CHAPTER ONE

The History Machine

FREDERICK WILLIAM, the prince known as the Great Elector, was the first Brandenburg Elector of whom numerous portraits survive. Many of them were commissioned by the sitter himself. They document the changing appearance of a man who spent forty-eight years—longer than any other member of his dynasty—in sovereign office. Depictions from the early years of the reign show a commanding, upright figure with a long face framed by flowing dark hair; in the later images, the body has swollen, the face is bloated, and the hair has been replaced by cascades of artificial curls. And yet one thing is common to all the portraits painted from life: intelligent, dark eyes that fix the viewer in a sharp stare.1 The engraving shown opposite page 1 (figure 1.1) was based on a sketch by Anselmus van Hulle, court painter to the Prince of Orange. In 1645 or 1646, van Hulle attended the negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia in Münster and Osnabrück in order to capture the likenesses of the sovereign and delegates taking part. The decision to frame the engraved portrait of each peacemaker in the manner of an epitaph suggests this was not merely a portrait. It was intended to serve as a memorial to a man of renown who had left a mark on the history of his times.2

Frederick William presided over the restoration—indeed the transformation—of the Brandenburg composite monarchy in the aftermath of the devastations of the Thirty Years’ War. During his reign, which lasted from 1640 until 1688, Brandenburg acquired a small but respectable army, a land bridge across Eastern Pomerania to the Baltic coast, a modest Baltic fleet, and even a colony on the west coast of Africa. Brandenburg became a regional power, a sought-after ally, and a principal party to major peace settlements.3

In 1667, Frederick William, the Great Elector, composed a ‘Fatherly Instruction’ for his heir. The document began, in the manner of the traditional princely testament, with exhortations to lead a pious and god-fearing life, but it soon broadened into a politico-historical tract of a type without precedent in the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Sharp contrasts were drawn between the past and the present. The Duchy of Prussia, the prince reminded his heir, had once languished in the ‘intolerable condition’ of vassalage to the Crown of Poland; only the Elector’s acquisition of sovereignty over the Duchy had annulled that oppressive state of affairs. ‘All this cannot be described; the Archive and the accounts will bear witness to it’.4 The future Elector was urged to develop what we would call a historical perspective on the problems that beset him in the present. Industrious consultation of the archive would reveal not only how important it was to maintain good relations with France, but also how these should be balanced with ‘the respect that You, as an Elector, must have for the Reich and Emperor’. There was also a strong sense of the new order established by the Peace of Westphalia and the importance of defending it if necessary against any power or powers that should set out to overturn it.5 In short, this was a document acutely sensitive to its own location in history and charged with an awareness of the tension between cultural and institutional continuity and the forces of change.

This chapter is about that tension. It is doubtful whether the Elector ever developed a coherent view of ‘history’, in the sense of a philosophical standpoint on its meaning or nature. He was a man oriented towards questions of power and security, not given to speculative reflections or to the discussion of issues of principle.6 And ‘history’ in its present-day sense, an abstract, collective-singular noun denoting an all-encompassing, multilayered process of transformation, did not yet exist. The word had not yet undergone that process of expansion and ‘temporalisation’ that would establish it as one of the matrix concepts of modernity.7 Yet the Elector and his regime did possess, so this chapter will argue, something more intuitive, a highly distinctive and dynamic form of historicity, rooted in the sense that the monarchical state occupied an exposed location on the threshold between a catastrophic past and a threat-rich future.

In order to flesh out this claim and clarify its implications, I first examine the arguments deployed in the conflict between the electoral government and the noble-dominated provincial Estates, focusing in particular on the historicity implicit in the arguments offered by both sides, because when the prince invoked the idea of ‘necessity’ or ‘emergency’ against the entrenched claims of the traditional holders of provincial power, he was in effect playing the future against the past.8 I then ask whether there was something Calvinist in the historicity of the Elector and of his government—confessional tensions, after all, were woven into the conflicts between the Elector’s largely Calvinist administration and his Lutheran Estates. The Reformed faith was the most complex intellectual system to which the Elector made a conscious commitment. A final section examines the efforts of the Elector’s government to secure the services of an official historian, focusing in particular on the writings of Samuel Pufendorf, who came to Berlin to take up his post as official historiographer in January 1688, a few months before the Elector’s death. Here I suggest that Pufendorf first provided, as a theorist, powerful philosophical justifications for the consolidation of Electoral power and then fashioned, as a historian, an ambitious, archivally researched narrative that captured the dynamic historicity of the Elector and his officials. The chapter closes with a brief reflection on how the repudiation of traditional privilege that became a salient theme of the Elector’s reign found expression in the elaborate ceremony that attended the coronation of the first Prussia king in 1701.

Composite Monarchy in an Age of War

The political entity whose throne Frederick William ascended in 1640 was no unitary state. It was a ‘composite monarchy’ comprising territories acquired by different means, subject to diverse laws and ruled under different titles. The heartland was the Electorate of Brandenburg, purchased by the Hohenzollerns in 1417 for four hundred thousand Hungarian gold guilders. Through strategic marital alliances, successive generations of Hohenzollern Electors had acquired territorial claims to a number of noncontiguous territories to the east and the west: Ducal Prussia on the Baltic and the Duchy of Jülich-Kleve, a complex of Rhenish territories comprising Jülich, Kleve (Cleves), Berg, and the Counties of Mark and Ravensberg. Thanks to a family connection dating back to 1530, the Hohenzollerns also claimed the right of succession to Pomerania, a strategically important territory between Brandenburg and the Baltic Sea.

Within their diverse possessions, the Electors of Brandenburg shared power with regional elites organised in representative bodies called Estates. In Brandenburg, the Estates approved (or not) taxes levied by the Elector and (from 1549) administered their collection. In return, they possessed far-reaching powers and concessions. The Elector was forbidden, for example, to enter into alliances without first seeking the approval of the Estates.9 In a declaration published in 1540 and reiterated on various occasions until 1653, the Elector even promised that he would not ‘decide or undertake any important things upon which the flourishing or decline of the lands may depend, without the foreknowledge and consultation of all our estates’.10 The provincial nobilities owned the lion’s share of the landed wealth in the Electorate; they were also the Elector’s most important creditors. But their outlook was vehemently parochial; they had no interest in helping the Elector to secure faraway territories of which they knew little.

The estates inhabited a mental world of mixed and overlapping sovereignties. The Estates of Kleve maintained a diplomatic representative in The Hague and looked to the Dutch Republic, the Imperial Diet (the assembly of the Holy Roman Empire), and on occasions even to Vienna for support against illicit interventions from Berlin.11 They envisaged establishing their own system of taxation and forming a corporate ‘hereditary union’ with the nearby territories of Mark, Jülich, and Berg and frequently conferred with the Estates of these lands on how best to respond to (and resist) demands from Berlin.12 The estates of Ducal Prussia, for their part, were still subjects of the Polish crown; they saw neighbouring Poland as the guarantor of their ancient privileges. As one senior Electoral official irritably remarked, the leaders of the Prussian Estates were ‘true neighbours of the Poles’ and ‘indifferent to the defence of [their own] country’.13

The turbulence and destruction of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) placed these delicately balanced arrangements under pressure. In Brandenburg, the estates remained deeply sceptical of military expenditures and foreign combinations of any kind. Even after repeated incursions into Brandenburg territory by Protestant and Imperial troops, they remained impassive in the face of entreaties for financial assistance from the sovereign.14 As they saw it, their function was to forestall unwarranted adventures and to preserve the fabric of provincial privilege against incursions from the centre.15 But as the war dragged on, the fiscal privileges of the Brandenburg nobilities began to look fragile.16 Foreign princes and generals had no compunction in extorting contributions from the provinces of Brandenburg; why should the Elector not take his share? This would involve rolling back the ancient ‘liberties’ of the Estates. For this task, the Elector turned to Count Adam Schwarzenberg, a Catholic and a foreigner with no ties to the provincial nobility. Schwarzenberg lost no time in imposing a new tax without any recourse to the usual provincial organs. He curtailed the power of the Estates to oversee state expenditures and suspended the Privy Council, transferring its responsibilities to the Council of War, whose members were chosen for their complete independence from the Estates. In short, Schwarzenberg installed a fiscal autocracy that broke decisively with corporate tradition.17 The corporate nobility came to loathe him for his assault on their corporate liberties. In 1638–39, when Schwarzenberg’s power was in its zenith, fly sheets circulated in Berlin decrying the ‘Hispanic servitude’ of his rule.18

The effects of the war on the Duchy of Kleve were less drastic. Here, as across Germany, heavy contributions and extortions were levied as various armies fought for control of the strategically important lower Rhine. But the occupation of the eastern areas on the right bank of the Rhine by Dutch troops brought money into the country, revived trade, and strengthened the political connection with The Hague. Whereas the interventions of Count Schwarzenberg, combined with widespread devastation, had weakened the Estates in Brandenburg, the Estates of Kleve remained as powerful as ever and continued to be confident in the political support of the nearby United Provinces, whose garrisons remained in many towns, even after the war had come to an end.19

Ducal Prussia lay outside the areas of the most intense conflict during the Thirty Years’ War and thus managed to avoid the destruction visited upon Brandenburg. Here, the Estates had traditionally ruled the roost, meeting regularly in full session and keeping a tight grip on central and local government, the militia, and the territorial finances. The traditional Prussian right of appeal to the Polish crown, still formally sovereign in the territory, meant that they would not easily be pressed into cooperating.20

Prince versus Estates

In December 1640, when Frederick William acceded to the throne, Brandenburg was still under foreign occupation. A two-year truce was agreed with the Swedes in July 1641, but the looting, burning, and general misbehaviour continued.21 Only in March 1643 did Frederick William return from the relative safety of Königsberg in Ducal Prussia to ruined Berlin, a city he scarcely recognised. Here he found a population depleted and malnourished and buildings destroyed by fire or in a parlous state of repair.22 The predicament that had bedevilled his father’s reign remained unsolved. Brandenburg had no military force with which to establish its independence. The small army created by Schwarzenberg was already falling apart and there was no money to pay for a replacement. In the Duchy of Kleve and the County of Mark, the new Elector was sovereign in name only; these were still occupied by Imperial, Spanish, Dutch, Hessian, and French troops.23 As for Pomerania, it was likely to remain under Swedish occupation for the foreseeable future. Johann Friedrich von Leuchtmar, a privy councillor and the Elector’s former tutor, summarised Brandenburg’s predicament in a report of 1644: Poland, he predicted, would seize Prussia as soon as it was strong enough; Kleve in the west was under the control of the Dutch Republic. Brandenburg stood ‘on the edge of the abyss’.24

In order to restore the independence of his monarchy and press home his territorial claims, the Elector needed a flexible and disciplined territorial fighting force. The creation of such an instrument became one of the consuming preoccupations of his reign.25 It also placed the Elector on a collision course with the Estates. In a letter of October 1645 to the Estates of Kleve, he explained that he needed to occupy the entire area of the Duchy with his own troops in order to avert the prospect of being driven out of his possessions by rivals in the region. And ‘since a soldier cannot live on wind’, this would mean the continuation of special financial contributions. These were necessary, the Elector explained, because the retention of cities was not possible without an occupying force:

In these irregular times of war and this ruined state of affairs, in this state of extreme need (where a case cannot always be made for privilege [ubi privilegii ratio haberi semper non potest]) we sincerely hope that you will not view these measures, which are undertaken in the spirit of faithful and paternal princely care for the rescue and conservation of Our lands and indeed for the welfare of you and yours, as a deliberate and premeditated infraction of the privileges you have already invoked in this matter (of which, incidentally, We have to date received no thorough report), and that you will not insist on the disbanding of these troops, who have been raised at such heavy cost, or on the demolition of the fortifications (which could not happen without the greatest danger and ruin . . . to Our reputation and Our country).26

This was a rather loose bundle of arguments. ‘I’m doing this for your own good’ was one of them, though not one that the Estates were likely to find persuasive. In a later declaration to the delegates of the Kleve Estates in Königsberg, the Elector fleshed out this claim, noting that were the Estates to succeed in blocking supply, the result would be misery, as the collapse of the Elector’s small armed forces opened the Duchy to further ‘enemy attacks and sieges’ and thus to ‘utmost ruin and danger’.27 More forceful was the reference to the broader state of emergency that had given rise to his demands for money—though it is interesting to note the softness of the Latin parenthesis, which stopped short of proposing a global suppression of privilege, even under extreme circumstances. The observation that the Elector had not as yet been fully apprised of what the privileges in question actually were implied scepticism about the precise scope and the legal foundation of the Estates’ claims. Finally, there was the reminder that refusing to comply would have ruinous consequences for the prince himself and for his lands.

This was the case the Elector made to justify the contributions he intended to levy on his subjects in Kleve. At their core was the claim that the Elector had no choice but to act as he did. ‘We remain graciously confident’, he declared in a letter to his officials in the Duchy in November 1645, ‘that they [the Estates] will duly take this to heart as an unavoidable necessity (unvermeidliche Nothwendigkeit)’; other letters spoke of ‘a need that cannot be circumvented’ (unumgängliche Noth) or of ‘extreme need’ (äusserste Noth).28

The standoff between the sovereign and the Kleve Estates came to a head during the Northern War of 1655–60.29 In 1657, Frederick William demanded the raising of over four thousand armed men and the payment of eighty thousand Reichsthaler to finance the new troops and cover the expense of maintaining garrisons and fortresses. In presenting this request to the Estates, Moritz von Nassau-Siegen, the Elector’s governor in the Duchy, observed that the Elector had tried as far as possible to avoid burdening the Estates with further demands. Now, however, he was in a position where he could pursue his ‘project to achieve peace’ (den vorhabenden friedens zweck) only with the support of his ‘loyal Estates and subjects’ (dero getrewen Staenden und Unterthanen). If these were to ‘abandon’ him, he warned, the Elector’s ‘need’ (Noth)—emergency might be a better translation in this context—would become even more pressing and the desired peace even harder to achieve. ‘And since the only true friend was a friend in need’ (Und dan nun ein getrewer freund in der noth erkant wuerde), the Governor reasoned, in terms that recall the logic of a protection racket, the Elector did not doubt that the Estates would be his ‘friends’ and come to his aid.30

In response to this importuning, the Estates of Kleve, like those of the Elector’s other lands, dug in their heels, insisting on their hereditary rights and privileges. In 1649, the Brandenburg Estates, too, refused to approve funds for a campaign against the Swedes in Pomerania, despite the Elector’s earnest reminder that all his territories were now ‘limbs of one head’ (membra unius capitis) and that Pomerania ought thus to be supported as if it were ‘part of the Electorate’.31 In Kleve, where the wealthy urban patriciate still regarded the Elector as a foreign interloper, the Estates revived the traditional ‘hereditary union’ with Mark, Jülich, and Berg; leading spokesmen even drew parallels with the contemporary upheavals in England and threatened by implication to treat the Elector as the parliamentary party were treating King Charles. Frederick William’s threats to apply ‘military executive actions’ were largely futile, since the Estates were supported by the Dutch garrisons still occupying the Duchy.32 When the Elector stepped up the pressure during the Northern War, the Estates pointed out that their fundamental duty was to see to it that ‘subsequent generations’ (posteritet) were not robbed of their privileges. In a classic exposition of the provincial perspective, the Estates explained that the subjects were in no condition to ‘assist the Elector in this war that did not concern them’. They assured the Elector that they intended no disrespect; the fact was that the duty incumbent upon them ‘pro conservatione Privilegiorum et boni publici’ prevented them from acceding to the Elector’s request, even if they had wished to. In the eyes of the Estates, the ‘preservation of privileges’ and ‘the public good’ appeared to be one and the same thing. Here as in other German lands, local elites responded to the demands and unilateral measures of the prince by invoking the rights of a ‘fatherland’ the protection of whose ‘ancient constitution’ was the duty of every noble ‘patriot’.33

In Ducal Prussia, negotiations with the Estates were complicated by the residual sovereignty of the Polish Crown. Here, the Estates possessed the right of appeal to a jurisdiction completely outside the Elector’s control. Their acquiescence in the Hohenzollern claim to their Duchy had been secured only on the condition that the transfer of custodianship over the Duchy to the Electoral House of Brandenburg would not incur any diminution of their corporate privileges. The half century before the succession of Frederick William had been marked by ambivalent trends: on the one hand an expansion of corporate rights that reinforced the preeminence of the Duchy’s nobility, on the other hand signs in the 1620s and 1630s of a rapprochement between the Prussian Estates and the Brandenburg administration.34 But in Prussia too, as in every other Hohenzollern land, the Estates baulked at the Elector’s requests for money and protested at every initiative by the Electoral administration that injured the fabric of their traditional exemptions and rights.

In the Hohenzollern lands, as elsewhere in Germany and Europe, the conflict between the central executive and the holders of provincial power encompassed many issues—the right to be consulted on key questions of foreign policy, the right to oppose the introduction of new taxes, the power, known as the Indigenatsrecht, to appoint local officials, and the traditional mechanisms of corporate provincial control over the armed forces, for example. One should not cast this confrontation in absolute terms: there was no global abolition of privilege, and the Brandenburg Elector never rejected in principle the argument from ‘ancient provenance’, though his councillors did on occasion point up the ideological and manipulative character of such arguments.35 The ‘fabric of norms’ linking the prince and the regional nobilities was stretched, but not broken.36 Frederick William had no intention of transforming his state into a unitary centralised polity in the manner imputed to him by some early twentieth-century historians. Again and again, however, he had to make the case that the Estates and the regions they represented should see themselves as parts of a single whole, and thus as bound to collaborate in the maintenance and defence of all the sovereign’s lands and the pursuit of his legitimate territorial claims.37

This way of seeing things was alien to the Estates, who viewed the respective territories as discrete constitutional parcels, bound vertically to the person of the Elector, but not horizontally to each other. The Estates of the Mark Brandenburg saw Kleve and Ducal Prussia as ‘foreign provinces’ with no claim on Brandenburg’s resources. Frederick William’s long wars for Pomerania, by the same token, were merely private princely ‘feuds’, for which he had—in their view—no right to sequester the hard-earned wealth of his subjects.38 And these disputes unfolded against the background of a polarisation in political and legal theory: while some authorities endorsed the ambitions of princes, others insisted on the ancient rights of the estates and the illegitimacy of any tax levied without their consultation and consent.39

Forms of Historicity

The Estates argued their case on the grounds of continuity with the past. Confronted by the Elector and his officials with demands for money or other resources, the Estates insisted on the continuation and solemn observance of their ‘especial and particular privileges, freedoms, treaties, princely exemptions, marital agreements, territorial contracts, ancient traditions, law and justice’. The Prince’s interventions were illegitimate because they were innovations. They represented a break with past practice. The ‘traditional’ privileges, rights, liberties, and so on were legitimate precisely because they were old. The discourse of the Estates bore the imprint of a fundamental esteem for what was old: this was a world in which rights and law in general derived their value and respectability from their having existed for a long time.40 What counted for the Estates was the regress of documents enshrining the privileges and liberties of their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers, documents that had supposedly been confirmed and reconfirmed by generations of princes. This may have looked like an invocation of inherited property title, but it was something at once larger and more diffuse: it was a constructed corporate memory of ancient right and usage. In this sense, the Estates were exemplars of a ‘culture of legal remembering’ that was characteristic of the corporate regional elites of the German lands.41 In a draft Electoral Letter of Assurance they proposed to the Electoral administration in Königsberg, representatives of the Estates of Ducal Prussia found expansive language for their own traditional liberties:

We undertake to protect unchanged in every point and clause all of the praiseworthy old orders, customs, traditions and usages, letters of lease and other licenses, contracts, goods and chattels, agreements, letters and seals, immunities, jurisdictions, possessions, personal obligations and pardons, which the Honourable Estates in general and specifically have received, used and possessed from the times of the [German] Order right down to this hour, whether through the Order, or his Royal Majesty and the Crown of Poland or from our estimable forebears of blessed memory, Margraves and Electors of Brandenburg, [and we undertake to do this] without exception, such that no action will be initiated or permitted against them, in any manner or form whatsoever, whether in times of peace or of war.42

By contrast, Elector Frederick William, as we have seen, founded his claim to intervene and modify these arrangements on the need of the state and its inhabitants. To the ‘libertas’ of the Estates, he opposed the ‘necessitas’ of the central executive, a necessity that might under certain circumstances justify the dissolution or suspension of long-standing traditional arrangements.

