Episode 477: Prussia

French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. But the story of Prussia begins not in the great capitals of Europe, but in the frozen marshlands around Brandenburg and the distant duchy of At the time it was called East Prussia, which was nothing more than a scattered realm of modest cities, sandy fields, dense forests full of charring old legionary bones that no one in the seventeenth century mistook for a

great power. But within a single lifetime, one family, the Hausenhollerans, would transform the territory into a kingdom, and its ruler, Frederick the First, would wear a crown forged not through war and conquest, but through calculation, diplomacy, and ambition. To understand how Frederick became the first King of Prussia, we have to start a generation earlier with his fader, Frederick William,

known to history as the Great Elector. When the Thirty Years War ended in sixteen forty eight, Brandenburg Prussia was a broken shell of a state. Its cities had been burnt, its population absolutely decimated, its economy stood in ruins. But Frederick William, a Calvinist prince of Iron Resolve, spent decades

rebuilding his state, sometimes almost literally brick by brick. He centralized the administration, crushed the rebellious estates, and created this is the important part, the most efficient militarized bureaucracy in Europe. He forged an army not just to fight the wars, but as the glue that would actually hold his state together. He wrote once, where the sword is not drawn, the pen may be ignored. Frederick William had no intention of

having his pen ignored. By the time of his death in sixteen eighty eight, the Hosenhaller in territories, though still scattered across the Holy Roman Empire and some outside it, had become a force to be reckoned with his son. At the time, Frederick the Third inherited an empire that had a huge amount of potential, not much else. He was cultured, vain and exsessed with prestige. If his father had been a hammer, Frederick would be a gilded frame. But he had a vision that his father did not.

He wanted to turn the Electorate of Brandenburg into its own kingdom. But here lay the problem. Brandedberg was a part of the Holy Roman Empire, where the Emperor, by ancient custom and papal sanction, was the only one allowed to grant royal dignity to vassals. No one within the Empire could declare themselves king without permission, and both Habsburg emperors were loath to allow new crowns to bloom. But Frederick he knew of a legal loophole, and he was

determined to use it. While Brandenburg within the Empire, the Duchy of Prussia, which had once been a fief of Poland, was not. Since the Treaty of Weilau in sixteen fifty seven, the Duchy had been a fully sovereign territory, owing no allegiance whatsoever to the Holy Roman Emperor. And so Frederick figured, if he could not be crowned King of Brandenburg, he could still become King of Prussia, a carefully worded title

that avoided any direct offense to imperial dignity. Still, such a transformation would require imperial blessing that meant to diplomacy, flattery, and, of course, because it's the Holy Roman Empire more than anything else, a big, heaping cash pile. And in the winter of seventeen hundred, as Europe teetered on the edge of the War of Spanish Succession, Frederick made his move. The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold the first desperately needed allies.

France under Louis the fourteenth threatened to expand its once again, and the balance of Europe hong. Frederick offered troops eight thousand disciplined brandenburg soldiers for the coming war, and in return, he demanded the Emperor's approval for his royal coronation. After months of negotiation, Leopold relented in a secret treaty signed in November seventeen hundred. The Emperor agreed that Frederick could assume the title of King of Prussia, provided he did

so only in the lands outside the Empire. It was a weird and awkward compromise, but Frederick accepted it. He knew his foot was in the door and now would be impossible to close it. He had paid for his crown not in blood, but in soldiers, coin and diplomacy. On January eighteenth, seventeen oh one, in the icy chapel

of Kannisburg Castle, Frederick crowned himself King of Prussia. The scene was a spectacle of gold and velvet, with foreign diplomats, Lavish banquets, and sarah ammonial finery imported all the way from Versailles and some from Vienna. Frederic's wife, Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, knelt beside him, radiant and jewels. As he placed the crown on her head. The new king declared that God himself had raised him from elector to sovereign.

He had no intention of ruling as a provincial monarch. However, his new court in Berlin, styled after Louis the fourteenth Versailles, was filled with opera, architecture, and philosophy. He founded the Berlin Academy of Sciences, employed foreign artists and scholars, and transformed Charlottenburg Palace into a symbol of royal culture. But even as he reveled in ceremony, Frederick never forgot the reality of his kingdom's birth. He ruled in king in Prussia.

Lest he insult the Empire. He refrained from using King of Prussia as much as humanly possible, and he continued, of course, to of the Holy Roman Emperor loyally in all his wars. The title may have been awkward, but it held power in foreign courts. Frederick was now treated as an equal, at least of the kings of Denmark, Sweden, and England. The Hosenhollerins had stepped out of the shadow of the Habsburgs, and the long path towards Prussia and

then ultimately Germany becoming a European power had begun. Frederick died in seventeen thirteen. He had ruled as king for just over a decade, and though he left behind debts in an ornate court, he also left a title, one that would be inherited by his son, Frederick William the First, the Soldier King, and eventually by his grandson Frederic the second Frederick the Great, and he would forge that title into empire. Prussia was no longer a duchy or some

bizarre electoral creerosity in the Holy Roman Empire. It was a kingdom, a peculiar one, but it was still a kingdom, and its foundations were not laid by conquest honestly, but by illegal fiction, some imperial politics, and the unrelenting ambition of a man who desperately wanted a crown. Voltaire, writing later of the Hosenhollerance, observed quote, they stole their kingdom with a quill and kept it with a sword. We'll see just how right that is. And so it was.

The Kingdom of Prussia had been born not in battle, but in back rooms, embassies and snowy chapels. Its age of kings had begun. But while in Prussia Frederick might bask in the glow of his new beautiful palace, the realities were very different for a lot of Europe, because in the opening days of January seventeen oh nine, a

strange and sudden stillness swept the continent. Across the plains of northern France, in the valleys of the Rhineland, along the rivers of Bohemia and Poland, the air suddenly turned sharp, and bitter winds stilled, clouds vanished, the stars burned in a sky that were so clear, according to some it seemed painted by ice itself. And then the cold descended, not in days, but in hours. This, ladies and gentlemen, was no ordinary winter. By dawn of January sixth, seventeen

oh nine, temperatures had plummeted across the continent. Church bells cracked in their towers, wine froze, and bottles. Trees burst apart from the cold with a sound that reminded some of musket fire. Birds dropped mid flight. In Paris, it was so so cold that wolves crept into the suburbs, drawn by the scent of rotting meat. It was, as one French observer wrote, a cold so harsh the earth

itself seemed dead. This was the Great Frost of seventeen o nine, the harshest winter in Europe in over five hundred years, and its effects would haunt the continent for years to come. The cold was immediate and unrelenting. In Paris, the thermometer dropped to as low as minus fifteen degrees celsiuss five degrees fahrenheit, a low that was basically unheard of. The Sen River froze solid, halting trade and stranding barges in massive sheets of ice. In Geneva, the snow stood

chest high by the end of January. In Italy, citrus groves dyed in moss, their roots split from the freeze, even the warm waters of the Venetian Lagoon. For those who have been to Venice, this is almost unbelievable. But they turned to ice. The German writer Zecharias Conrad von Offenbach recorded quote, we are in the grip of a monstrous winter. No man remembers the like The elb is frozen so hard that wagons cross it. The poor die in the streets like flies. Peasants were the first to suffer.

Whole villages perished. Europe hadn't seen death like this since the Bubonic plague three hundred and some years earlier. In the countryside, grain stores were frozen or spoiled. Firewood ran out, Farmers slotted live stock rather than watch them die in the fields. In the city is the price of bread sword, and those without means starved to death. Even the well off struggled. These cracked from the cold, stoves burst, and food supplies dwindled. But the worst thing of all was

that this wasn't a short frost, not at all. The brutal temperatures continued throughout January and February. Even in March and April. The thaw was sluggish and cruel. When the snows finally melted, they revealed the devastation flooded fields, dead crops, drowned animals, and the stinking of corpses of thousands who had simply died where they lay. Now, the spring of seventeen oh nine should have been a season of hope. But I'm sure you realize this now. The land was

simply too devastated to give. Crop failures were everywhere France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. The harvest of seventeen oh nine was disastrously bad, and what little food remained was often moldy, frostbitten or rotting from the fields. Prices doubled, then they tripled. In some towns, a loaf of bread cost a full day's wages. In the French countryside, where years of war and taxation under Louis the fourteenth had already brought the people to the very edge, the

frost tipped them into catastrophe. One report from Burgundy stated the people eat the bark from the trees. Mothers abandoned their infants on the road. The dead are buried in shallow pits, if at all. Now, the death toll is difficult to estimate but historians now believe over six hundred thousand people died just in France that was from starvation, exposure,

or disease related to frost and famine. In Sweden, where winter coincided with the catastrophic defeat of Charles the Twelfth Army in that Great Northern War I mentioned before, thousands of soldiers froze to death in the March. The cold ravage not only homes and harvests, but full nations. Russia too felt the bait of the frost. Peter the Greats and Armies campaigning in Poland lost untold thousands of men

to the cold. Even his newly built city of Saint Petersburg, still struggling to survive in its swampy cradle, saw entire work gangs perish in the frozen mud. One French envoy in Moscow wrote, and just total disbelief. The cold is so severe that even the beards of men freeze. It must be broken off with their hands. I've seen dead men standing upright in the snow. Malnutrition and poor sanitation

sparked typhus outbreaks from Ireland to Transylvania. Entire towns withered away, the peasantry of Central and Eastern Europe, already burdened by serfdom, taxation, and war, sank into a state of almost medieval suffering. And the Great Frost of seventeen o nine didn't just kill it actually changed the course of European history. In France, disaster accelerated the decline of Louis the fourteenth reign. Already bankrupt from decades of war, the French state could barely

respond to the emergency. Royal grain depots were quickly exhausted. The king's reputation, once shining from Versailles, was now dimmed by hunger and death. In the words of a Norman priest quote, the sun no longer warms his people end quote. In Sweden, the frost compounded the disaster from the Battle of Patava. That same year, Charles the Twelfth's once fearsome empire quickly began to crumble. The winter had weakened his army before the Russian Spring campaign began, and it would

never fully recover. In the longer term. The frost helped triggered a wave of migration and agricultural reform. Peasants abandoned marginal lands, some fled west to the Americas, others turned to new Cropsticularly, potatoes, once viewed with suspicion, were now prized for their hardiness. Scientific agriculture for the first time began to gain ground, especially in England and the Netherlands.

But the frost also left a spiritual scar. In sermons and pamphlets across the continent, preachers declared that God was punishing Europe for its sins. In Catholic France and Orthodox Russia. In Protestant Prussia and Calvinist Geneva, the faithful sought divine meaning in a winter that seemed to defy understanding. Now modern cleomenttologists have always debated the cause of the Great Frost.

Some link it to a volcanic eruption, possibly Helka in Iceland in seventeen oh seven, or an unrecorded eruption elsewhere. Others point to the monitor Minimum, a period of low solar activity from roughly sixteen forty five to seventeen fifteen, part of the socol called Little Ice Age that gripped Europe with cooler, wetter seasons. Whatever the cause, the impact

of the frost was undeniable. It was a turning point, a reminder that even in the age of the Enlightenment, reason and empire could be humbled by the sky itself. For decades afterward, the year seventeen o nine was remembered with dread in villages chronicles. It was written as the Linney terry Bell. The Terrible Period survivors told tales of birds that froze mid air, a bread that would crack

like glass, of funeral bells silenced by frost. In the words of one French peasant recorded in seventeen twenty, we lived through a winter not made for men, but for beasts of ice, and we prayed not for warmth, but for mercy. A great frost was not merely a weather event. It was a catastrophe a biblical scale. It was the

winter when Europe shivered all the way to its knees. Now, if you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like additional content, this is just one of my few reminders at this point that as we wrap up the main show, Western CIV. Two point zero is still humming. We're deep in the Roman Empire, in the reigns of the Julio Claudians at this point, So if you'd like to go back to Rome and who doesn't with a lot more depth and

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