Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (65 page)

The Brandenburg party eventually gained the upper hand, possibly by bribery; the royal commissioners suddenly announced the imminent handover of the duchy’s administration at the end of May. After that, the king concentrated on winning Georg Wilhelm’s co-operation in his dynastic feud with the Swedish Vasas.
⁵⁶
He never managed to insist on the reinstatement of the speaker, who had been physically ejected from Königsberg by guardsmen from Brandenburg. The game closed with the would-be duke’s candidature approved. Georg Wilhelm was received in Warsaw, where he was obliged to swear on oath that his sister’s marriage to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had been arranged without his knowledge. The act of homage was performed on 23 October. The dual state of Brandenburg-Prussia was finally under way.

From 1621 to 1657 the Duchy of Prussia was ruled from Berlin but as a distinctly separate element of the doubly dependent, dual state of Brandenburg-Prussia. Its continuing feudal link to Poland required some residual obligations, but in practice it meant little more than an understanding not to oppose the overlord’s interests in foreign policy. The reign of Margrave-Duke-Elector Georg Wilhelm was overshadowed by the Thirty Years War, from which he sought to stay aloof. In this he was successful with respect to Prussia, but unsuccessful with respect to Brandenburg. In 1631 he was drawn into the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus. His tiny army was unable to compete and large parts of his ancestral lands were ravaged. He retired exhausted to Königsberg six years later, and was succeeded by his only son, Friedrich Wilhelm (r. 1640–88), known to Berlin-biased history as ‘The Great Elector’,
Der Grosser Kurfurst
.
⁵⁷

The constitutional position of the Great Elector is worth elucidating. Later German history would always present him as a prince of the German Empire with subsidiary interests in the distant outpost of Prussia. The key to his policies, however, lay in the fact that he was bound by two loyalties, not one. As elector of Brandenburg, he was a dependant of the Habsburg-run Empire. But as duke of Prussia he was a dependant, and a formal vassal, of the Kingdom of Poland. Especially in the early years of his reign, it was far from clear which of the two allegiances would be the more important. He later became a past master of playing off one against the other, but prior to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, when the Thirty Years War finally ended, Poland attracted much of his loyalty. The court of Ladislas IV Vasa in Warsaw, where religious tolerance prevailed, could be reached in a day from Königsberg, at least on a winter sleigh ride, and the young Hohenzollern loved to go there. He spoke bad Polish fluently, and as a ‘prince of Poland’ was eager to participate in all the gatherings, rites and ceremonies. His own act of homage was performed on 6 October 1641 in the courtyard of Warsaw’s royal castle. This outlook would not be modified until the following decades, when Poland would be overtaken by calamities every bit as horrendous as those visited earlier on Germany.

The lessons which the young margrave-duke-elector learned from his father’s unhappy experiences were threefold. First, since he had forsaken Lutheranism for the Calvinism of his mother and his uncle Frederick, elector palatine, the ‘winter king’ of Bohemia, he cannot have failed to realize that Poland’s religious pluralism brought many benefits. Secondly, seeing Poland’s vulnerability despite its size, he decided that a large standing army was a sine qua non for self-protection. Thirdly, he calculated that the fiscal and commercial policies of smaller states would have to be unusually efficient if they were to support a viable military establishment. In short, he was encouraged to adopt the inimitable mixture of toleration, militarism and mercantilism for which the Hohenzollern state would become famous. In this, the margrave-duke-elector’s chief adviser was to be J. F. von Blumenthal (1609–57), sometime chief military commissar of the Empire, diplomat, administrator and financier.

The establishment of Brandenburg-Prussia encouraged the consolidation of a social class whose fortunes would for ever be tied to the image of the Hohenzollern state. Landowning and military service had gone hand in hand throughout European history; but conditions to the east of the Elbe in the seventeenth century fostered a very special breed of noble families, whose rise has been extravagantly described as ‘the most important factor in German History’.
⁵⁸
The
Junkers
*
benefited both from the availability of large expanses of uncultivated land, which enabled them to build up unusually extensive estates, typically of 5,000–7,000 acres, and from a dynamic state machine eager to employ them. As a result, they would acquire a near-monopoly on higher posts in the Hohenzollerns’ army and bureaucracy; and they cultivated a corporate ideology and ethos which has been defined as ‘the opposite of everything bourgeois’.
⁵⁹
Combining land improvement with soldiering, the typical Junker was a patriarchal
Hausvater
, a stickler for discipline, a political loyalist, a social conservative, an agrarian capitalist, a cultural philistine, a devotee of his honour, duty and masculinity, and the self-appointed master of his home locality. He had more in common with his brothers and neighbours, the Polish
szlachta
, than with counterparts in France or England. Several of the largest Junker families, like the Donhoffs of Friedrichstein, had close relatives, like the Denhoffs of Parnava, who lived and served in Poland and Lithuania.
⁶⁰
But one should take care not to run ahead too fast. ‘In early modern times,’ writes a specialist, ‘the Junkers were interested above all in farming; their military inclinations date from the eighteenth century.’
⁶¹