This was an argument that could be articulated in two modes: it might simply mean that in times of dire necessity, the central executive had the right temporarily to suspend certain customary arrangements. This was the sense of the rather tentative Latin formulation used by the Elector in his letter of 1646 to the Kleve Estates: here he suggested that in an emergency, a case ‘cannot always be made for privilege’ (privilegii ratio haberi semper non potest).43 In a curious reformulation of the same argument, Daniel Weimann, one of the Elector’s officials in Kleve, described a meeting of March 1657, at which he had confronted the recalcitrant Estates representatives with the lapidary observation that ‘privileges presupposed the absence of emergency’ (Die Privilegien präsupponirten Unnoth).44 But in its more radical form, the argument from need or emergency could assert the priority in principle and at all times of the central executive and its ‘needs’ over the historic ‘liberties’ of the provincial elites. In an interesting passage from his diary dated 22 March 1657, Weimann described a conversation with a group of Electoral officials, in which he remarked that it would be better to ignore the assemblies and remonstrations of the Estates and simply continue indefinitely to raise troops and taxes without local approval, for ‘necessity knows no law and dissolves all obligations’ (die nodt lidte kein gesetz undt entbinde von allen banden).45

The provincial defenders of libertas looked to the past, and to its manifold continuities with the present. For them, ‘posterity’ (Posteritet) was the preservation of rights established in the past for the sake of future generations.46 The Electoral authorities, by contrast, looked to the future—for what was ‘necessity’ but the anticipation of future harms and the planning of their prevention? The raising of new and unapproved taxes and troops was a measure oriented towards future danger, the risk of future incursions, the need to secure one’s interests in future peace negotiations. And the Elector, who conducted correspondence with courts across Europe, was surely in a better position to recognise such harms and opportunities in advance than the Estates, whose horizons were provincial, or regional at best. As he himself made clear, warding off potential threats meant reading the present trends in European politics:

The Honourable Estates [he observed in a declaration to a delegation from Kleve in 1645] will also bear in mind that current developments [die jetzigen Läufe] in the Roman Empire are taking such a dangerous direction that for the moment there is little prospect of the peace and tranquillity we have so long desired, and if one thinks the matter through, then there is certainly no prince whose land and people are in great danger than the Klevisch, Pomeranian and other hereditary lands of His Electoral Highness; indeed His entire Electoral state stands right now in the balance, and it will depend [on the Estates] whether what follows is the ascendancy of H.E.H. or the utmost ruin and downfall of H.E.H. and His lands.47

This argument presumed that the Elector and his officials were in a better position than his subjects to judge which dangers were most pressing and how they might best be addressed. The Estates were of course under no obligation to accept this presumption. They could and often did question the prince’s reasoning; so, on occasion, did groups of more humble subjects. In the summer of 1640, with the Elector newly installed in Königsberg (Berlin was still a no-go zone), a group of free smallholders, free peasants, and other ‘privileged people’ in the districts of Samland, Nathangen, and Oberland in Ducal Prussia added an appendix to the general remonstrance of the Estates protesting that far from increasing the security of the country, the calling up of young men for military service ‘in foreign places’ had precisely the opposite effect: ‘bearing in mind that if a danger (which God forbid) should arise, the best manpower we have to perform our services would be out of the country and we poor old-timers . . . have to mount our horses in person, though we would be of little use in a fight’.48

In 1651, the Estates of the County of Mark disputed whether the international situation justified the maintenance of an expensive Electoral military contingent in their small territory. The context here was that Spain, which was at war with France, was still occupying Frankenthal in the Palatinate. Charles IV of Lorraine, whose domains separated Alsace from the main territory of France, was also at war with Louis XIV, who was still struggling to gain control over the country. But the Estates of Mark doubted whether this posed a threat to their own country. The Lorrainers, they argued, were now depleted in numbers, and it appeared that the King of Spain intended to leave Frankenthal and return it to the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg: ‘So that neither an enemy nor hostilities are to be feared in the Holy Empire and thus we, in common with other subjects and Estates of the Empire are entitled to enjoy the sweet and noble fruits of peace; for which reason it will no longer be necessary for Your Electoral Highness to maintain so many high and costly officers, Commissars and troops’.49 Here, the priority of the central over the provincial perspective was being questioned: from their location in the Rhineland, the representatives of Mark implied, they were better placed to make sense of the shifting balance of power in their own region (though for tactical reasons they appeared to accept the logic of necessity and confined themselves to questioning whether it was applicable in this case).

Moreover, it was one thing for the prince to claim to be warding off imminent dangers and another for him to create threats through his own precipitate or preemptive initiatives. Responding to complaints along these lines from the Estates of Kleve in 1651, the Elector informed them that he intended to continue maintaining his troops in their provinces and wanted them to pay him twelve thousand thalers towards their support. But he also assured them that it was not his intention to use these troops ‘for the continuation of any hostilities’; they were there to provide ‘security against foreign invasion’.50 When the Estates’ representatives objected that there was no sign of an imminent threat, the Elector responded with the sage observation that one must not be fooled by the mere appearance of peace: despite open declarations of ceasefire, the armies of his old Neuburg rival, for example, were still concentrating and continued to pose a threat to Brandenburg’s territories. As soon as the Neuburger stood down his forces, the Elector would do the same.51

In theory, then, dangers could subside as fast as they arose, and in this lay a seed of hope for the estates. In his declaration to the Kleve delegates of December 1645, the Elector reassured his interlocutors that the current fiscal innovations would exist only for as long as the danger was imminent: ‘His Electoral Highness assures the Estates and their delegates that all of these things, which had to be done out of unavoidable necessity, are not intended in the least to be prejudicial to their documented privileges and tradition (Herkommen), and they should trust in God that these burdens will not last for long, but rather hopefully be ameliorated soon if not cease altogether.’52 The problem was that a discrepancy persisted between the localised security thinking of the individual territories and the administration’s efforts both to protect the scattered territories of the prince’s patrimony and to pursue his claims in adjacent territories. As the Elector’s political horizons broadened and the growth and improvement of his armed forces enabled Brandenburg to begin playing the role of a significant regional power in Northern Europe, the discrepancy between the princely and the provincial perspective became more pronounced.53 During the Northern War of 1655–60, the Elector’s army grew to twenty-five thousand men. By fighting first on the Swedish and then on the Polish-Imperial side, the Elector was able to prevent the powers engaged in the conflict from shutting him out of Ducal Prussia. It was a sign of Frederick William’s growing weight in regional politics that he was appointed commander of the Brandenburg-Polish-Imperial allied army raised to fight the Swedes in 1658–59. A chain of successful military assaults followed, first in Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland and later in Pomerania.

