THE GERMAN EMPIRE OF 1740 was established on Christmas Day 800 when the Pope placed the imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne in Rome. From that time until far down the Middle Ages the Empire stood forth as the great power in western Europe. Conjointly with the Papacy it was the acknowledged head of Christendom. But the Empire comprised many different racial elements which could not be coalesced. A political unit in name, the Empire was never one in spirit. In the centuries which followed Charlemagne various emperors tried to mold the imperial provinces into an organic whole – Otto the Great (936-973) succeeded in part – but all were ultimately defeated either by intrigues of powerful nobles or by divergence of material interests. Luther created a feeling of national unity by means of his Translation of the Bible (1534), as Germans realized in it the possession of a mother-tongue common to them all. But the religious differences of the Reformation ranged German states against each other in bitter partisanship, and the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the culmination of this hostility, added unparalleled want and misery to spiritual discord that could not be reconciled. The Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the Thirty Years’ War, left the states of Germany as disunited as they ever were. Provisions of this treaty were still regulating affairs of the German Empire in 1740.
For many years Germany had borne the official title of “The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”; “Holy” in order to mark the secular state as divinely appointed and as a counterpart to “the Holy Catholic Church”; “Roman” because the German Empire was conceived as a continuation of the ancient Roman Empire; “of the German Nation” because the head of the Holy Roman Empire was the chosen leader of the German peoples. In the following pages, until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, the terms “Germany,” “the German Empire,” and “the Holy Roman Empire” will be used, in accordance with the custom of the eighteenth century, as synonyms of each other. In 1740 Germany included Austria as well and thus embraced a territory which nearly doubled the area occupied by the German Empire of recent decades. In round terms, Germany included four hundred and fifty thousand square miles of land, or equaled that portion of the United States which lies east of the Mississippi River and north of Tennessee and North Carolina. The exact number of people in this great territory is not known, but it was probably between twentyfive and thirty millions.
The Holy Roman Empire consisted in 1740 of three hundred and eighteen states. Each of these states enjoyed full territorial sovereignty and the right to form alliances with any other states or with foreign powers on condition that such alliances should not be injurious to the emperor or to the Empire. Each state might have an army of its own, coin its own money, and regulate its own tolls and customs-houses. Thus, as the heads of the large majority of the states were absolute monarchs by hereditary right, each ruling prince in 1740 exercised absolute sovereignty in his own dominions and felt himself attached to the Empire chiefly by tradition and sentiment. The Imperial Diet might make laws for the Empire and declare war and conclude treaties in the name of Germany. But the decisions of the Diet were dependent upon a unanimity that could rarely be attained, and the Diet had no efficient means of enforcing decrees which it might pass. The practical difficulties of this situation blocked progressive legislation hopelessly. The sessions of the Diet had therefore degenerated into long and solemn discussions of very frivolous matters; for example, which of two duchies should vote first, and whether the envoys of princes should sit on chairs of red or green cloth. In the seventies of the eighteenth century the Imperial Court of Law at Wetzlar faced a docket of sixty thousand undecided lawsuits. Thus, through the impotence of the central government and through the guaranteed petty sovereignty of the states, the Holy Roman Empire of the eighteenth century failed completely to give its subjects a sense of national unity and a large national life. As it was then constituted, it was hastening inevitably toward final disintegration. Thoughtful people realized this failure even then and foresaw the coming collapse. Goethe in his young manhood was only expressing the sentiment of the age when he put into the mouth of a student in Faust: “The poor old Holy Roman realm, how does it hold together?”
The states of the Empire varied greatly in extent and in the character of their government. The hereditary lands of the archduke of Austria composed about half of the Empire; a few of the remaining three hundred and seventeen states barely surpassed the burgraviate of Reineck, which, it seems, could boast of only one castle and twelve subjects. Nevertheless a state might enjoy the rank of a kingdom or a duchy or a county; it might be a free imperial city; it might be ruled over by an archbishop or an abbot or a prior. The actual government ranged from the unblushing tyranny of sundry princes to the semi-republicanism of free cities; in many free cities the government was determined by limited suffrage and popular representation in legislative assemblies. Little monarchies were very prone to copy the court of Louis XIV; regardless of the inordinate taxation which it entailed, they vied with each other in setting up weak and foolish imitations of the court of Versailles. The heads of other states were meanwhile striving to bind up the wounds of the Thirty Years’ War and thus to provide a reasonable amount of comfort and prosperity for their subjects; for many years after 1648 the restoration of conditions before the war marked the acme of any ruler’s hopes, but few achieved even this by 1740. Even state loyalty and state patriotism found little nourishment for growth when the memory of recent disasters was still vivid and the knowledge of a distant and more glorious past had been obliterated by the intervening years. One reads but little of open strife between the states from 1648 to 1740, but boundary disputes, jealousy, and suspicion perpetuated the apartness of one state from another. Individual states were frankly determined not to sacrifice their own interests for those of all the states combined, thus giving a final emphasis to the lack of cohesion throughout the Holy Roman Empire.
The supreme head of all these three hundred and eighteen states was chosen by the majority of certain leading princes of the Empire. Originally there were seven of these princely electors, but by 1740 the number had been increased to nine. Three were the German archbishops of the Roman Catholic Church at Mainz, Trier, and Cologne; six were the secular rulers of Bohemia, Saxony, Prussia, the Palatinate of the Rhine, Bavaria, and Hanover. Theoretically these electors met after the death of each emperor and chose without fear or favor the new head of the Empire. As a matter of fact their choice was predetermined, as each emperor before his death secured the promise of the various electors to vote for a successor who had already been selected by the emperor himself. In every case for three hundred years preceding 1740, the emperor, and the electoral college after him, had chosen a member of the reigning emperor’s own family as his successor.
For three centuries the ruling house of Austria, the Hapsburg family, had furnished the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. As the possessions of the archduchy of Austria equaled all the rest of the Empire put together, the leadership and the predominating influence of Austria were well founded. But the Austrian possessions were widely scattered; many of them lay entirely outside of the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire; and they were very heterogeneous in character. Besides the German-speaking inhabitants of Austria proper, the Hapsburg family ruled over the Czechs of Bohemia and the Magyars of Hungary, over the Rumanians in Transylvania, over the Italians of provinces scattered all the way from Milan to Naples, and over the Flemings of Belgium; in 1740 Belgium was known as the Austrian Netherlands. Austria proved its claim to rank among the first powers of Europe, if in no other way, by holding together these variegated possessions; but in order to achieve this, the Hapsburgs sacrificed their opportunities and their obligations as heads of the Holy Roman Empire. Pursuing the selfish dynastic policy of their family, they devoted all their attention to their own hereditary possessions and gave the Holy Roman Empire not a single emperor who labored earnestly for the unification and progress of the Empire.
Through age as well as through honorable achievements many states besides Austria were widely known throughout Germany and Europe and figured conspicuously in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among these were Bavaria, just west of Austria proper in South Germany, and the electorate of Saxony in central Germany, directly north of the Austrian possession of Bohemia. In 1740 the duke of Bavaria hoped at the death of the archduke of Austria to succeed to the Austrian dominions by inheritance through an elder female branch of the Hapsburgs. The duke, or as he was more generally called, the elector of Saxony cherished similar hopes and for the same reason. His position in Germany was further strengthened by the fact that he had been elected by the Polish diet as head of its kingdom. The duchy of Würtemberg, west of Bavaria, and the margraviate of Baden, west of Würtemberg, were also important states. In North Germany the duchy, or electorate, of Hanover loomed large, in great part because its head was also king of England from 1714 to 1837. For many years Hanover aspired to play among the states of North Germany the leading rôle which Austria played in the south. These aspirations were destined, however, to be blighted by Hanover’s next-door neighbor to the east, the kingdom of Prussia.
