During a portion of his reign the crabbed old king feared that all his labors and savings would go for naught, for he was supremely disappointed in his son, the crown-prince Frederick. The stern father had no sympathy for the literary, musical, artistic tastes of his son, whom he thought effeminate, and whom he abused roundly with a quick and violent temper. When Prince Frederick tried to run away, the king arrested him and for punishment put him through such an arduous, slave- like training in the civil and military administration, from the lowest grades upward, as perhaps no other royal personage ever received. It was this despised and misunderstood prince who as Frederick II succeeded his father on the throne of Prussia in 1740 and is known in history as Frederick the Great.
The year 1740 marked the accession of Frederick the Great in the Hohenzollern possessions and of Maria Theresa in the Habsburg territories. [Footnote: Below are discussed the foreign achievements (pp. 354 ff.) of these two rival sovereigns, and in Chapter XIV (pp. 440 ff.) their internal policies.] It also marked the outbreak of a protracted struggle within the Holy Roman Empire between the two foremost German states—Austria and Prussia.
THE MINOR GERMAN STATES
[Sidenote: German States Other than Austria and Prussia]
Of the three hundred other states which composed the empire, few were sufficiently large or important to exert any considerable influence on the issue of the contest. A few, however, which took sides, deserve mention not only because in the eighteenth century they preserved a kind of balance of power between the rivals but also because they have been more or less conspicuous factors in the progress of recent times. Such are Bavaria, Saxony, and Hanover.
[Sidenote: Bavaria]
Bavaria lay on the upper Danube to the west of Austria and in the extreme southeastern corner of what is now the German Empire. For centuries it was ruled by the Wittelsbach family, whose remarkable prince, Maximilian I (1597-1651), had headed the Catholic League and loyally supported the Habsburgs in the Thirty Years' War, and by the peace of Westphalia had gained a part of the Palatinate [Footnote: The other part of the Palatinate, under another branch of the Wittelsbachs, was reunited with Bavaria in 1779.] together with the title of "elector." His successor had labored with much credit in the second half of the seventeenth century to repair the wounds caused by the war, encouraging agriculture and industries, building or restoring numerous churches and monasteries. But the Bavarian electors in the first half of the eighteenth century sacrificed a sound, vigorous policy of internal reform to a far-reaching ambition in international politics. Despite the bond of a common religion which united them to Austria, they felt that their proximity to their powerful neighbor made the Habsburgs their natural enemies. In the War of the Spanish Succession, therefore, Bavaria took the side of France against Austria, and when Maria Theresa ascended the throne in 1740, the elector of Bavaria, who had married a Habsburg princess disbarred by the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VI, immediately allied himself with Frederick of Prussia and with France in order to dismember the Austrian dominions.
[Sidenote: Saxony]
The Saxony of the eighteenth century was but a very small fraction of the vast Saxon duchy which once comprised all northwestern Germany and whose people in early times had emigrated to England or had been subjugated by Charlemagne. Saxony had been restricted since the thirteenth century to a district on the upper Elbe, wedged in between Habsburg Bohemia and Hohenzollern Brandenburg. Here, however, several elements combined to give it an importance far beyond its extent or population. It was the geographical center of the Germanies. It occupied a strategic position between Prussia and Austria. Its ruling family—the Wettins—were electors of the empire. It had been, moreover, after the championship of Martin Luther by one of its most notable electors, [footnote: Frederick the Wise( 1486-1525)] a leader of the Lutheran cause, and the reformer's celebrated translation of the Bible had fixed the Saxon dialect as the literary language of Germany. At one time it seemed as if Saxony, rather than Brandenburg-Prussia, might become the dominant state among the Germanies. But the trend of events determined otherwise. A number of amiable but weak electors in the seventeenth century repeatedly allied themselves with Austria against the Hohenzollerns and thereby practically conceded to Brandenburg the leadership of the Protestant states of northern Germany.[Footnote: Another source of weakness in Saxony was the custom in the Wettin family of dividing the inheritance among members of the family. Such was the origin of the present infinitesimal states of Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen, and Saxe-Altenburg.]
[Sidenote: Personal Union of Saxony and Poland]