Free Forgotten Land by Max Egremont Page A

grand master, then as Duke of Prussia. His lands became the first evangelical state, with a Lutheran University founded in Königsberg in 1544. The two faiths – Polish Roman Catholicism and Prussian Lutheranism – tolerated one another; unlike in England, remarkably little destruction of Church property occurred as a result of the Reformation. Polish and German were spoken throughout East Prussia, after Polish overlordship ended in 1656. In 1618, with the end of Albrecht’s direct line, Brandenburg and Prussia were united under the Hohenzollern Elector of Brandenburg.
    Settlers came to East Prussia from the west and the accumulation of large estates began. The Lehndorffs arrived in the fifteenth century, the Dohnas and the Dönhoffs at about the same time. In the eighteenth century, there was more immigration: Protestants thrown out by the Archbishop of Salzburg in 1732, Mennonites from less tolerant parts of Germany, Huguenots from France. Königsberg became an international port, with traders from all over Europe. But the land was always hard, devastated by plagues, needing to be drained and reclaimed. Its precarious security was shown in 1656 when Tatars stormed into Masuria, perpetrating massacres still used in the twentieth century to evoke terror of what might come from across the eastern frontier.
    Königsberg was chosen for the coronation of the King of Prussia in 1701 because, unlike Berlin, it was outside the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire, thus freeing the new king from having to acknowledge the Habsburg Emperor in Vienna as his overlord. In 1713 Frederick I was succeeded by Frederick William I, who doted on his regiment of tall soldiers and forced his oldest son, Frederick (later ‘the Great’), to watch the execution of Frederick’s best friend, Katte, who had been involved in a failed attempt by the boy to flee from Prussia and parental tyranny. Frederick William I consolidated an absolutist state, sound finances and a powerful army and encouraged immigration, particularly into his eastern domains. Tax increases hit the smaller
farmers but the nobility flourished and built many of the large East Prussian houses. The ascent of Prussia as a great power began in 1740 when King Frederick II, ‘the Great’, inherited from his terrible father the strong state that made an adventurous policy possible. With such coups as the conquest of Silesia in 1740 and the First Partition of Poland in 1772, Frederick turned Prussia into a European power, and the perception of a cold, militarized kingdom began. By 1786 it was the thirteenth-largest European state by population but with the third largest army: with a population of 5.8 million, Prussia had an army of 195,000, or a soldier for every twenty-nine subjects.
    Frederick’s foreign adventures were no more cynical or brutal than those of Louis XIV or Napoleon or the later imperial expansion of Britain and France. Also they were not always successful. They gained territory for Prussia – Silesia, Roman Catholic Warmia in the first Polish partition (Danzig and Thorn came later) – but also brought about defeat when Königsberg came under Russian rule from 1758 until 1762. Kant wrote a letter of homage to his new monarch, the Tsarina Elizabeth.
    Prussia, shown to be fragile by Frederick II’s defeats, was overwhelmed by Napoleon. The Prussian court fled from Berlin to Königsberg in December 1806, then further north-east to Memel in January 1807. After the battle of Eylau, in February 1807, Napoleon ruled his empire from the East Prussian castle of Finckenstein for ten weeks, while having a liaison with the Polish Countess Marie Walewska, before winning a decisive victory in June at Friedland. The Teutonic Knights had built fortifications at Friedland some four hundred and fifty years before.
    The humiliation of the Prussian King, Frederick William III, was demonstrated by the King’s presence as a mere observer at the meeting on 25 June 1807 between Tsar