The growth of Prussia under the Hohenzollern family forms one of the most important chapters in modern European history. The original home of the Hohenzollerns lay in the former South German duchy of Swabia, but as early as the twelfth century a scion of the family went to Nuremberg and there secured for himself and his descendants the position of burgrave, or “count of the city.” In 1415, however, in return for financial assistance of three years before, the reigning emperor conferred the Mark of Brandenburg together with its electoral vote upon the burgrave Frederick of Hohenzollern. Originally one of the border provinces of the Empire – hence its name, “Mark,” or “march” – the Mar k of Brandenburg lay in northern Germany; in 1415 it embraced about ten thousand square miles, approximately equal to Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined, with Berlin near the center. In the hands of Frederick and his heirs, the electorate of Brandenburg became one of the most flourishing of all the North German principalities. At the time of the Reformation, Albert, a member of a subordinate branch of the Hohenzollern family, was the chosen Grand Master of the Knights of the Teutonic Order. He became a Protestant, dissolved the Order in 1525, and received in fief of the king of Poland a part of the old territories of the Order, namely, the duchy of East Prussia; this is now the extreme northeastern province of the kingdom of Prussia. In 1618 the duchy fell by inheritance to the elector of Brandenburg, and in 1657 its permanent independence of Poland was secured.
Frederick William (reigned 1640- 1688), “the Great Elector” of Brandenburg, laid the foundations of the modern house of Hohenzollern. He built up a strongly centralized government; he developed agriculture and trade so that his people became comparatively wealthy; and he created a strong standing army. In the reign of his son and successor Frederick (1688- 1713), the electorate of Brandenburg was merged, by imperial sanction, into the Kingdom of Prussia; with the title of Frederick I the new king assumed the royal crown amid great splendor on January 18, 1701 in the city of Königsberg. The royal treasure which Frederick depleted in order to acquire and embellish his new dignity was restored and enlarged by his frugal son Frederick William I (1713- 1740). The army grew to a host of 80,000 thoroughly drilled soldiers, and the centralized government of the Great Elector was converted into an absolute monarchy. These bequests of Frederick William I to his son paved the way for a series of startling events which began in 1740.
The life of the German people embodied the unhappy effects of existing political conditions, and at the same time it contained the germs of a new being. The Thirty Years’ War took from the German people all initiative and enterprise for many years; it gave them a craving for continued peace, for law and order at any price. Men found it comparatively easy therefore in the absence of war to realize a measurable degree of happiness. They paid the bills of extravagant courts without much grumbling, and were satisfied with the large or small crumbs of good government which fell from their rulers’ tables. The peasants suffered most. Burdened by taxation and required to perform fixed services for their landlords, they were bound to the soil and passed from one owner of an estate to another along with plows and other farming implements. Traces of medieval conditions also clung to many towns. Few were lighted at night; few boasted any paved streets; many were still enclosed by old walls and ramparts; communication between them still depended upon more or less infrequent and unreliable stagecoaches. For a century and more German life had contained no impulse to the creation of an honorable literature. In 1740 Germans read chiefly the literature of other nations, France and England particularly; weak imitations of Defoe Robinson Crusoe and the Spectator of Addison and Steele were read with especial delight. German architecture and sculpture had produced memorable works, for example, the Zwinger at Dresden, but these works without exception also show the deep influence of foreign models. Only music had maintained independence and originality. Like the German hymn, the one great achievement of German literature in two hundred years, music had sprung directly from the high spiritual fervor of the Reformation and the heart-rending tribulations of the Thirty Years’ War; it had found immortal form in the works of Bach and Händel. Thus, purely intellectual vitality was at a low ebb in 1740; but two great forces had begun to leaven German life and thought. The “pietistic movement” was turning men away from blind adherence to dogmatic doctrines which had been set up by the Church; it was teaching men that true Christianity sprang only from a close prayerful relation to a personal God; pietism was thus reviving ardent feeling and it was spurring imagination. Rationalism likewise protested against adherence to traditional dogma. It differed from pietism in subjecting all theories and all phenomena of life to the test of reason. Both forces made for independence; rationalism made for intellectual vigor and liberty as well. The history of German literature in the eighteenth century presents not a single author of great repute whose early life was void of pietistic influences. German philosophy and German science of the nineteenth century could hardly have come into being without rationalism as a forbear.
