FREDERICK WILLIAM (BRANDENBURG) (1620–1688; ruled 1640–1688)

FREDERICK WILLIAM (BRANDENBURG) (1620–1688; ruled 1640–1688), elector of Brandenburg and duke of Prussia. Frederick William, known as "the Great Elector," was the first of the great Hohenzollern rulers who established the Prussian state, which in turn created a united Germany in the late nineteenth century. The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) made Frederick William's early years turbulent ones. For months he lay unbaptized because there was no money for baptismal festivities and because no proper godparents could be found. At the age of seven Frederick William left Berlin to avoid approaching Catholic armies, and at the age of fourteen he was sent to Holland to study and to live with his relatives of the House of Orange. He developed an early taste for books, engravings, plants, coins, and all sorts of curios, which later led to the founding of a library, museum, and botanical garden in Berlin.

When Frederick William became elector of Brandenburg in 1640, his lands were a wreck. Scholars estimate that the war had cost Brandenburg more than half its population, and by 1648 Berlin numbered only 6,000 people. His other two major possessions, Prussia in the east and Cleves and Mark in the west, had not suffered quite so much but had still lost population and treasure. To make matters worse, his father, George William (ruled 1619–1640), had turned over his authority to a military adventurer named Adam von Schwartzenberg, who had created an army of mercenaries that spent more time terrorizing the countryside than resisting the country's enemies. Frederick William began his rule with conciliatory gestures. He did not dismiss Schwartzenberg right away but waited until the representative Estates begged him to rid the country of his mercenaries. He also restored the traditional rights of the Estates of Prussia and Cleves and Mark and granted the Estates of Brandenburg additional privileges in exchange for a monetary contribution.

The conciliatory gestures ended in 1655 when he found his lands caught in the midst of a war between Sweden and Poland. Frederick William adopted a policy of strict neutrality, but, to defend that neutrality, he needed a modest army to fend off bands of Swedish and Polish soldiers. He had created a force of about two thousand from Schwartzenberg's mercenaries, but he need more, especially to defend East Prussia, which was close to the fighting. To raise those forces, he asked the Estates of Brandenburg to provide him with funds. They refused, arguing that they had no responsibility to protect East Prussia. When Frederick William responded that this increased force would protect Brandenburg too, they remained unmoved.

This confrontation with the Estates of Brandenburg triggered the effort for which Frederick William is most famous—reducing the authority of the Estates and substantially increasing the authority of the prince—in other words, bringing absolutism to Brandenburg-Prussia. He began by ignoring the decision of the Estates and using his small army to collect the proposed taxes anyway. The Estates were horrified, but the people paid. Finally the Estates granted the sums requested because they could not think of any way to resist.

From his taming of the Estates of Brandenburg, Frederick William turned to the Estates of Cleves and Mark and Prussia. Between 1655 and 1666 Frederick William whittled away at the powers of the Estates of Cleves and Mark until he reduced them to impotence. Prussia was more of a challenge because resistance to his absolutism was led by the city of Königsberg, the greatest urban center in the elector's realms. In 1674 Frederick William forced a showdown with Königsberg, occupying the city with military force and compelling it to accept his taxes and his officials. By then Frederick William was absolute in all of his lands. The Estates of Brandenburg and Cleves and Mark ceased to meet at all, and the Estates of Prussia met but had little power. As he was reducing the power of the Estates, Frederick William built the authority of his central administration. After all, he needed to replace the tax-collecting structure of the Estates with a structure of his own. This began as the General War Office in 1655 with soldiers serving as tax collectors, and slowly but surely that office became the government. With name changes, it took over the treasury and then administration in general, becoming by 1679 responsible for maintaining the army, collecting taxes, fostering economic development, encouraging immigration (most notably French Huguenots fleeing Louis XIV), and controlling municipal government. In 1668 he laid the foundations of the Prussian General Staff that would evolve into the German General Staff of nineteenth- and twentieth-century notoriety.

Frederick William did not carry out his centralizing reforms as part of a long-term plan or governmental philosophy. Each time he moved against an Estate's privilege or instituted a tax, he did so because he believed it was needed at that time. His reforms had specific, limited targets, but over time they coalesced into a system that many other states would emulate. On his deathbed he still had no overall concept of a future Hohenzollern state but instead expressed his wish to divide his lands into three states, one for each of his sons, an act that would have annulled all of his centralizing reforms. Only resistance from his senior advisers and his sons prevented the Hohenzollern inheritance from becoming three petty German states. Frederick William himself did not realize that he laid the foundations of the greatest German state of the modern era.

FREDERICK WILLIAM (BRANDENBURG) (1620–1688; ruled 1640–1688)

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