With Fehrbellin, moreover, a bond was forged between history and legend. The battle became a fixture in memory. The dramatist Heinrich von Kleist chose it as the setting for his play Der Prinz von Homburg, a fanciful variation on the historical record, in which an impulsive military commander faces a death sentence for having led a victorious charge against the Swedes despite orders to hold back, but is pardoned by the Elector once he has accepted his culpability. To the Brandenburgers and Prussians of posterity, Frederick William’s predecessors would remain shadowy, antique figures imprisoned within a remote past. By contrast, the ‘Great Elector’ would be elevated to the status of a three-dimensional founding father, a transcendent personality who both symbolized and bestowed meaning upon the history of a state.
ALLIANCES
‘Alliances are certainly good,’ Frederick William wrote in 1667, ‘but a force of one’s own, that one can confidently rely on, is better. A ruler is not treated with respect unless he has his own troops and resources. It is these, thank God, that have made me important since I have had them.’24 There was much truth in these reflections, composed for the edification of the Elector’s son and successor. By the end of the Second Northern War, Frederick William was a man to be reckoned with. He was an attractive alliance partner who could command substantial subsidies. He also participated as a principal in major regional peace treaties – a distinction that had been denied to his predecessors.
But the army was just one factor in Brandenburg’s recovery and expansion after 1640. Even before he possessed an armed force capable of tipping the scales in regional conflicts, Frederick William was able to secure major territorial gains simply by playing the international system. It was only thanks to French backing that Brandenburg emerged in such a strong position from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The French, who were looking for a German client state to support their designs against Austria, helped Frederick William thrash out a compromise agreement with Sweden (a French ally), under which Brandenburg received the eastern portion of Pomerania (excluding the river Oder). Then France and Sweden joined forces in pressing the Emperor to compensate Brandenburg for the still Swedish portion of Pomerania by granting it lands from the former bishoprics of Halberstadt, Minden and Magdeburg. These were by far the most significant acquisitions of Frederick William’s long reign. After 1648, a swathe of Hohenzollern territory swept in a broad curve from the western borders of the Altmark up to the eastern end of the Pomeranian coastline – the gap between the central agglomeration of territories and Ducal Prussia narrowed to less than 120 kilometres. For the first time in its history, Brandenburg was bigger than neighbouring Saxony. It was now the second largest German territory after the Habsburg monarchy. And all this was achieved without discharging a single musket, at a time when Brandenburg’s tiny armed force still counted for little.
The same point can be made in connection with the acquisition of full sovereignty over Ducal Prussia in 1657. To be sure: the Elector’s army expanded to 25,000 men in the course of the Northern War of 1655–60. By fighting first on the Swedish and then on the Polish-imperial side, the Elector was able to prevent the powers engaged in the conflict from shutting him out of his exposed eastern duchy. After the victory at Warsaw in 1656, Charles X abandoned his plan to occupy Ducal Prussia as a Swedish fief and agreed to concede full sovereignty to Brandenburg. But once the Swedes had been driven back into Denmark, this promise became meaningless – Ducal Prussia was no longer theirs to give. The trick now was to get the Poles to follow suit and grant full sovereignty in their turn. Here again, the Elector was the beneficiary of international developments beyond his control. A crisis in relations between the Polish Crown and the Russian Tsar meant that the lands of the Commonwealth were exposed to Russian assaults. The King of Poland, John Casimir, was thus eager to separate Brandenburg from Sweden and to neutralize it as a military threat.
By a further coincidence, Emperor Ferdinand III died in April 1657, meaning that Frederick William could trade his Electoral vote for concessions over Ducal Prussia. The Habsburgs duly pressed the Polish king to grant the Elector’s demand for sovereignty over Ducal Prussia, urgings that carried considerable weight, since the Poles were counting on Austrian assistance in the event of a renewed Swedish or Russian attack. In a secret treaty signed at Wehlau on 1 September 1657, the Poles agreed to cede Ducal Prussia to the Elector ‘with absolute power and without the previous impositions’. The Elector promised in turn to help John Casimir against Sweden.25 Nothing could better illustrate the intricacy and geographical scope of the mechanisms that shaped Brandenburg’s opportunities. The fact that Frederick William had by now assembled sufficient troops under his command to be a useful ally was an important enabling factor in this outcome, but it was the international system rather than the Elector’s own efforts that settled the question of sovereignty in his favour.
Conversely, the unilateral application of military force – even when it was successful in military terms – was of little avail in cases where Brandenburg’s objectives were not underwritten by the broader dynamics of the international system. In 1658–9, Frederick William commanded an extremely successful joint Austrian-Polish-Brandenburg campaign against the Swedes. There was a long chain of successful military assaults, first in Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland and later in Pomerania. By the time the campaign of 1659 was over, Brandenburg troops controlled virtually all of Swedish Pomerania, excluding only the coastal cities of Stralsund and Stettin. But these successes did not suffice to secure the Elector a permanent foothold in the disputed portion of his Pomeranian inheritance. France intervened in support of Sweden, and the Peace of Oliva (3 May 1660) largely confirmed the concessions agreed at Wehlau three years before. Brandenburg thus gained nothing from the Elector’s involvement in the alliance against Sweden, apart from broader international recognition of his sovereign status in Prussia. Here was a further lesson, if any were needed, in the primacy of the system over the forces at the disposal of one of its lesser members.
