Frederick William

Frederick William
1. ("the Great Elector") 1620-88, elector of Brandenburg who increased the power and importance of Prussia.
2. 1882-1951, German general: crown prince of Germany 1888-1918 (son of William II of Germany).

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German Friedrich Wilhelm known as the Great Elector

born Feb. 16, 1620, Cölln, near Berlin
died May 9, 1688, Potsdam

Elector of Brandenburg (1640–88) who restored the Hohenzollern dominions after the Thirty Years' War.

At his accession to the electorship, Brandenburg was ravaged by war and occupied by foreign troops. He cautiously maintained neutrality between the warring Swedes and Habsburgs, started to build a standing army, and added to his territories with the Peace of Westphalia (1648). In the First Northern War (1655–60) he gained sovereignty over the duchy of Prussia. In the complex power struggles in Europe starting in 1661, he shifted allegiance by always joining with the weaker party, hoping to maintain the balance of power. He issued the Edict of Potsdam in 1685, granting asylum to Huguenots expelled from France. When he died, he left a centralized political administration, sound finances, and an efficient army, laying the foundation for the future Prussian monarchy.

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▪ elector of Brandenburg
Introduction
byname  The Great Elector,  German  Der Grosse Kurfürst 
born Feb. 16, 1620, Cölln, near Berlin
died May 9, 1688, Potsdam, near Berlin

      elector of Brandenburg (1640–88), who restored the Hohenzollern (Hohenzollern Dynasty) dominions after the devastations of the Thirty Years' War—centralizing the political administration, reorganizing the state finances, rebuilding towns and cities, developing a strong army, and acquiring clear sovereignty over ducal Prussia. All these measures contributed to the foundation of the future Prussian monarchy.

      Frederick William was the eldest son of the elector George William and Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, a granddaughter of William the Silent, prince of Orange.

      He grew up amid the chaos of the Thirty Years' War, in which Brandenburg suffered particularly heavily, and was forced to spend his childhood years far from the Berlin court in the fortress of Küstrin, where he was educated in the Calvinist faith. His stay in Holland between his 14th and 18th years, the time divided between the University of Leiden and the court of his future father-in-law, Frederick Henry of Orange, at The Hague, left him with lasting impressions. The future elector was, above all, impressed by Holland's imposing maritime and commercial power, as well as by its pioneering achievements in military technology and organization. He retained a marked preference for Dutch architecture and agriculture and a strong desire to open Brandenburg to international commerce and maritime trade.

Early years of reconstruction.
      When Frederick William, completely inexperienced in politics, succeeded his father as elector in December 1640, he took over a ravaged land occupied by foreign troops. Under his father's powerful favourite, Graf Adam von Schwarzenberg, Brandenburg had changed sides from the Swedes to the Habsburgs (Habsburg, House of) and had thus been drawn into the struggle on both sides. Residing until 1643 not in Brandenburg, the heartland of his domain, but rather in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), the capital of the remote Duchy of Prussia, the Elector at first pursued a policy of cautious neutrality in order to escape the pressure of the rival powers. He discharged the Brandenburg troops in the service of the Habsburg emperor and concluded an armistice with Sweden.

      He soon recognized, however, that without an army he could never become master in his own house. In 1644, at the beginning of negotiations to conclude the Thirty Years' War, he had already started to organize his own military force. Though his army was small, Brandenburg could not support it without requisitioning funds from the Duchy of Cleves, in the west, and from the Duchy of Prussia. For the first time Brandenburg's territories, united only by their allegiance to the person of the Elector, were drawn together for a political purpose. The standing army was the first institution used by the increasingly absolutist rulers of Brandenburg to combat the privileges of the estates of the individual territories. It was never entirely disbanded and became the core of the 18th-century Prussian army.