CHARLES VI, HEAD OF THE Holy Roman Empire and archduke of Austria, died in October 1740. Throughout many years Charles had feared that at his death his lack of male issue would induce various rulers to seize a part of the Hapsburg possessions. He had therefore spared no efforts to secure the promises of the most important European nations and German states that they would permit his daughter Maria Theresa (born 1717) to inherit her father’s dominions unimpaired. Many nations and states had given their promise; but, in view of the treacherous course which international politics of the eighteenth century often followed, no one was sure that any of these promises would be kept. The news of the death of Charles VI sounded in the ears of Europe like the curtain bell of a long-awaited drama. Every one knew that the stage was set; whether for tragedy or serio-comedy no one could foretell. All doubt soon vanished. Bavaria at once reasserted its claims to all the Austrian possessions and to the succession as head of the Empire; Saxony followed suit; France manifested its desire for the Austrian Netherlands. But Maria Theresa’s most fateful enemy came from the kingdom of Prussia. With speed and energy he came and struck before any other claimant mobilized his army. Prussia’s claim to Austrian territory went back to the year 1537. By a treaty made at that time the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg and a ducal house of Silesia agreed that on failure of issue on either side the other should inherit the lands of the decedent. Such treaties were frequently made; but the emperor of that time, who was also king of Bohemia, refused to acknowledge this one because the Silesian house had become the voluntary vassal of the Bohemian Crown two centuries before. When the ducal house did fail of issue in 1675, the emperor seized the Silesian lands. At the same time, however, he gave the Hohenzollerns a compensation in the form of other land and thus lent a semblance of legality to the Hohenzollern claim. This compensatory land which Austria had given to the Great Elector, Austria next took back from the Great Elector’s son Frederick I. From that time on the Hohenzollern claim, though never renounced, lay dormant until the death of Charles VI, five months after Frederick II (born 1712) had become king of Prussia. Frederick saw in Charles’s death an opportunity to reassert and to secure the Hohenzollern claim; he proceeded at once to realize it. This determination on the part of Frederick cannot be wholly condemned, as custom and usage were on the side of the Hohenzollerns when the original treaty was made; this custom and usage furnished the basis on which Frederick defended his act in a later writing. But in Frederick’s own time public opinion was already giving more weight to the dependent relation between the Silesian ducal house and Bohemia. In the eighteenth century and ever since, Frederick’s act has more and more appeared like an attempt to impose sixteenth-century conceptions of law and of the right of might on an age of higher standards. Few people outside of Prussia have ever believed that Frederick’s course was thoroughly justified or that he was actuated solely by a desire for justice. Indeed, Frederick himself gives authority to this view. In his Memoirs he says with convincing audacity that he seized the opportunity of 1740 as “a means of acquiring reputation and of increasing the power of the state.”
In November 1740 Frederick offered to assist Maria Theresa to the undisputed possession of her father’s throne and dominions if she would give him a part of Silesia, but she refused the offer. In December Frederick invaded Silesia with an army of 22,000 men. With the exception of three fortresses the whole province surrendered to him before February 1741. A decisive Prussian victory over Austrian veterans in April paved the way to an alliance two months later between Prussia and France. In November Frederick joined the general coalition of Bavaria, Saxony, many lesser German states, Sweden, France, Spain, and Sardinia against Austria and its allies: England, Holland, and Russia. Frederick’s fight for Silesia thus became a part of the War of the Austrian Succession. An army of Bavarians and French marched victoriously through a part of Austria and after uniting with Saxon forces took Prague. Here the elector of Bavaria was crowned king of Bohemia; a month later, January 1742, he was chosen emperor of the Holy Roman Empire under the title of Charles VII. Another victory of the Prussians over the Austrians determined Austria to dispose of the enemy at its flank by making peace with him. The resulting Treaty of Breslau (June 1742) gave Frederick Silesia; but he deserted his allies to achieve it. As Maria Theresa could now turn with far greater effect against her remaining enemies, she succeeded in wrenching Bohemia from them before the end of the year, and in May 1743 she was crowned queen of Bohemia. In June the energetic coöperation of English, Hanoverian, and Austrian troops resulted in a brilliant victory over the combined French and Bavarian armies. Saxony and Sardinia went over to the side of Austria a few months later. Austria’s star was in the ascendant.