Exactly the same thing happened after the victory over Sweden at Fehrbellin in 1675. In the course of an exhausting four-year campaign, the Elector succeeded in driving every last Swede out of Western Pomerania. But even this was not enough to place him in possession of his claim, for Louis XIV had no intention of leaving his Swedish ally at Brandenburg’s mercy. France, whose powers were waxing as the Dutch Wars came to an end, insisted that the conquered Pomeranian territories should be restored in their entirety to Sweden. Vienna agreed: the Habsburg Emperor had no desire to see ‘the rise of a new king of the Vandals on the Baltic’; he preferred a weak Sweden to a strong Brandenburg.26 In June 1679, after much impotent raging, the Elector finally renounced the claim he had fought so hard for and authorized his envoy to sign the Peace of St Germain with France.
This dispiriting conclusion to a long struggle was yet another reminder that Brandenburg was still, for all its efforts and accomplishments, a small player in a world where the big players decided the important outcomes. Frederick William had been able with some success to exploit the shifting balance of power in a regional conflict between Poland and Sweden, but he was out of his depth in a struggle in which great-power interests were more directly engaged.
Playing the system effectively meant being on the right side at the right moment, and this in turn implied a readiness to switch allegiances when an existing commitment became burdensome or inopportune. Throughout the late 1660s and early 1670s, the Elector oscillated frantically between France and Austria. In January 1670, a three-year train of negotiations and agreements culminated in a ten-year treaty with France. In the summer of 1672, however, when the French attacked the Dutch Republic, invading and plundering Kleve in the process, the Elector turned instead to Emperor Leopold in Vienna. A treaty was signed in late June 1672, by which it was agreed that Brandenburg and the Emperor would conduct a joint campaign to safeguard the western borders of the Holy Roman Empire against French aggression. In the summer of 1673,
however, the Elector was once again in alliance discussions with France; by the autumn of the same year he was already gravitating back towards a new anti-French coalition centred on a triple alliance between Emperor Leopold, the Dutch and the Spaniards. The same pattern of rapid alternation can be observed during the last years of Frederick William’s reign. There was a succession of alliances with France (October 1679, January 1682, January 1684), yet at the same time a Brandenburg contingent was sent to assist in the relief of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. In August 1685, moreover, Frederick William signed a treaty with the Dutch Republic whose terms were largely directed against France (while at the same time assuring the French of his loyalty and pressing them to keep up with their subsidy payments).
‘[It is] in the nature of alliances,’ the Austrian military strategist Count Montecuccoli sagely observed, ‘that they are dissolved at the slightest inconvenience.’27 But even in an era that saw alliances as short-term fixes, the ‘feverish inconstancy’ (Wechselfieber) of the Elector seemed remarkable. There was method in the madness, however. In order to pay for his growing army, Frederick William needed foreign subsidies. Frequent alliance-switching forced would-be partners into a bidding war and thereby pushed up the going price for an alliance. The rapid alternation of alliances also reflected the complexity of Brandenburg’s security needs. The integrity of the western territories depended on good relations with France and the United Provinces. The integrity of Ducal Prussia depended on good relations with Poland. The safety of Brandenburg’s entire Baltic littoral depended on holding the Swedes at bay. The maintenance of the Elector’s status and the pursuit of his inheritance claims within the Empire depended upon good (or at least functional) relations with the Emperor. All these threads crossed at various points to form a neural net generating unpredictable and rapidly shifting outcomes.
Although this problem was particularly acute in the reign of the Great Elector, it did not go away after his death. Again and again, Prussian sovereigns and statesmen would face agonizing choices between conflicting alliance commitments. It was a predicament that placed considerable strain on the decision-making networks close to the throne. During the winter of 1655–6, for example, as the Elector pondered which side to back in the opening phase of the Northern War, ‘Swedish’ and ‘Polish’ factions formed among the ministers and advisers and even the Elector’s own family. The resulting mood of uncertainty and indecision prompted one of the Elector’s most powerful councillors to the observation that the Elector and his advisers ‘want what they didn’t want and do what they didn’t think they would do’28 – a charge that had also been laid at the feet of George William and would be made against various later Brandenburg sovereigns. The periodic disintegration of the policy-making establishment into factions supporting rival options would remain one of the structural constants of Prussian politics.
