Brandenburg-Prussia: Militaristic Absolutism

The contrast between Poland-Lithuania and Brandenburg-Prussia could not have been more extreme. The first was huge in territory and constitutional in government but in the end failed as a state. The second was puny and made up of disparate far-flung territories moving toward absolutism but in the nineteenth century would unify the different German states into modern-day Germany.

The ruler of Brandenburg was an elector, one of the seven German princes entitled to select the Holy Roman Emperor. Since the sixteenth century, the ruler of Brandenburg had also controlled the duchy of East Prussia; after 1618, the state was called Brandenburg-Prussia. Despite meager resources, Frederick William of Hohenzollern, who was the Great Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia (r. 1640–1688), succeeded in welding his scattered lands into an absolutist state.

Frederick William was determined to force his territories’ estates (representative assemblies) to grant him a dependable income. The Great Elector struck a deal with the Junkers (nobles) of each province: in exchange for allowing him to collect taxes, he gave them complete control over their enserfed peasants and exempted them from taxation. By the end of his reign, the estates met only on ceremonial occasions. Frederick William was able to expand his army from eight thousand to thirty thousand men. Peasants filled the ranks, and Junkers became officers. (See “Taking Measure: The Seventeenth-Century Army.”)

As a Calvinist ruler, Frederick William avoided the ostentation of the French court, even while following the absolutist model of centralizing state power. He boldly rebuffed Louis XIV by welcoming twenty thousand French Huguenot refugees after Louis’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In pursuing foreign and domestic policies that promoted state power and prestige, Frederick William adroitly switched sides in Louis’s wars and would stop at almost nothing to crush resistance at home. In 1701, his son Frederick I (r. 1688–1713) persuaded Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I to grant him the title “king in Prussia” in exchange for support in the War of the Spanish Succession. Until then, there was only one kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire, the kingdom of Bohemia. Prussia had arrived as an important power.