Frederick II of Prussia: Encyclopedia II - Frederick II of Prussia - Kingship

Frederick II of Prussia - Kingship

As king, Frederick did not have a vision for a unified Germany; this had to wait until Bismarck planned the wars of unification a century later. Frederick's goal was to improve his country of Prussia. Toward this end he fought his wars mainly against Austria, whose Habsburg dynasts reigned as emperors of the Holy Roman Empire almost continuously from the 15th century until 1806). Frederick established Brandenburg-Prussia as the fifth and smallest European great power by using the resources his father had made available. For 100 years the ensuing Austro-Prussian dualism made a unified Germany impossible until Prussia's defeat of Austria in 1866.

Frederick led the Prussian forces during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), and in the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778) - not only as king, but also as the military commander in the field. He was quite successful on the battlefield; Frederick is often admired as one of the greatest tactical geniuses of all time. Even more important were his operational successes, especially preventing the unification of superior enemy armies and being at the right place at the right time to keep enemy armies out of Prussian core territory.

Frederick managed to better Prussia from being a European backwater and make it an economically strong and politically reformed state. His acquisition of Silesia was orchestrated so as to provide Prussia's fledgling industries with raw materials, and he protected these industries with high tariffs and minimal restrictions on internal trade. Canals were built, swamps were drained for agricultural cultivation, and new crops, such as the potato and the turnip, were introduced. With the help of French experts, he reorganized the system of indirect taxes, which provided the state with more revenue than direct taxes. He abolished torture and granted wide religious freedom (although he himself did not care much for religion). He gave his state a modern bureaucracy whose mainstay until 1760 was the able War and Finance Minister Adam Ludwig von Blumenthal, succeeded in 1764 by his nephew Joachim who ran the ministry to the end of the reign and beyond. The civil service code was based on respect for law and ethics, as well as pride in one's profession. This legacy was passed on into the modern German state and is a main reason why he is still admired as a historical figure within Germany. A major example of the place that Frederick holds in history as a ruler is seen in Napoleon Bonaparte, who saw Frederick as the greatest tactical genius of all time.

Having no children of his own, Frederick was succeeded by his nephew as King Frederick William II of Prussia.

Frederick was a gifted musician. He played the cross-flute and composed one-hundred sonatas for the flute as well as four symphonies. His court musicians included C. P. E. Bach, Johann Joachim Quantz, and Franz Benda. A meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach in 1747 in Potsdam led to Bach writing The Musical Offering.

He also aspired to be a philosopher-king like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He stood close to the French Enlightenment and admired above all its greatest thinker, Voltaire, with whom he corresponded frequently. Their personal friendship, however, came to an unpleasant end after Voltaire's visit to Berlin and Potsdam, 1750-1753.

Frederick the Great invited Joseph-Louis Lagrange to succeed Leonhard Euler at the Berlin Academy.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Kingship", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki