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Frederick articulated largely consistent ideas about military history, but also used concepts of the superiority of “our age” to extoll the virtues of his own oblique order of battle, and manipulated narratives of technological change to apologise for his own mistakes.
This was centuries before the scientific method was a thing, but there's a distinctly modern feel to how Frederick researched and wrote the book. Not only did he spend a lot of time watching birds (and likely assigned underlings to do it for him and report back), but he also experimented to see if their behavior varied in the presence of food ...
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Jul 5, 2017 · But Frederick was more than a general. His military career was a subset of his position as a king, and as such Frederick was the West’s first modern ruler. His one big idea shaped the Prussia he governed into a “security state,” whose pattern endures into the present century. Today the synergistic integration of domestic and foreign ...
- Dennis Showalter
- Overview
- Early life
- Accession to the throne and foreign policy
Frederick II, king of Prussia (1740–86), was a brilliant military campaigner who, in a series of diplomatic stratagems and wars against Austria and other powers, greatly enlarged Prussia’s territories and made Prussia the foremost military power in Europe.
When was Frederick II born?
Frederick II was born on January 24, 1712, in Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany).
When did Frederick II ascend the throne?
Frederick II ascended the throne, becoming the king of Prussia, in 1740, following the death of his father, Frederick William I.
Frederick II (born January 24, 1712, Berlin, Prussia [Germany]—died August 17, 1786, Potsdam, near Berlin) king of Prussia (1740–86), a brilliant military campaigner who, in a series of diplomatic stratagems and wars against Austria and other powers, greatly enlarged Prussia’s territories and made Prussia the foremost military power in Europe. An enlightened absolute monarch, he favoured French language and art and built a French Rococo palace, Sanssouci, near Berlin.
Frederick was the eldest surviving son of Frederick William I, king of Prussia, and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, daughter of George I of Britain. Frederick’s upbringing and education were strictly controlled by his father, who was a martinet as well as a paranoiac. Encouraged and supported by his mother and his sister Wilhelmina, Frederick soon came into bitter conflict with his father. Frederick William I deeply despised the artistic and intellectual tastes of his son and was infuriated by Frederick’s lack of sympathy with his own rigidly puritanical and militaristic outlook. His disappointment and contempt took the form of bitter public criticism and even outright physical violence, and Frederick, beaten and humiliated by his father, often over trifling details of behaviour, took refuge in evasion and deceit. This personal and family feud culminated spectacularly in 1730, when Frederick was imprisoned in the fortress of Küstrin after planning unsuccessfully to flee initially to France or Holland. Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte, the young officer who had been his accomplice in the plan, was executed in Frederick’s presence, and there was for a short time a real possibility that the prince might share his fate. During the next year or more Frederick, as a punishment, was employed as a junior official in local administration and deprived of his military rank. The effects of this terrible early life are impossible to measure with accuracy, but there is little doubt that the violent and capricious bullying of his father influenced him deeply.
In 1733, after a partial reconciliation with his father, Frederick was married to a member of a minor German princely family, Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern, for whom he never cared and whom he systematically neglected. In the following year he saw active military service for the first time under the great Austrian commander Eugene of Savoy against the French army in the Rhineland. In the later 1730s, in semiretirement in the castle of Rheinsberg near Berlin and able for the first time to give free rein to his own tastes, he read voraciously, absorbing the ideas on government and international relations that were to guide him throughout his life. These years were perhaps the happiest that Frederick ever experienced. However, his relations with his father, though somewhat improved, remained strained.
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Frederick William I died on May 31, 1740, and Frederick, on his accession, immediately made it clear to his ministers that he alone would decide policy. Within a few months he was given a chance to do so in a way that revolutionized Prussia’s international position. The Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, of the Austrian house of Habsburg, died on October 20, leaving as his heir a daughter, the archduchess Maria Theresa, whose claims to several of the heterogeneous Habsburg territories were certain to be disputed. Moreover, her army was in a poor state, the financial position of the Habsburg government very difficult, and her ministers mediocre and in many cases old. Frederick, however, thanks to his father, had a fine army and ample funds at his disposal. He therefore decided shortly after the emperor’s death to attack the Habsburg province of Silesia, a wealthy and strategically important area to which the Hohenzollerns, the ruling family of Prussia, had dynastic claims, though weak ones. The most important threat to his plans was Russian support for Maria Theresa, which he hoped to avert by judicious bribery in St. Petersburg and by exploiting the confusion that was likely to follow the imminent death of the empress Anna. He also hoped that Maria Theresa would cede most of Silesia in return for a promise of Prussian support against her other enemies, but her refusal to do so made war inevitable.
The first military victory of Frederick’s reign was the battle of Mollwitz (April 1741), though it owed nothing to his own leadership; in October Maria Theresa, now threatened by a hostile coalition of France, Spain, and Bavaria, had to agree to the Convention of Klein-Schnellendorf, by which Frederick was allowed to occupy the whole of Lower Silesia. However, the Habsburg successes against the French and Bavarians that followed so alarmed Frederick that early in 1742 he invaded Moravia, the region south of Silesia, which was under Austrian rule. His rather incomplete victory at Chotusitz in May nonetheless forced Maria Theresa to cede almost all of Silesia by the Treaty of Berlin of 1742 in July. This once more allowed Habsburg forces to be concentrated against France and Bavaria, and 1743 and the early months of 1744 saw Maria Theresa’s position in Germany become markedly stronger. Frederick, again alarmed by this, invaded Bohemia in August 1744 and rapidly overran it. However, by the end of the year lack of French support and threats to his lines of communication had forced him to retreat. Moreover, the elector Augustus III (king of Poland and the elector of Saxony) now joined Maria Theresa in attacking him in Silesia. He was rescued from this threatening situation by the prowess of his army; victories at Hohenfriedberg in June 1745 and at Soor in September were followed by a Prussian invasion of Saxony. The Treaty of Dresden, signed on December 25, 1745, finally established Prussian rule in Silesia and ended for the time being the complex series of struggles that had begun five years earlier.
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- Matthew Smith Anderson
Frederick William, (ruled 1640 - 1688) and his grandson (also named Frederick William, 1713 - 1740) used absolute policies to build a huge and highly trained army (Wiesner-Hanks 352). However, it was Frederick II “the Great” (ruled 1740 - 1786) who truly established Prussia as a powerful contender in both the Holy Roman Empire and Europe as ...
levels: cultural, temporal, and intellectual. It shows that Frederick’s warfare (at least in his youth) was culturally French, and reflected the towering influence of King Louis XIV, with Frederick following the flamboyant masculinity of the French baroque court. Frederick was a backward-looking military thinker, who situated his
Abstract A product of the Enlightenment — aesthete, atheist, asexual, and philosopher and composer of the second rank — Frederick II exploited the elements of the early modern military revolution t...