As Austria gathered strength, Frederick doubted more and more the permanence of his hold on Silesia. In June 1744, therefore, he made a new alliance with France; in August, under the pretense of assisting the emperor, Charles VII, he opened the Second Silesian War. He captured Prague in September, but the French left him in the lurch, and he was forced to retire into Silesia for the winter. Partly through indolence, partly through insufficient money and men, the new emperor had never been able to help himself, much less Frederick. From the Prussian point of view it was an irony of fate when Charles VII died in January 1745. The ground of Frederick’s contention was cut from under his feet. In the very same month Austria, Saxony, England, and Holland formed the Quadruple Alliance for the purpose of dividing Prussia among themselves. After concluding a peace with the new elector of Bavaria, Maria Theresa sent (May 1745) an army of Austrians and Saxons over the Riesengebirge into Silesia to crush Frederick. Lured on by his seeming torpor, they penetrated into the heart of Silesia. At Hohenfriedberg, on a June morning soon after dawn, Frederick fell upon them with bewildering fury and success. A single regiment of 1500 cavalrymen brought in 2500 prisoners and 66 standards; the Austrians and Saxons lost more than four times as many men as the Prussians. Frederick hoped for peace, but Maria Theresa was by no means defeated in spirit. In September her confidence increased when her husband, formerly duke of Lorraine and now grand duke of Tuscany, was elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire as Francis I. A plan was soon evolved for the invasion of Prussia by three Austrian and Saxon armies. But as they were advancing certain of success, Frederick charged and routed them (November 1745). Three weeks later a victory of one of his generals opened the way for Frederick to the capital of Saxony. In Dresden, on Christmas Day, a peace was signed whereby, in return for the confirmation of his possession of Silesia, Frederick acknowledged Francis I as emperor.
With the Peace of Dresden tranquillity returned to the German Empire. But Austria was forced to continue its struggle with France and Spain in order to maintain possession of its provinces lying without the Empire. In 1746 the chief engagements were in Italy, in 1747 in the Austrian Netherlands; both campaigns went against Austria, though it was assisted in the one by Sardinia and in the other by England. At last, in 1748, Austria entered into an alliance with Russia, and England hired a Russian army. When this fresh force crossed Germany in the summer of 1748 on its way to the chief scene of conflict, along the Rhine, France decided to conclude peace. The articles which now closed the War of the Austrian Succession were signed in October 1748 at Aix-la-Chapelle. By this peace Austria again confirmed Frederick’s possession of Silesia and it also relinquished three Italian provinces, but it regained the Netherlands, which France had seized during the war. Austria thus lost heavily, but the chief principle for which it had contended, the succession of Maria Theresa in Austria and the Holy Roman Empire, was permanently established. When Frederick returned home from the Silesian Wars, he was already greeted by his exultant subjects as Frederick “the Great.” To the heritage from the Great Elector and Frederick William I – a full treasury, a large army, and a well-centralized government – Frederick had added surpassing strategic ability in war and the magic inspiration of a born leader of men. By these means he had acquired a province of a million and a quarter inhabitants and sixteen thousand square miles, that is, in area more than Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts combined; he had won the devotion of his people; and he had made a name for himself throughout Europe in two brief campaigns. But the very brilliance of his triumph and his unholy consummation of it through repeated desertion of sworn allies left him exposed to the sore jealousy of Austria and the distrust of all Europe. On the other hand, Austria’s prestige as the leading and most powerful state of the Empire had been openly questioned by Bavaria, Saxony, and Prussia. Though Bavaria and Saxony had failed of their purpose, a large Austrian province had passed into the hands of Prussia. On this account Austrian jealousy of Prussia now struck its roots deep. From this jealousy and from the obvious rivalry which thus began between Austria and Prussia sprang many events in the history of Germany far down into the nineteenth century.
In years of peace Frederick devoted himself to the development of his state with a zeal that has rarely been surpassed, but in the decade after the close of the Second Silesian War he was quickened more and more in his activity by an increasing sense of the dangers which threatened him from abroad. Knowing that in case of war he would have to depend mainly upon the resources of his own country, he gave to trade and agriculture every incentive at his command, replenished his treasury, and nearly doubled his standing army, now a body of 150,000 men. Maria Theresa meanwhile instituted reforms in her army, but she sought strength chiefly through alliances with foreign powers. She was by no means reconciled to the loss of Silesia – it is told of her that she could not see a Silesian without tears – and time and resentment were bringing her powerful friends. The ancient hostility between Austria and France was bridged over; Frederick’s biting epigrams against the mistress of Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, clinched the Austrian-French alliance. The empress of Russia, Elizabeth, whose notorious life had been sharply ridiculed by Frederick, likewise shared Maria Theresa’s hatred of the “upstart” rival. Sweden was ready to enter an alliance against Prussia, as it desired to regain the Baltic port Stettin and thus secure a foothold on the Continent. Lastly, almost every state of the German Empire eventually took active part against Prussia either through jealousy of its successes or on account of the traditional prestige of Austria as head of the Empire. Speaking in round numbers, the allies commanded full 500,000 troops; Frederick mustered about 200,000.
