Frederick the Great

Frederick II, remembered as Frederick the Great, was king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786. He seized Silesia from Austria, held it through the Seven Years' War against a coalition of the continent's largest powers, and took a share of Poland in the first partition of 1772. Admirer and correspondent of Voltaire, flautist and composer, he is the classic example of an "enlightened absolutist": a ruler who spoke the language of reason and public service while keeping all power in his own hands.

Frederick was born on 24 January 1712 in the royal palace in Berlin, the son of Crown Prince Frederick William and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, a sister of the future George II of Britain. His father, who became king in 1713 and was known as the Soldier King, poured the state's money into a large, drilled army and despised his son's love of French literature, music and philosophy. He beat and humiliated the boy in public.

In 1730, aged 18, Frederick tried to escape to Britain with his friend Hans Hermann von Katte, a young officer. Both were caught and charged with desertion. The king had Katte beheaded at Küstrin in front of the prince, who was then confined and set to work in the provincial administration. A form of reconciliation followed. In 1733 Frederick accepted an arranged marriage with Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern, which remained childless and loveless; once king, he lived apart from her. Most historians think Frederick was homosexual, though the evidence about his private life is fragmentary.

The later 1730s, spent at the palace of Rheinsberg, were the happiest years of his life. He read, played the flute, gathered musicians and wits around him, began writing to Voltaire, and composed the Anti-Machiavel, a rebuttal of Niccolò Machiavelli arguing that a prince must serve his people. It appeared anonymously in 1740, the year he became king.

Frederick came to the throne on 31 May 1740. When Emperor Charles VI died that October, leaving his lands to his daughter Maria Theresa, Frederick saw an opportunity. Citing old and doubtful dynastic claims, he invaded the rich Austrian province of Silesia in December 1740, with no declaration of war. His first battle, at Mollwitz in April 1741, was won by his infantry after he had left the field believing it lost, a humiliation he never forgot.

The invasion opened the general War of the Austrian Succession. Prussia fought two wars over Silesia, in 1740–1742 and 1744–1745, winning at Chotusitz, Hohenfriedberg and Soor. The treaties of Breslau (1742) and Dresden (1745) confirmed his conquest. Silesia, with its textile industry, its capital Breslau, today's Wrocław, and the navigable Oder, added well over a million subjects to a kingdom of about two and a quarter million. It was after Dresden that contemporaries began to call him "the Great".

Maria Theresa never accepted the loss. In the "Diplomatic Revolution" of 1756, Austria allied with its old enemy France and with Russia, while Frederick allied with Britain. Expecting attack, he struck first, invading neutral Saxony in August 1756 and forcing its captured army into Prussian service. The war that followed lasted until 1763 and nearly destroyed his state.

Frederick won some of the most celebrated battles of the century, crushing a larger French and imperial army at Rossbach and the Austrians at Leuthen, both in late 1757. But he also suffered severe defeats at Kolín, Hochkirch and above all Kunersdorf in 1759, where the Russians and Austrians routed his army and he wrote that all was lost. Russian and Austrian troops raided Berlin in 1760. He paid for the war with British subsidies, by bleeding occupied Saxony, and by repeatedly debasing the coinage.

By early 1762 Prussia seemed close to collapse. It was saved by the death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia, whose successor Peter III, an admirer of Frederick, made peace at once. The Treaty of Hubertusburg in 1763 restored the pre-war borders, leaving Silesia in Prussian hands. Prussia had survived as a great power, but at the cost of perhaps several hundred thousand lives and a devastated countryside.

In 1772 Frederick joined Catherine the Great of Russia and Austria in the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Prussia took most of Royal Prussia, though not the city of Gdańsk, linking Brandenburg with East Prussia, and from then on Frederick styled himself King of Prussia rather than King in Prussia. He treated the Polish inhabitants of the new lands with open contempt and encouraged German settlement there. In 1778–1779, in the War of the Bavarian Succession, he blocked Austria's attempt to acquire Bavaria, and in 1785 he formed a League of German Princes against Emperor Joseph II, posing as the defender of the smaller states of the Holy Roman Empire.

Frederick described the ruler as "the first servant of the state" and governed in person from his cabinet, reading reports and issuing orders in writing. He abolished most judicial torture soon after his accession, reformed the courts, and ordered a codification of Prussian law that was completed after his death as the General Land Law of 1794. He drained the Oder marshes, settled colonists there, built canals and promoted the potato as a food crop. He offered refuge to persecuted Protestants and tolerated Catholics, but his policy towards Jews remained restrictive and discriminatory. Serfdom was left largely intact, and the army and officer corps remained the preserve of the nobility.

Frederick wrote in French, the language of his reading and conversation, producing histories, political testaments, poetry and treatises on war. At his palace of Sanssouci in Potsdam he received Voltaire, who lived at his court from 1750 to 1753 before they quarrelled. He was a serious flautist and composer of more than a hundred flute sonatas, and in 1747 he set Johann Sebastian Bach the theme that became the Musical Offering. The ideas of the Age of Enlightenment shaped his language and his court, though they did little to limit his own authority.

In old age Frederick, "Old Fritz", grew solitary and bitter, preferring the company of his greyhounds. He died at Sanssouci on 17 August 1786 and was succeeded by his nephew Frederick William II. Against his wishes he was buried in the Potsdam garrison church; in 1991, after German reunification, his remains were reburied at Sanssouci as he had asked.

He left a Kingdom of Prussia twice as populous as the one he inherited, with an army of close to 200,000 men. Nineteenth-century nationalists made him the founding hero of Prussian-led Germany, and the Nazis exploited his image heavily. Historians today see him as a gifted commander and hard-working administrator whose aggressive wars, above all the unprovoked attack on Silesia, began the long rivalry between Prussia and Austria that ended only with the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership in 1871.