‘[It is] in the nature of alliances’, the Austrian military strategist Count Montecuccoli sagely observed, ‘that they are dissolved at the slightest inconvenience’.54 In order to pay for his growing army, Frederick William needed foreign subsidies. Frequent alliance switching forced would-be partners into a bidding war and thereby pushed up the going price for an alliance, allowing him to supplement money extracted through contributions and new taxes from the Estates with less politically irksome external funding. The rapid alternation of alliances also reflected the complexity of Brandenburg’s security needs. The integrity of the western territories depended on good relations with France and the United Provinces. The integrity of Ducal Prussia depended on good relations with Poland. The safety of Brandenburg’s entire Baltic littoral depended on holding the Swedes at bay. The maintenance of the Elector’s status and the pursuit of his inheritance claims within the empire depended upon good (or at least functional) relations with the Emperor. These imperatives interacted to generate unpredictable and rapidly shifting outcomes. It was a predicament that placed considerable strain on the decision-making networks close to the throne. During the winter of 1655–56, for example, as the Elector pondered which side to back in the opening phase of the Northern War, ‘Swedish’ and ‘Polish’ factions formed among the ministers and advisors and even the Elector’s own family. The resulting mood of uncertainty and indecision prompted one of the Elector’s most powerful councillors to complain that the Elector and his advisors ‘want what they didn’t want and do what they didn’t think they would do’.55 In switching thus from partner to partner, the Elector followed the advice of the Pomeranian Calvinist Privy Councillor Paul von Fuchs, who urged the Elector not to commit himself permanently to any one partner but always to follow a ‘pendulum policy’ (Schaukelpolitik).56

The complexity and even opacity of a foreign policy marked by sudden changes of affiliation was a further burden on relations between the prince and the Estates. The latter were sometimes reluctant (though the problem was less pronounced in the Elector’s Brandenburg heartland) to follow the twists and turns of the Elector’s policy. In an exasperated letter of complaint despatched to the Elector on 24 May 1657, the Estates of Kleve expressed dismay at the prospect of being drawn into a war with Poland: ‘We feel ourselves obliged, on account of our duties towards the conservation of privileges and the public good [to repeat our earlier protests] for fear that we should sin by omission in allowing ourselves to become entangled in this currently remote conflict and like other land and people of His Electoral Highness to come to ruin, be ravaged with fire and sword and plunged into misery and captivity’.57 In fact, it was a war with Sweden, not a war with Poland, that followed. But this merely underlined the difficulty, for the Estates, of sustaining the claim to co-arbitrate in questions touching on the security of the Elector’s lands. Where the prince acted preemptively, it might be impossible to establish whether the ‘emergency’ that justified the overriding of traditional privileges was genuinely external in character. On several occasions, the Estates cautioned the Elector against engineering situations of conflict on his own initiative.58

Who had the authority to determine when the state of threat no longer existed? Increasingly, it was the Elector who monopolised this power. And he expected his subjects to accept his explanations on trust. In 1659, when the Kleve Estates complained yet again of their burdens, imposed by the Elector’s ongoing campaign against the Swedes for Pomerania, the prince replied that there was nothing he would better like than to abolish these impositions. ‘But we are graciously confident that you will sensibly take to heart present developments (gegenwärtigen Conjuncturen) and thus come to see how impossible it has hitherto been for us to take care of the maintenance of our Military Establishment (Militäretats) and take appropriate measures for the security of our lands. [And so We expect that you will continue to help Us] so that we can pursue our just cause and bring our State into security and peace by decisively completing the military operations already entered upon’.59

But what if the Elector proved unwilling to dismantle the innovation whose introduction had been justified by dire need, even when the emergency he had invoked manifestly became less dire, or dissipated altogether? Why should we keep paying for your army, now that peace has returned? asked the Estates of Brandenburg in 1650. ‘Your Electoral Highness will surely concede that the maintenance of troops becomes, once peace has been concluded, a voluntary rather than a necessary subsidy’.60 The Elector himself had promised in his Proposition of 1655 to the Estates Assembly of Ducal Prussia to disband his troops and to remove the new excise tax ‘as soon as the emergency came to an end’, grumbled the Ducal Prussian Estates in 1661. But even six years later, when the threat was no longer imminent or evident, nothing had been done to reverse these arrangements.61

In the spring of 1683, by which time the Elector had been ruling Brandenburg-Prussia for forty-three years, the Brandenburg Estates renewed their old complaint. The Elector had not merely saddled them repeatedly with ‘extraordinary burdens’ but also failed to observe the traditional obligation to consult with the Estates on the introduction of new taxes and levies. In his reply, the Elector adopted the persona of a weary Landesvater scratching his head at the ingratitude of his children. After all these years working hard for his subjects, he wrote, he was irritated to receive this cavilling letter. His reply closed with a revealing passage justifying the burdens imposed. These, he said, had been introduced not for the purpose of oppressing or weakening the Estates, but rather on account of ‘the uncircumventable and lawless emergency (Noth), which God visited on us as a well-deserved plague upon the country and before which the invidious leges fundamentales invoked by the Estates had to give way’. And when would the plague have passed? In this text, the restoration of a true and lasting peace threatened to recede beyond the horizons of the prince’s own life on earth. ‘We long before God on high for better times and for such peaceful neighbours as Our forebears resting in God once had, so that his goodness might crown Our old age with a complete and secure state of peace, and We might die in the satisfaction of having brought Our lands into the real enjoyment of a relief so long awaited’.62 As the trope of ‘necessitas’ was radicalised, transformed from an ad hoc argument for provisional interventions to a universal justification for permanent instruments of central power (a new and more encompassing fiscal regime, a permanent standing army, and so on), it was also temporally stretched. It referred less and less to a clear and present danger and more and more to a permanent anticipatory posture, a security apparatus focused on future contingencies.

This anticipatory posture was not just gestural or discursive; its deepening purchase on the structure of the Electoral government can be traced in the institutions he built. The Brandenburg campaign army grew dramatically, if unsteadily, from 3,000 men in 1641–42 to 8,000 in 1643–46, 25,000 during the Northern War of 1655–60, and 38,000 during the Dutch Wars of the 1670s. During the final decade of the Elector’s reign, its size fluctuated between 20,000 and 30,000.63 The improvised forces assembled for specific campaigns during the early years of the reign gradually evolved into what one could call a standing army. In April 1655, a General War Commissioner (Generalkriegskommissar) was appointed to oversee the handling of financial and other resources for the army, on the model of the military administration recently introduced in France. This innovation was initially conceived as a temporary wartime measure and only later established as a permanent feature of the territorial administration. After 1679, under the direction of the Pomeranian nobleman Joachim von Grumbkow, the General War Commissariat extended its reach throughout the Hohenzollern territories, gradually usurping the function of the Estate officials who had traditionally overseen military taxation and discipline at a local level. This synergy between war-making and the development of state-like central organs was something new; it became possible only when the war-making apparatus was separated from its traditional, provincial-aristocratic foundations.

The Estates had structured their arguments around the opposition between a state of normality inherited from the past and the extraordinary concessions they were obliged from time to time to make to the Elector. And in a sense the Elector had encouraged or licensed this view of the matter by deploying the language of ‘emergency’. But over time, he came to mean something else: a ‘new normal’ not fixed to a foundation of traditional rights at all, but responsive to a constantly shifting flux of demands, to the ‘conjunctures’ and ‘current trends’ (jetzigen Läufe) of a constantly changing present, in short: to what we would call ‘history’.

A Confessional Dynamic?

Was there anything more to the futurity implicit in the Elector’s arguments than the mechanical conversion of future threats into present imperatives? The claim that the harms implicit in a possible future impose duties upon the present articulates a historicity in which the authority of the past over the present is diminished. It favours instead a mode of reasoning hostile to tradition (or at least to tradition in its own right) and prepared to deploy the future as an argument against inherited rights and structures of power.

