CHAPTER I
THE RISE OF PRUSSIA
The first task of the student of Frederick’s life-story is to rid himself of the idea that the solitary King was either wholly original or wholly free. To seize Silesia, to quarter Poland, to rival Austria, to humble France, each was no doubt a feat which no Prussian ruler before him had dared to attempt. Yet in each of these, as will presently be shown, the hand of the living was at once nerved and guided by the dead. From his House Frederick inherited his might, to his House he turned for inspiration in the use of it, and to it he dedicated his conquests. He who would appreciate Frederick must first survey the road trodden for three centuries before him by the Hohenzollerns from whom he sprang.
“Why should I serve the Hohenzollerns?” Bismarck is said to have exclaimed. “My family is as good as theirs.” It was the complaint of the yeoman against his fellow who has saved money and bought the lordship of the manor.
The early history of the state now called Prussia is chiefly the record of a thrifty family—the Hohenzollerns. Since the year 1415, when the overlordship of the sandy tract lying between the middle Elbe and lower Oder and stretching across their banks was conferred upon him by the Emperor for cash down, Frederick of Hohenzollern and his descendants had remained lords of Brandenburg. From Nuremberg, where Frederick had been Burggrave, they had brought with them the vital energy and business ability of successful townsmen. So poor was their new estate that for many generations relaxation would have meant ruin. There was therefore no temptation to depart from that policy of adding field to field which is the natural law of the industrious countryman. Whether from native superiority or from greater need, the Hohenzollerns were usually a little wiser than their neighbours. With the aid of a family statute of 1473, which made primogeniture the rule of succession for Brandenburg, they avoided the consequences of that custom of equal inheritance which has been the bane of Germany. By careful watching of opportunities, by windfalls, by purchase, and by covenants for mutual succession on failure of heirs made with neighbours whose lines died out, the domain of the rulers of Brandenburg was in two centuries increased fourfold. When the Thirty Years’ War broke out and the modern history of Prussia began, the head of the Hohenzollern family, who had long since become one of the seven Electors of the Empire, held sway over an area almost as great as that of Ireland.
Of the territories by which the original Mark of Brandenburg had been augmented, two were of special importance. In 1525 East Prussia had been acquired. This province, which throughout this book will be called by its German name of Ost-Preussen, was richer by far than the Mark, the kernel of the Hohenzollern possessions. It had an important city, Königsberg, for its capital and a coast-line on the Baltic. It constituted the domain of the old Order of Teutonic Knights, permanent crusaders whose task had been to spread the faith and civilisation of their fatherland among the heathen Slavs. But the Baltic lands had all submitted to the Cross, and the Knights became in their turn the objects of a religious mission. Early in the sixteenth century, the doctrines of the Reformation penetrated the minds of their High Master, Albert of Hohenzollern. He turned for counsel to Luther himself. In a celibate Order which had no more heathen to convert, the husband of the nun Catherine Bora could see only a standing defiance of the laws of nature and of God. By his advice Ost-Preussen was “secularised,” that is, taken from the service of religion to form a Hohenzollern estate, and in time (1618), though still submissive to the suzerainty of Poland, it was added to the main body of the Electoral dominions. The Hohenzollerns thus became distinguished from the mass of German princes by ruling territories to which the Empire had never possessed any claim. Ost-Preussen was to them on a small scale what England became in 1688 to the House of Orange, or in 1714 to the House of Hanover. Their policy acquired a new breadth and a new weight. Hitherto provincial, it became more and more cosmopolitan, and commerce with the Baltic lands and England began to hint to the lord of Pillau and Memel that his future lay upon the water.
A makeweight to Ost-Preussen, which would prevent the centre of gravity of the Hohenzollern lands from shifting eastwards, was found in 1609, when the family inherited Cleves, Mark, and Ravensberg in Western Germany. This acquisition, made on the very eve of the Thirty Years’ War, was accompanied in 1613 by the conversion of the Elector, John Sigismund, from the Lutheranism which his grandfather, Joachim II., had established in 1539 to the sterner and more militant creed of Calvin. This meant that at the very moment when all Germany was taking up arms for the greatest religious war of modern times, the court and people of Brandenburg were hopelessly at variance with one another. A Calvinist prince ruled a Lutheran people, and the new Elector, George William (1619–1640), “of Christ-mild memory” but the weakest of his line, proved to be a puppet in the hands of Schwarzenburg, his Romanist prime-minister. Under such guidance did Brandenburg, ill-knit and ill-armed, become the battle-ground between Swede and Hapsburg in their struggle for faith and empire.
What Brandenburg suffered in the terrible decade 1630–1640, between the landing of Gustavus Adolphus in Germany and the accession of the Great Elector, can never be fully calculated. The State was rudderless, defenceless, and poor; the combatants on both sides brigands, whom years of license had habituated to every kind of cruelty. What passed could be described by no more patently truthful eye-witness than Andreas Rittner, the cheery burgomaster of Tangermünde, a little town on the Elbe with a royal history of its own. In his pages may be traced the swift descent of the afflicted people through every depth of misery down to despair or even annihilation. The invaders—it mattered little whether Swedes or Imperialists—exacted in endless sequence contributions, lodging, forage, and loot, drove off the cattle, broke up the coffins of the dead, laid waste the land, and hunted down the inhabitants. The mischief was only increased by the feeble efforts of the home government to call out and support a militia. The maddened peasants turned guerilla. Food failed, for who could sow or reap? Men fed on carrion, even, it was whispered, on human flesh, and soon pestilence seized on persecutors and persecuted alike.
Anarchy and degradation brought forth torture. The name of the Swedish Drink attests the cruelty of the degenerate deliverers of Germany. “They laid men awhile upon the fire,” writes Rittner,
“baked them in ovens, flung them into wells, hung them up by the feet, fastened thumb-screws upon them, drove sharp spikes under their nails, bound round their heads so tight that their eyes started out, gagged them and sealed their mouths. Matrons and virgins were oft-times put to shame. Husbands must often leave their wives and wives their husbands, parents their children and children their parents, even on the bed of sickness, for they were powerless to save them from abuse, and sometimes when they came back they found nought of them save some few bones, for all else had the dogs mangled and eaten up.”
Not less graphic is the story told in stone in some of the tormented cities. Round the giant church, spared by the Swedes to uphold the Lutheran faith of which it was then the temple and by the Imperialists for the sake of the Roman faith which they hoped to establish anew within its walls, there may be seen the tombs of many generations of citizens. Those of the sixteenth century are covered with quaint adornment and graven with artistic skill. Then, as war sweeps over the land, the series is broken, to be resumed after many decades with a rude clumsiness which shows that wealth and art had fled from Brandenburg together.