The the Age of Absolutism (Routledge Revivals) by Max Beloff

Author:Max Beloff [Beloff, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780415736619
Goodreads: 18289609
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1971-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

PRUSSIA AND AUSTRIA

At the end of the Thirty Years’ War—a catastrophe from which Germany was long in recovering—it was already plain that the attempt to assert the authority of the Habsburg emperors outside their hereditary dominions had failed. The machinery of the Empire, the Diet, the Supreme Court, the Circles for administration ground meaninglessly on. The Emperor was one only among the German sovereigns, even if, for a long time to come, the most powerful of them. During the next century the most significant development was the emergence of the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg-Prussia as the rulers of another Great Power, so that henceforth Prussia was not simply one of the multitude of small states into which the German nation had been fragmented but something clearly superior to its rivals. It was during the Age of Absolutism that there emerged into view that polarisation of Germany between Berlin and Vienna, incarnating to some extent the older division into Protestant and Catholic, which was to be the principal feature of German history in the nineteenth century.

The history of the Hohenzollerns thus provides a direct and indeed striking parallel to the history of the House of Savoy which from its base in Piedmont was ultimately to oust Austria from the control of northern Italy that it inherited from the Spanish Habsburgs as a result of the territorial settlements after the War of the Spanish Succession, It is probably no accident that Prussia proper, like Piedmont, was on the periphery of the area to which its rule was ultimately to give political unity. The stages in Prussia’s geographical expansion have already been sketched. Its history provides the best example of what could be achieved by a succession of determined dynasts in the way of creating a viable realm out of decidedly heterogeneous materials.

The real founder of the country’s greatness, Frederick William the Great Elector (1604–88), had not been content to rely on military and diplomatic successes to increase and maintain his dominions. He had begun the essential work of creating a single administrative machine based primarily on the army supply organisation, the Kriegskommissariat, and of subordinating to it the older provincial governments of the separate lands. The nobility and the towns were forced to confound their separate interests with those of the whole. But one should not read back into a seventeenth-century context the impersonal idea of the State of which later Prussian rulers were to make themselves the servants. Frederick William in his will attempted to divide up his lands again between the sons of his first and second marriages as though they were purely personal possessions.

The new elector, Frederick III secured the support of the Privy Council in setting aside a testamentary disposition that ran counter to dynasty’s traditions, and after his assumption of the title of King in Prussia in 1701, royal decrees of 1710 and 1713 affirmed the unity of the Hohenzollern domains. But although Frederick inherited the basic institutions for a unitary State, including an army and a bureaucracy

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