George II of England, who was also elector of Hanover, feared that Frederick would seize his Hanoverian posses- sions west of Prussia. But war broke out just then between France and England in America, the French and Indian War. If France transferred the scene of conflict to Europe, it would naturally, with the aid of the Austrian Netherlands as a base of operations, attack Hanover. George’s fear of this drove him to an alliance with Frederick. For several years England gave Prussia an annual subsidy of £ 150,000; its troops also assisted Frederick indirectly at certain crises by keeping the French occupied in and west of Hanover; but Frederick fought his own battles without any aid from English troops, and he sent many of his soldiers to assist England in driving and keeping the French out of Hanover. In 1756 Frederick received proof of the existence of a coalition consisting of Austria, Russia, and France, whose purpose was the dismemberment of Prussia. When Maria Theresa evaded and then repulsed his inquiries about the reasons for her increasing armament, he resolved to anticipate his enemies and to strike first and hard.
In August 1756 Frederick led 70,000 men into Saxony and thus began the Seven Years’ War. Saxony was captured in a few weeks and converted into winter quarters for the Prussian troops. In the following spring Frederick entered Bohemia and fought the first big fight of the war near Prague in May 1757. Here Frederick’s troops crossed a broad stretch of marshy meadows under the fire of the Austrian guns on the heights above, stormed the fortifications, and drove the Austrians into Prague. Frederick and his men reaped the moral benefit of a great victory, but they lost nearly a fifth, 12,000, of their comrades. A month later Frederick was badly beaten by the advancing Austrian reënforcements, and the siege of Prague had to be abandoned. During the summer of 1757 the Russians overran East Prussia, the Swedes landed in Pomerania, and France seized Hanover. The triumph of the coalition seemed certain. In October Frederick heard that the hostile states of the Empire had formed a large army, and that this army was marching north to join the French. Fearing that their juncture would mean the loss of his capital, Berlin, Frederick headed for Leipsic at full speed to prevent the union. All Europe looked upon him as ruined. But early in November 1757, at Rossbach, Frederick achieved one of those sudden, utterly unexpected victories which made him the wonder of his age. He failed to avert the union of the French troops and the army of the Empire, but when the allies were marching in a long thin line with the purpose of surrounding the Prussians, Frederick threw his troops upon them like a thunderbolt. In an hour and a half, against odds of more than two to one, he put the whole army of the allies to flight. He lost less than 600 men; his opponents lost nearly 8000. The armies of the allies scattered all over Germany.
The Austrians now engaged Frederick’s still more serious attention. They had captured Breslau, the capital of Silesia, and Frederick had to dislodge them or yield his most treasured possession. In twelve days he led his troops one hundred and seventy miles through difficult country. On the fifth of December 1757, just a month after Rossbach, Frederick with an army of 33,000 men met the Austrian army of 82,000 at Leuthen in Silesia. Here he used his famous “oblique” attack; that is, he marched his troops obliquely to the enemy’s left so that his right wing might half encircle the Austrian left and drive it back upon the center and right. The Austrian ranks crumpled up under the terrific charge, first the left, and then the center; the town of Leuthen was seized by the Prussians, and a cavalry charge decided the battle. The Austrians left 10,000 men on the field; 21,000 of them were taken prisoners. The Prussians lost 5500. Napoleon called the Battle of Leuthen “a masterpiece” and said that it alone would have been sufficient to make Frederick immortal. Within a month, under different conditions both in the character of the country and in the style of attack, with desperate odds against him in both cases, Frederick had crushed both the French and Austrian armies, two of the most renowned armies of the time. He had cleared the country south of Berlin of the enemy, and he had again made good his claim to Silesia.