In 1648 the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was struck by an explosion of chaos similar to that which had hit Germany in 1618. It was brought low in the first instance by a long-running and destructive rebellion of the Ukrainian Cossacks. But then the Muscovite armies invaded, followed in close order by those of Charles X of Sweden, who launched simultaneous attacks from both north and west. These were the years of the Swedish ‘Flood’, the
Potop
. Pillage, rapine, plague and hunger ensued. A quarter of the population died. The royal government virtually collapsed. The king, Jan Kasimierz Vasa, fled his kingdom (see p.
281
).
⁶²
In the midst of the anarchy, the duke of Prussia attempted to stay neutral. But in 1656, when another Swedish army landed in Danzig, Brandenburg-Prussia could either join the invader or risk being invaded. Moreover, the Swedish campaign was dressed up as a Protestant crusade, to which the Protestant Prussians were expected to adhere. Also, since Charles X Vasa was posing as the rightful king of Poland, he could reward the Hohenzollern duke by releasing him from his feudal dues. Friedrich Wilhelm made his choice, and in late July the Prussians entered Warsaw in triumph with the Swedes. Charles X then declared that the Duchy of Prussia was sovereign and independent.

The next year, however, saw the beginnings of a strong Polish revival. At the Treaty of Wehlau (September 1657) the margrave-duke-elector agreed to abandon the Swedes, but only if the Polish negotiators matched the Swedes by conceding Prussia’s sovereign status. Poland could not refuse. And the concession was incorporated into the Treaty of Oliwa (1660) that ended the
Potop
.

In later times, the Treaty of Wehlau and its consequences have caused considerable controversy. German historians have usually seen it as an inevitable step in Prussia’s rise to power. Polish historians have often seen it as a shameless act of blackmail, carried out by a grasping Prussian who had treacherously deserted his duty. All agree that it was an important milestone, and few could deny that the feudal contract was broken. As a vassal of Poland, the margrave-duke-elector definitely had an obligation of loyalty; equally, as the feudal liege, the Polish king had an obligation to protect his vassal. Both sides had broken their bond. It is also beyond dispute that the Treaty of Wehlau was never constitutionally ratified by the
Sejm
of the Commonwealth, and that many clauses remained a dead letter. One, for example, granted Poland-Lithuania the right of reversion to the Duchy of Prussia, much as the Hohenzollerns had obtained in the previous century. Another, which granted Brandenburg-Prussia the income of Lauenburg and Bütow, was made conditional on Berlin supplying 1,500 infantrymen and 500 cavalrymen for the commonwealth’s campaigns against Muscovy. By a similar arrangement, the elector was to enjoy the city of Elbing’s income until the commonwealth refunded the costs of his operations against the Swedes. Neither side observed these near-impossible commitments, thereby storing up a mass of unresolved disputes for the future.

From 1657 to 1701 the Duchy of Prussia was thus an independent state attached by personal union to the dependent, imperial state of Brandenburg. It was already a monarchy in substance, if not in name, and though its ruler did not change his titles, he had definitely improved his status. The margrave-duke-elector of Brandenburg-Prussia, like the Stuart kings of England-Scotland-Ireland in the same period, was moving from the third class to the second class of European rulers.

This was the age of Louis XIV, when the absolutist model of government in France was widely praised, and the Hohenzollern elector was one of many who was attracted to it. In Brandenburg, Blumenthal proposed that nobles committed to military service be relieved of taxation in return for surrendering their rights to assemble in the Estates. Eventually, in 1678, he would succeed in founding and financing a substantial standing army. His master was moving along an authoritarian, if not a strictly absolutist, road.

Huge resentment built up in the duchy. The governor, whose first act had been to hang two of Königsberg’s burghers accused of collaboration with the Swedes, was seen to violate the guarantee of self-government which the Prussian Estates had received; they protested in fury. The imperial envoy to Poland, Franz von Lisola, expressed his surprise:

[A] strong aversion to the Elector [prevails] in the whole Duchy of Prussia, not just among the Catholics but also among the Lutherans and the common folk… They all plan rebellion as soon as possible, mainly because of religion, [but also] because the Elector aims… to subject Prussia to the arbitrary power of his ministers from Brandenburg and to abolish all privileges. The Elector joined the Swedish party without the consent of the estates, thereby provoking the revenge and the hatred of the Poles against them.
⁶³

The elector’s own chancellor, Otto von Schwerin, shared the opinion. ‘Your Electoral Highness would not believe to what extent the Polish crown is dear to their hearts,’ he reported in 1661, ‘and how they all seek their good in this connection.’ A decade later he wrote, ‘As long as one generation lives who remembers Polish rule, there will be a source of resistance in Prussia.’
⁶⁴

The reasons for constitutional conflict between Brandenburg and Prussia ran deep. The two states drew on different traditions concerning the relationship between ruler and ruled:

While pro-Hohenzollern theorists proclaimed the duty of the ruled to believe and trust in the good intentions of the ruler
legibus solutus
, some among the Ducal Prussian estates, including the burghers of Königsberg, defended the principle of fundamental laws restricting the power of central government. [It was] the outsider from Berlin who diminished their liberties, while the Polish crown, with whom they had formed ‘one body’, was their natural home. The belief that they were dealing with a foreign ruler provoked a refusal to finance the Elector’s other domains and provinces in the Empire, which had no connection with Prussia but through the dynasty: ‘Shall the last drop of blood be wrung from the Prussian nobility, although they have nothing to do with the Holy Roman Empire?’