Whether this future-oriented historicity was embedded in something more reflexive, an awareness of the larger movement of history, is hard to discern, all the more so as this sovereign was not given to speculative or philosophical reflection. Yet he did consciously adhere to at least one complex contemporary philosophical structure, namely the theology of his Calvinist faith. Frederick William was the first Brandenburg Elector to be born of two Calvinist parents, and the composite name Frederick William, a novelty in the history of the house of Hohenzollern, was devised precisely in order to symbolise the bond between Berlin (William was his father’s second name) and the Calvinist Palatinate of his uncle, Frederick V. Only with this generation of the Hohenzollern family did the reorientation launched by the conversion to Calvinism of his grandfather John Sigismund in 1613 come fully into effect.

The confessional divide between the ruling house and the population is one of the intriguing peculiarities of Brandenburg-Prussian history. John Sigismund’s conversion had placed the house of Hohenzollern on a new trajectory. It reinforced the dynasty’s association with the small but combative camp of the Calvinist states in early seventeenth-century Imperial politics. It augmented the status of the Calvinist officials who were beginning to play an influential role in the central government. But it also placed the Elector in a religious camp for which no provision had been made in the Peace of Augsburg of 1555. Not until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 would the right of the Calvinists to tolerance within the confessional patchwork of the Holy Roman Empire be enshrined in a binding treaty. The conversion of the monarch also drove a deep confessional trench between dynasty and people. Inasmuch as there existed a sense of territorial ‘identity’ in late sixteenth-century Brandenburg, this was intimately bound up with the Lutheran church, whose clergy spanned the length and breadth of the country.

John Sigismund initially believed that his own conversion would give the signal for a generalised—and largely voluntary—‘second Reformation’ in Brandenburg. The Elector and his advisors assumed that the inherent superiority and clarity of Calvinist doctrine, when cogently and accessibly presented, would suffice to recommend it to the great majority of subjects. In this they were mistaken. The Lutheran networks bitterly resisted any measures that appeared likely to further the transformation of Brandenburg into a Calvinist territory.64 The strength of Lutheran resistance eventually forced John Sigismund and his Calvinist advisors to abandon their hopes of a Second Brandenburg Reformation. They settled instead for a ‘court reformation’ (Hofreformation), whose religious energies petered out on the fringes of the political elite.65 But it took a long time for the emotion to drain out of the Lutheran-Calvinist confrontation. Tension levels fluctuated with the ebb and flow of confessional polemic.66

This was still the situation when Elector Frederick William took power in 1640. Frederick William reinforced his house’s affiliation with the Calvinist faith in 1646 by marrying Louise Henriette, nineteen-year-old daughter of Frederick Henry, sovereign Prince of Orange and Stadhouder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel. At the international negotiations in Münster that prepared the way for the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, he successfully campaigned for the inclusion of the Calvinists among the official tolerated confessions of the Holy Roman Empire.67 Yet within his territories, the problem of confessional tension remained, and Ducal Prussia in particular, in which he spent the early years of his reign, but over which he would not secure full sovereignty until 1657, was a staunchly Lutheran country, dominated by noble elites deeply attached to their Lutheran traditions.

In 1642, only two years into his reign, the Elector responded with anger to the news that Lutheran polemicists in Königsberg were accusing him of renewing the Hohenzollern project to effect a ‘second Reformation’. This development was particularly unwelcome at a moment when the Brandenburg court was exploring the possibility of a dynastic alliance with the Lutheran Crown of Sweden.68 In a letter to his councillors, he lamented the theological bickering and name-calling that threatened to poison public life in Ducal Prussia. The catastrophic consequences of religious division could be observed across the German lands—the Lutheran subjects of Prussia, which had managed to escape the worst turmoil of war, should study this example and learn from it. The best course of action, the Elector proposed, would be ‘a friendly and peaceful discussion among the theologians in Our presence and that of Our councillors, Estates and senior servants’. In such a context, each point could be carefully examined, and where there was a need for further elucidation, this could be provided in an informed way by both sides.69

In rejecting this proposal, the Lutheran clergy of Königsberg developed an argument from continuity with tradition that was strongly analogous to the corporatist arguments for privilege offered by the Estates. It would be ‘half-heathen’, they argued, to enter into a discussion without a prior ‘condemnation of the error and incorrect doctrine’ of the Reformed interlocutors. Particularly revealing was the Biblical reference offered by the Estates in support of this claim, 2 Kings 17. This passage in the Book of Kings relates how several thousand Israelites of ancient Samaria were captured by the Assyrians and resettled in lands under Assyrian control. These captives assimilated to the new political leadership and abandoned their old religion, ignoring the injunction of God, uttered through the mouths of seers and prophets, to ‘keep My commandments and My statutes, according to all the law which I commanded your fathers’. They ‘rejected His statutes and His covenant that He had made with their fathers, and His testimonies which He had testified against them’.70 In short, so the argument ran: if the Prussian Lutherans acquiesced in the Elector’s proposal, they would resemble the faithless Israelites of Samaria, who had betrayed their time-honoured covenants. To this they added an argument from legal authority: the Political Testament of Duke Albrecht the Elder, Duke of Prussia from 1525 until 1568, had stipulated that the Lutheran supremacy in the Duchy must not be tampered with.71 The conference project was abandoned. When a symposium of Lutheran and Calvinist theologians did eventually meet at the Electoral palace in Berlin in 1662–63, it merely sharpened the differences between the two camps and led to a new wave of mutual denunciations.72

Here, as in the Elector’s disputes with his estates, we can discern two opposed temporalities. The invitations to take part in colloquies implied that an open-ended process of discussion might in future resolve all remaining differences. The Lutheran view, in contrast, argued that the past, invoked in the form of tradition, imposed obligations upon the present. The term ‘tolerance’ has often been used to characterise the Elector’s political management of the Calvinist-Lutheran divide in his own lands, and the suggestion that the minority status of the Elector’s confession imposed religious tolerance as a permanent and structural feature of Prussian public life is a commonplace in the older literature.73 And it is certainly true that some of the most influential Calvinists of this era used irenic language to characterise the relationship between the two faiths.74 Yet what is lost from view if we apply the rubric ‘tolerance’ is the partisan character of the Elector’s measures and his abiding determination to reinforce the position of his Reformed co-religionists across his territories.75 Under the ‘Edict of Tolerance’ issued in September 1664, Calvinist and Lutheran clergymen were ordered to abstain from mutual disparagements; all preachers were required to signal their acceptance of this order by signing and returning a pre-circulated reply.76 Yet the impact of the edict was highly asymmetrical, since the theological polemics stemmed almost exclusively from Lutheran functionaries alarmed at Calvinist incursions. Only Lutheran preachers objected to the terms of the edict, and those who refused to sign the pre-circulated reply were summarily dismissed from their livings.77

