A brutal apprenticeship
Frederick II ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786, inheriting a small state that his father, Frederick William I, had armed far beyond its size. Within months of his accession Frederick invaded Habsburg Silesia, opening two wars that by 1745 had given Prussia the province outright and very nearly doubled its population. He went to war again in 1756, when the Seven Years’ War set Prussia against Austria, France, and Russia together; battles at Rossbach, Leuthen, and Kunersdorf swung between triumph and near-collapse before an exhausted peace in 1763 left his borders intact. In 1772 he took Royal Prussia from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in its first partition. Between campaigns he rebuilt the bureaucracy, revised the law code, tolerated several faiths, and described the ruler as the state’s first servant rather than its master.
Silesia taken twice over
Much of what is known about Frederick’s inner life comes from people close to him rather than neutral observers. His sister Wilhelmine left memoirs describing their father’s beatings and the young prince’s attachment to a page, Peter Karl Christoph von Keith, though how far that friendship went is not stated plainly by anyone who was there. Frederick himself wrote prolifically: a philosophical tract against Machiavelli before he took the throne, and afterward a stream of letters and military notes that historians still mine for his own account of his decisions. Biographers writing decades and centuries later, from nineteenth-century German scholars to later English-language historians such as Tim Blanning and Christopher Duffy, have had to weigh a ruler’s self-presentation against the record of what he actually ordered done, which is a harder task than it sounds.
Survival at long odds
Frederick’s early years shaped the king he became. His father drilled him for command while despising his taste for music, French literature, and philosophy, and had him beaten and humiliated for it. At sixteen Frederick tried to flee to Britain with a friend, Hans Hermann von Katte; both were arrested, and Frederick was made to watch Katte beheaded before he was restored to favour and put through years of administrative training. That mixture of literary ambition and enforced military discipline produced a king who could write a treatise against tyranny and then invade a neighbour within months of inheriting the crown. Prussia’s army, already the fourth largest in Europe on a small population, gave him the means; Austria’s difficulties on Frederick’s accession gave him the opening he judged Silesia was worth taking.
The philosopher-king’s paperwork
Historians still argue over how to weigh the two halves of Frederick’s reputation. His sexuality is one open question: contemporaries and later writers alike describe close attachments to men, including Keith and Katte, but the sources stop short of saying plainly what those relationships were, and speculation has filled the gap ever since. A second dispute concerns sincerity: whether his enlightened rhetoric about serving the state reflected real conviction or dressed up a ruler who fought three wars of choice. A third is his afterlife rather than his life. Nineteenth-century German historians turned him into a romantic warrior-king, and the Nazi regime later claimed him as a forerunner, which is part of why German assessments of Frederick cooled sharply after 1945 even as the underlying facts had not changed.
A third of Poland
Frederick left Prussia far larger and more centralised than he found it. Silesia’s mines and looms, and later Royal Prussia’s control of the lower Vistula, gave the kingdom resources and territory that made it a rival to Austria for leadership among the German states rather than a minor power beside it. The bureaucracy, legal code, and religious toleration he built or extended outlasted him and became part of how Prussia, and later Germany, governed itself. The military culture he entrenched, an army maintained at a size the state could barely afford, also outlasted him, feeding into a strand of Prussian and German history that ran through unification in 1871 and was still being invoked, for very different purposes, in the 1930s and after.
Claimed by later Germans
A reign this eventful rewards attention, provided the reader keeps the two Fredericks in view rather than settling for one. The military history is genuinely dramatic, full of reversals that were not certain to end in his favour, and the domestic record, of legal reform, religious tolerance, and a self-consciously modest idea of kingship, complicates any simple verdict on an eighteenth-century absolute ruler. What is less rewarding is the temptation to resolve him into a single symbol, whether enlightened reformer or proto-nationalist warlord, since the source record supports neither reading cleanly. Readers drawn to how personal formation, war, and later political mythology interact will find plenty here; readers wanting a tidy hero or villain will not.