      This army was not big enough to allow Frederick William to conduct an independent foreign policy. Moreover, his marriage in 1646 to Louise Henriette of Orange failed to bring the anticipated Dutch support. Lacking the support of friendly great powers at the peace congress of Westphalia (Westphalia, Peace of) in 1648, he did not attain his aim of acquiring all of Pomerania, with the Oder estuary and the important harbour of Stettin (since 1945 Szczecin). He had to be content with eastern Pomerania, the secularized dioceses of Minden and Halberstadt, and the promise of the archbishopric of Magdeburg, all of which were, however, important as links to his western German possessions.

      After seven years of peaceful reconstruction, Frederick William saw his political and military ability put to a difficult test with the outbreak of the First Northern War (Northern War, First) (1655–60). By invading Poland, King Charles X Gustav of Sweden sought to expand the power in the Baltic that Sweden gained by the Peace of Westphalia. Frederick William, as duke of Prussia, owed fealty to the Polish king, but, when offered an alliance by Sweden in return for control over the East Prussian ports, the Elector chose armed neutrality. When Charles Gustav rapidly overran Poland and advanced against East Prussia, Frederick William had to exchange Polish for Swedish suzerainty and provide armed support to Charles Gustav. In the three-day Battle of Warsaw in July 1656, the untried army of Brandenburg, under the Elector's command, passed its test of fire. To keep the Elector on his side, the Swedish king granted him full sovereignty over the Duchy of Prussia. This did not prevent Frederick William, when Sweden's military position deteriorated, from entering into negotiations with Poland, which now renounced suzerainty over East Prussia. With his new allies, Poland and the Habsburg emperor, the Elector drove the Swedes from western Pomerania. French intervention, however, forced Frederick William once again to give up his Pomeranian conquests. Ratified in the Treaty of Oliva in 1660, this renunciation was balanced by confirmation of the Elector's full sovereignty over the Duchy of Prussia.

      The Elector's ability to gain his ends arose not only from the ease with which he changed sides but also from his success in forcing the provincial estates to support the standing army independently of tax appropriations by the diets. In the second half of his reign, he removed control of taxation and finances from the estates altogether, thereby laying the groundwork for the powerful bureaucracy of later Prussian absolutism, with its standing army, fixed taxes, and an officialdom dependent on the sovereign alone.

Attempts to establish balance of power.
      The year 1661, in which Louis XIV assumed the reins of government in France, ushered in an era of vast power struggles in Europe. In the conflict erupting between Austria and Spain, on the one side, and France and Sweden, on the other, the Elector hoped to maintain the balance of power (power, balance of) by preventing either side from achieving predominance. He sought not a simple policy of neutrality but rather, as he recommended to his successor in his political testament of 1667, to advance the interests of his house by always joining the weaker power against the stronger. Here lies the basis for the continual shifts in his policy of alliances: “Brandenburg's intermittent fever,” which became proverbial in the 17th century.

      In 1672, when Louis XIV prepared for the invasion of Holland, Frederick William, still true to his policy of supporting the weaker power, allied himself with the Dutch states-general. Their sole European ally, he concluded an aid agreement with them, fully aware of the danger from France to his territories of Cleves on the lower Rhine. But after the unexpectedly rapid collapse of the Netherlands forced him to make a separate peace with France in 1673, the Elector adopted a policy of neutrality, which he abandoned only when the Holy Roman Empire declared war against France. In July 1674 he joined the alliance of the Habsburg emperor, Spain, and the Netherlands. Frederick William's military expectations were disappointed by the slow progress of the allies on the upper Rhine. He also suffered a more serious personal loss with the death of the gifted young heir to the throne, Karl Emil.

      When the Swedes invaded Brandenburg, the Elector turned northward, and under his command his army, in June 1675, scored its first independent victory. In a contemporary folk song Frederick William was for the first time called the “Great Elector.” In the same year, allied with the Emperor and with Denmark, he once more began to retrieve the spoils of the Thirty Years' War from the Swedes. For the second time he gained western Pomerania by the sword, only to lose it again under French pressure. Abandoned by his allies, he had to yield the fruits of his victory in the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1679.