In switching thus from partner to partner, the Elector followed the advice of the Pomeranian Calvinist Privy Councillor Paul von Fuchs, who urged the Elector not to commit himself permanently to any one partner but always to follow a ‘pendulum policy’ (Schaukelpolitik).29 Here was an important break with the previous reign: George William, too, had alternated between Vienna and Stockholm, but only under duress. By contrast, the word Schaukelpolitik implied a conscious policy of oscillation. And this in turn implied an attenuation of the Elector’s sense of obligation to the Emperor. Successive efforts to mount a joint Brandenburg-Habsburg response to the threat from France in the 1670s had revealed that the two powers had widely divergent geopolitical interests (this problem was to dog Austro-Prussian relations well into the nineteenth century). And the Austrian Habsburg court showed on more than one occasion that it was happy to see the Elector thwarted in his ambition. Frederick William boiled with resentment at these slights: ‘You know how the Emperor and the Empire have treated us,’ he told the chief minister of his Privy Council, Otto von Schwerin, in August 1679, when Vienna supported the return of Western Pomerania to Sweden. ‘And since they were the first to leave us defenceless before our enemies, we need no longer consider their interests unless they agree with ours.’30
Yet it is also striking how reluctant the Elector was to burn his bridges with Vienna. He remained a loyal prince of the Empire, supporting the Habsburg candidate Leopold I in the imperial election of 1657 and its various preliminaries.31 The Hohenzollern eagle shown on the ensigns of seventeenth-century Brandenburg always wore a shield proudly adorned with the golden sceptre of the Imperial Hereditary Chamberlain, a mark of the Elector’s prominent ceremonial standing within the Empire. Frederick William saw the Empire as indispensable to the future well-being of his lands. The interests of the Empire were not, of course, identical with those of the Habsburg Emperor, and the Elector was perfectly aware that it might at times be necessary to defend the institutions of the former against the latter. But the Emperor remained a fixed star in the Brandenburg firmament. It was essential, the Elector warned his successor in the ‘Fatherly Instruction’ of 1667, ‘that You bear in mind the respect that You must have for the Emperor and the Empire’.32 This curious combination of a rebellious resentment of the Emperor with an ingrained respect for the ancient institutions of the Empire (or at the very least a reluctance to do away with them) was another feature of Prussian foreign policy that would endure into the late eighteenth century.
SOVEREIGNTY
On 18 October 1663, a colourful assembly of Estates representatives gathered before Königsberg castle. They were there to swear an oath of fealty to the Elector of Brandenburg. The occasion was a solemn one. The Elector stood on a raised platform draped in scarlet cloth. Near him were four senior officials of the ducal administration, each bearing one of the insignia of his office: the ducal crown, a sword, a sceptre and a field marshal’s baton. After the ceremony, the gates of the castle courtyard were opened for the traditional display of sovereign largesse. As the people of the city crowded in to join the celebrations, chamberlains tossed gold and silver commemorative medals into the crowd. Wine – red and white from two different spouts – splashed all day from a fountain fashioned in the likeness of the Hohenzollern eagle. In the reception rooms of the palace, the Estates were entertained at twenty large tables.33
The choreography of this occasion invoked a tradition of great antiquity. The oath of fealty had been an accoutrement of sovereignty in western Europe since the twelfth century. It was a legal act by which the constitutional relationship between sovereign and subject was ‘actualised, renewed and perpetuated’.34 In time-honoured fashion, the Estates representatives swore that they would never ‘under any circumstances imaginable to man’ break their bond with the new sovereign, all the while kneeling before the Elector with the left hand laid across the chest and the right hand raised above the head with the thumb and two fingers extended. It was said that the thumb signified God the Father, the index finger God the Son and the middle finger the Holy Spirit; ‘of the other two fingers, folded down into the hand, the fourth signifies the precious soul, which is hidden among mankind, while the fifth signifies the body, which is a smaller thing than the soul’.35 A specific act of political subordination was thus merged into the permanence of man’s submission before God.
These invocations of timelessness and tradition belied the fragility of Hohenzollern authority in Ducal Prussia. In 1663, when the oath was sworn in Königsberg, the Elector’s legal sovereignty in the Duchy of Prussia was of recent vintage. It had been formally confirmed at the Peace of Oliva only three years before and had since been vigorously contested by the inhabitants. In the city of Königsberg, a popular movement emerged to resist the efforts of the Electoral administration to impose its authority. Only after a leading city politician had been arrested and Electoral cannon trained on the heart of the city could peace be restored, making way for the settlement that was solemnized in the palace courtyard on 18 October 1663. And yet, within a decade, the Electoral authorities once again faced open resistance and were force
d to invest the city with troops. Not only in Ducal Prussia, but also in Kleve and even in Brandenburg itself, the decades that followed the Thirty Years War were marked by strife between the Electoral authorities and the guardians of local privilege.
There was nothing inevitable about the conflict between monarchs and estates. The relationship between the sovereign and the nobilities was essentially one of interdependence. The nobilities administered the localities and collected the taxes. They lent money to the sovereign – in 1631, for example, George William owed the Brandenburg nobleman Johann von Arnim 50,000 thalers, for which he pawned two domains to him as security.36 Noble wealth provided the collateral for crown loans and in times of war noblemen were expected to provide the prince with horses and armed men to defend the territory. During the seventeenth century, however, the relationship between the two came under increasing pressure. It seemed that conflicts between the sovereign and the Estates had become the norm rather than the exception.37
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