These measures were flanked by numerous other interventions. Whenever he could, the Elector appointed Calvinists to senior court and government posts, dismissing Lutheran protests as vexatious efforts to sow distrust between the Elector and his subjects. The jurisdiction of the Privy Council with its Calvinist majority was extended at the expense of the Lutheran consistory. Lutheran preachers were menaced with capricious application of the censorship law: in one case a preacher was banished from Brandenburg for daring to mention in a sermon, alongside the great deeds of the Elector, those of his Lutheran rival the Swedish king Charles X Gustav. There was a consistent effort to cut the Lutherans in Brandenburg off from the Lutheran hub at Wittenberg, by denying them the right to take an active part in trans-territorial networks. New Calvinist parishes and churches were founded at every opportunity, and the Elector’s famed policy of offering refuge to Huguenots—also Calvinist—persecuted in the France of Louis XIV served the same objective, since it brought thousands of new co-religionists into his lands.78 In case there were any doubt about the concerted and systematic character of these efforts, the Elector advised his successor in the Political Testament to see to it that ‘if such subjects of the Reformed Religion existed in his lands, [these] were taken up and appointed above others to services and offices at court and across the country and if none could be found in the Electorate of Brandenburg, to take foreign ones and prefer them to the Lutherans’.79

Given that the Reformed never amounted to more than 4 percent of the total population of Brandenburg-Prussia, these measures were never going to transform the confessional character of the country as a whole, although they did mean that the administrative personnel in Brandenburg and Pomerania became steadily more Calvinist and less Lutheran. In Ducal Prussia by contrast, with its long-standing institutions and its confident Lutheran elites, the Elector’s efforts had less impact. The point I am interested in pursuing here is simply that the dynamic of ‘confessionalisation’ was sustained. The Elector did not retire from the fray and oversee the religious peace between Calvinists and Lutherans from a standpoint of religious neutrality. He remained committed to the ‘Calvinisation’ of court and government. And he did this because he continued to believe that the Reformed faith, with its roots in revealed biblical truth alone, represented a fundamental salvific advance on Lutheranism.

How exactly this confessional engagement bore upon the Elector’s historicity is hard to say. Was he making an absolute claim on behalf of his faith, or merely securing the political preeminence of his co-religionists in order to consolidate his authority? In the Political Testament, as we have seen, Frederick William affirmed the importance of defending the new order embodied in the Peace of Westphalia, the first international treaty to include the Calvinists among the confessions with a claim to be ‘tolerated’ in the Holy Roman Empire. But when he proposed symposia and conferences between the two Protestant confessions, he was not endorsing religious peace as such (however much he might value it for reasons of public order and political interest), but rather seeking to bring the Lutherans forwards towards an agreement with the Reformed. The Elector forbade the public use of the term ‘second reformation’, because it was used for scaremongering by Lutheran polemicists, but the logic of a supersession was implicit in his handling of the relationship between the two denominations.

It is true that the theological historicity of the Calvinists was also recursive in character, in the sense that it involved a ‘return’ to the supposedly unsullied condition of the early church. But for them, the early church was not a ‘tradition’, nor was it something inherited; it was merely the remembered instantiation of a communion with Christ (koinonia) that, for the Reformed, was as much at home in the future as in the past. The Calvinist notion of a supra-historical koinonia with Christ, guaranteed to the faithful, marked a definitive break both with medieval and with early reformation theology. It opened up a new time horizon, mapped out by the combination of a remote God with the promise of fellowship always ensured by faith, a horizon within which everything was possible and ‘constructible’ in the this-worldly world. The Reformed understanding of the possibility of Christ’s kingdom on earth proposed an impulse to action that was absent from the Lutheran doctrine of the Two Kingdoms (heaven and earth) as ontologically separate domains. Calvinist theology did not in itself offer a philosophy of history, but it did provide a framework in which there was an abundance of room for the chaotic particularities of present and future contingencies to be perceived, evaluated, and managed.80 As a theological temperament, Calvinism thus reinforced a broader shift in the character of early modern European political rationalisation. The propagation across the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German states of the ‘discorso method’ popularised by Machiavelli tended to displace arguments from authority and universal principle in favour of the weighing up of political options in a future that was yet to be determined.81

These features of Reformed theology resonated with assumptions anchored in the Elector’s own youthful experience. At the age of fourteen, as the military crisis deepened in his father’s lands and a wave of epidemics spread across Brandenburg, he was sent to the safety of the Dutch Republic, where he would spend the next four years of his life. The prince received instruction from professors in law, history, and politics at the University of Leiden, a renowned centre of the then-fashionable neostoical state theory. The prince’s lessons emphasised the majesty of the law, the venerability of the state as the guarantor of order, and the centrality of duty and obligation to the office of sovereign. A particular concern of the neostoics was the need to subordinate the military to the authority and discipline of the state.82 But it was outside the classroom, in the streets, docks, markets, and parade squares of the Dutch towns that Frederick William learned his most important lessons.

In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was at the height of its power and prosperity. Over more than sixty years, this small Calvinist country had fought successfully to assert its independence against the military might of Catholic Spain and to establish itself as the foremost European headquarters of global trade. ‘Let us take as our example the brave Dutch, who after pushing back the Romans [i.e., the Habsburgs] have been called promoters of liberty’, wrote the Calvinist clergyman, Johann Bergius, trusted advisor, and religious counsellor to the Great Elector.83 In their prosperity, material culture, and the sophistication and maturity of their political life, the United Provinces were ‘the first country in Europe’.84 Their orderly, bustling cities were physical arguments for the superiority of a certain way of life. They possessed a robust fiscal regime and a distinctive military culture with recognisably modern features: the regular and systematic drilling of troops in battleground manoeuvres, a high level of functional differentiation, and a disciplined professional officer corps. Frederick William had ample opportunity to observe the military prowess of the Republic at close hand—he visited his host and relative, Viceroy Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, in the Dutch encampment at Breda in 1637, where the Dutch recaptured a stronghold that had been lost to the Spaniards twelve years before.

Throughout his reign Frederick William strove to remodel his own patrimony in the image of what he had observed in the Netherlands. The training regime adopted by his army in 1654 was based on the drill book of Prince Maurice of Orange.85 Dutch immigrants were encouraged to settle in Brandenburg on privileged terms. Frederick William remained convinced that ‘navigation and trade are the principal pillars of a state, through which subjects, by sea and by manufactures on land, earn their food and keep’.86 Hence his repeated efforts to secure, at great cost and against bitter Swedish resistance, control over Pomerania.87 He became preoccupied with the idea that the link to the Baltic would enliven and commercialise Brandenburg, bringing the wealth and power that were so conspicuously on display in Amsterdam. In the 1650s and 1660s, he even negotiated international commercial treaties to secure privileged terms of trade for a merchant marine he did not yet possess.88 In short, Frederick William knew Calvinism not just as a faith community, but as the animating ethos of a country he acknowledged as culturally and materially superior and worthy of emulation. And, as Peter Burke has observed, ‘the emulation by sovereigns and governments of foreign models implied that action in the present might make their country prosperous in the future’.89

The Elector Becomes History

At the Battle of Warsaw in the summer of 1656, eighty-five hundred Brandenburg troops joined forces with the army of the King of Sweden to defeat a massive Polish-Tartar force. Elector Frederick William wrote a short account of the event and ordered it published in The Hague. He hoped by this means to counter the effect of contemporary Swedish reports that understated Brandenburg’s—and specifically the Elector’s—contribution to the victory.90 His own account made it clear that the Allied success was due to a two-pronged attack, in which the Elector of Brandenburg had personally commanded and led the left wing, come under direct fire from the enemy batteries, and played a key role in wresting from the Poles control of a stretch of high ground that allowed the allies to subject the enemy to intensive bombardment.91