Later policies.
      Frederick now decided to gain in alliance with France what he could not obtain by opposing it. In 1679 he concluded a secret pact with France, committing himself, in return for large subsidies, to support French candidates in the next elections for king of Poland and for emperor. The alliance endured as long as the Elector believed that Louis XIV would help him gain possession of western Pomerania. When he realized that this hope was vain, Frederick William changed political partners, for the last time, in 1685. The Elector's disillusionment with Louis XIV coincided with the assumption by William of Orange (later King William III of Great Britain) of his historical role as founder of the Grand Alliance. against Louis XIV. The Elector, impressed that William was a prince of Orange and his own nephew, concluded a defense pact with the Netherlands in 1685. He drew still closer to William's side with the issuance of the Edict of Potsdam on Nov. 8, 1685, in which he granted asylum to all Huguenots expelled from France by Louis XIV after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Thus, at the end of his life, the Great Elector returned to the political ties of his early years. He did not live to witness the great shift in the European balance of power that his nephew was to effect through his landing in England and his succeeding the Catholic Stuart King James II. But he was aware of William's plans when he died in 1688, the year of England's Glorious Revolution.

Legacy
      The Great Elector bequeathed to his son Frederick (after 1701, Frederick I, king of Prussia) a well-organized state, widely respected for its sound finances and efficient army. Frederick William had gone far toward integrating his inherited and acquired territories by establishing national institutions and central administrative bodies. He did, however, endanger the further integration by endowing the children of his second marriage, contracted in 1668 with Dorothea of Holstein-Glücksburg, with semi-autonomous principalities. Many of his ambitious plans were not realized. Just as he was unable to provide a pathway to the Baltic for his country, his attempt to establish a colony on the Guinea coast of Africa remained only an episode in Brandenburg–Prussian history. He was far more successful in the economic field. The systematic colonization of the sparsely populated country, the improvement of trade routes through canal construction, and the establishment and operation of factories after the mercantilist model were begun under Frederick William. In this area, too, the Elector established a tradition that was broadened by his 18th-century successors.

      Frederick William adopted the so-called government in council form of monarchical rule, whereby the ruler exercised his power with the aid of his principal council and functioned almost as a president. He always listened to his advisers' opinions but made all important decisions himself.

      The political views of all rulers of that period were rooted in religion. For the Great Elector royal power was a God-given duty, a common Christian viewpoint that was given a special character by the Elector's Calvinist beliefs, which bind the ruler, just as the least of his subjects, to prove himself visibly in his daily duties. Here lies the religious basis of Frederick William's ambition for political power and of his immense, yet restrained, energy, which is still evident today in Andreas Schlüter's famous equestrian statue of the Great Elector in Berlin.

Stephan Skalweit

Additional Reading
Herman von Petersdorff, Der Grosse Kurfürst, new ed. (1939), the standard biography, now in need of revision; Ferdinand Schevill, The Great Elector (1947), the best account in English; Francis Ludwig Carsten, The Origins of Prussia (1954), deals with the social and economic problems of the Elector's reign; Gerhard Oestreich, “Friedrich Wilhelm (Grosser Kurfürst),” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 5 (1961), contains a very complete bibliography.

▪ elector of Hesse-Kassel

born Aug. 20, 1802
died Jan. 6, 1875, Prague

      elector of Hesse-Kassel from 1847 after 16 years' co-regency with his father; he was noted for his reactionary stand against liberalizing trends manifested during the revolutionary events of 1848. In 1850 he re-instated an unpopular adviser, Hans Daniel Hassenpflug, who called on the German Confederation to restore by force the authority of the elector. At the end of the Seven Weeks' War (1866), in which he sided with Austria, he was deposed, and his lands were seized by the victorious Prussians.

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Universalium. 2010.

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