did grant the taxes requested by the elector.

It was in eastern Prussia that the struggle between Frederick William and the estates was most bitter. The estates there had won broad rights by appealing to the kings of Poland against their Hohenzollern dukes. The Prussian estates claimed that these privileges recognized by Frederick William in 1640 had not been erased by the Treaty of Oliva. Frederick William’s close associate Otto von Schwerin summoned a Great Diet and offered to recognize most of the privileges of the estates in return for their recognition of the elector’s sovereignty. The estates, led by Hieronymus Roth, a leading magistrate of Königsberg, rejected the offer. Eventually Frederick William himself went to Königsberg and had Roth arrested and tried before a special commission. Despite pleas for clemency, Frederick William condemned Roth to life imprisonment. Persuaded by Frederick William’s forcefulness, the estates in 1663 recognized his sovereignty and in return had their privileges confirmed.

The next Diet, which met in 1669, haggled over the elector’s tax request. This Diet, however, was cowed when another leading dissident, Christian Ludwig von Kalckstein, was executed for treason. After 1680, Frederick William collected a regular military tax from Prussia through a rural land tax and an excise tax in Königsberg. With city and countryside divided, the estates atrophied and in 1705 ceased to function.

Significance

Frederick William, the Great Elector, was the first truly gifted Hohenzollern ruler. He laid the foundations for the greatness of Brandenburg-Prussia. When he became elector in 1640, he faced a formidable challenge. He had to establish internal order and to secure his territories against predatory foreign powers. He also had to build a credible military from practically nothing. With the army, he secured Brandenburg against outsiders and asserted the authority of the central government over the defenders of local interests and rights. Having forcibly asserted his power to tax at will, he was able to expand his army and enlarge the state’s developing bureaucracy. He ran roughshod over traditional rights but did establish the order and security craved by many of his subjects after the calamity of the Thirty Years’ War, and he laid the foundations of later Prussian absolutism.

Bibliography

Carsten, F. L. The Origins of Prussia. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1954. Carsten’s book is a first-rate scholarly study, more than one-third of which is devoted to Frederick William and his accomplishments. Carsten details the elector’s use of his army to replace the power of the provincial Landtag with his own absolute authority.

Fay, Sidney Bradshaw. The Rise of Brandenburg-Prussia to 1786. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1937. This is an excellent introduction to and summary of Prussian history, including the reign of Frederick William. Fay clearly summarizes both internal and external developments under Frederick William and describes the bureaucracy the elector developed.

Holborn, Hajo. A History of Modern Germany. Vol. 2. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. In this second of his three-volume history of Germany, Holborn gives a brief but perceptive overview of Frederick William’s career and achievements.

Koch, H. W. A History of Prussia. New York: Longman, 1978. Koch presents an uncritical and rather old-fashioned treatment of Prussian history. The chapter on Frederick William emphasizes that while he did not make Prussia a great power, he laid the foundation for future Prussian greatness.

McKay, Derek. The Great Elector: Frederick William of Brandenburg-Prussia. New York: Longman, 2001. The first English biography in fifty years, McKay’s study does not view Frederick William as a precursor to Frederick the Great. Instead, McKay describes Frederick William as a product of his time—an unusually tough and opportunistic ruler able to overcome the hostility of local nobles and surrounding nations.

Nelson, Walter Henry. The Soldier Kings: The House of Hohenzollern. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970. Nelson’s study of the Hohenzollerns is intended for general readers. The work stresses the improbable accomplishments of the elector, laying the basis for a great state in his poor, sparsely populated, disjointed, and exposed territories.

Schevill, Ferdinand. The Great Elector. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947. Schevill is largely noncritical and laudatory, excusing Frederick William’s deviousness and violation of traditional privileges. Schevill maintains that Frederick William’s willfulness and brutal pursuit for additional power were justified by the end result: the groundwork for the modern Prussian state.

Shennan, Margaret. The Rise of Brandenburg-Prussia. New York: Routledge, 1995. Surveys the rise of Prussia from the early seventeenth century until 1740, focusing and evaluating the role of its rulers, Frederick William and his two successors.