This modest effort to situate himself in the chronicle of his times made sense in a world that was becoming increasingly aware of the relationship between the news of contemporary events and the record that ‘history’ would bequeath to future generations. The most sensational embodiment of this nexus between news and history was the Theatrum Europaeum, a publishing project launched by the Frankfurt printer, engraver, and entrepreneur Matthäus Merian. In a sequence of opulently illustrated volumes running to between four hundred and fifteen hundred pages, Merian and his collaborators and successors compiled an all-encompassing history of recent times. The first volume, published in 1633, covered the years between 1629 and the year of publication. The second, published two years later, backdated the story to 1618 and the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War that was still devastating Central Europe when the volume appeared. Thereafter, the project advanced in steps of between two and eight years over nineteen further volumes composed by at least ten different writers until 1738. From the outset, the publishers and the writers who worked with them aspired to capture the larger panorama of history in a narrative that avoided partisan viewpoints damaging to the interests of any particular party or individual, and sought ‘simply to bring the historical story [historische Geschichte] to light’.92

The Theatrum was and is remarkable for its technical ambition, especially the quality and profusion of the illustrations. In the ‘theatre’ portrayed on its pages, sovereigns and statesmen occupied a prominent place. They were the moving parts in a story that was European in scope. But the most striking feature of the Theatrum was its vision of European history as a connected system whose ‘commotions’ and realignments bound the states of the continent together in one community of destiny.93 The need for such a history was urgent, the editor declared, not just because prudent societies had always benefited from an understanding of their own times, but also because the violence and devastations of recent European history confronted contemporaries with the duty of describing ‘the course of our World-Actions [Welt-Actionen] / in order to see thereby why we began [the commotion of war], how we managed it and to know approximately on account of which causes and by means of which occasions we so lamentably spoiled, destroyed, ruined and devastated land and people’.94 Woven together of material drawn from the forty-odd printed weekly newspapers published in the cities of the Holy Roman Empire, histories of this kind made it possible to imagine the proximate future not as the fulfilment of a preordained plan, but as empty, like the still-unprinted pages of a newspaper, waiting to be filled with the acts and events of the powerful.95 This was precisely that world of ‘conjunctures’ (Conjuncturen) and ‘trends’ (Läufe) the Elector so often invoked in his communications with the Estates.

FIGURE 1.2. Engraving from the Theatrum Europaeum showing how the Great Elector led his forces into the Duchy of Prussia in 1679, surprising the Swedish army encamped there. Source: Anon., Theatri Europaei Eilffter Theil Oder: Außführlich fortgeführte Friedens und KriegsBeschreibung […] (Frankfurt/Main, 1682), 1466. Collection of the author.

In his ‘royal memoirs’, a confidential text intended for the eyes of his successor, Louis XIV observed that kings owe an account of their actions ‘to all ages’.96 The Elector never unfolded a cult of historicised self-memorialisation to rival that of his French contemporary, but he did begin consciously to perceive himself and his achievements through the eyes of an imagined posterity. From 1650 onwards, there were efforts to secure the services of a court historian. The first appointee was the librarian Joachim Hübner, but Hübner’s oeuvre never materialised, because he was dismissed in 1661 after complaints about his refusal to attend church.97 In 1664, the Elector appointed Marten Schoock of the University of Groningen in the United Provinces and paid him a handsome salary to write a history of Brandenburg. A first section of the projected Historia marchica was completed in manuscript in 1667, but its quality was so poor, one nineteenth-century commentator acidly remarked, ‘there is no reason to regret the fact that the work was cut short by Schoock’s premature death’ one year later.98 Two other appointees, the French adventurer and Calvinist convert Jean Baptiste de Rocolles and Martin Kempen, a Königsberger of Netherlandish descent, took up and abandoned the task without producing anything of note.

Gregorio Leti’s meandering two-volume chronicle of the House of Brandenburg, published in Italian and French in 1687, was not officially commissioned, but the Elector did reward its author with a medal worth a hundred ducats and a cash gift of five hundred thalers.99 Leti’s book was a fantastically chaotic string of vignettes and descriptions, interspersed with formulaic passages of panegyric on the Elector and his most prominent officials. But it is interesting to note that the first volume was criticised in Berlin for failing to do justice to the Elector’s achievements at the Battle of Warsaw in 1656—an indication that Warsaw had by now entered public awareness as a historical landmark in the reign.100 Neither Schoock’s antiquarian survey nor Leti’s rambling encomium left any discernible impact on the later historiography of Prussia.

Far more successful was Samuel Pufendorf, appointed court historian in 1686, whose comprehensive and sophisticated account of Frederick William’s reign marked a new departure in Brandenburg historiography. The choice of Pufendorf was telling. In a long career as a jurist, political theorist, and historian, Pufendorf had established himself as one of the stars of academic Europe. By the late seventeenth century, he was the most widely read philosopher of natural law on the continent. Unlike many of his university colleagues, he was read outside the academic world by senior officials, military commanders, and even monarchs.101 It is not difficult to see what attracted the Elector about Pufendorf and his writings. An astute (though also critical) German reader of the British political theorist Thomas Hobbes, Pufendorf grounded his arguments for the necessity of the state in a dystopian vision of ambient violence and disorder.102 The law of nature alone did not suffice to preserve the social life of man, he argued in his Elements of Universal Jurisprudence (1660). Unless ‘sovereignties’ were established, men would seek their welfare by force alone; ‘all places would reverberate with wars between those who are inflicting and those who are repelling injuries’.103

Hence the supreme importance of states, whose chief purpose was ‘that men, by means of mutual cooperation and assistance, be safe against the harms and injuries they can and commonly do inflict on one another’.104 The trauma of the Thirty Years’ War resonates in these sentences. Here was an eloquent philosophical answer to the resistance that the Elector had encountered from the provincial Estates. Since it was impossible in peace or war to conduct the affairs of a state without incurring expenses, Pufendorf wrote in 1672, the sovereign had the right to ‘force individual citizens to contribute so much of their own goods as the assumption of those expenses is deemed to require’.105 He wrote extensively on the place of consent in relationships of political subjection, arguing that obligations to the sovereign could never be the consequence of compulsion alone; they could have real force only if the subject had or were provided with good reasons for acquiescing in the obligations imposed—the benevolent intentions of the sovereign, for example, or gratitude for past benefits, or the acknowledgement that the sovereign may be better able to see to the subjects’ interests than the subjects themselves can.106 The harmonic resonances between these lines of thought and the arguments advanced in the Elector’s communications with his Estates are difficult to miss.

But Pufendorf was also a celebrated historian. His most famous political tract, known as the ‘Monzambano’, was a trenchant and controversial critique of the political organisation of the contemporary Holy Roman Empire, but it opened with a widely praised sequence of chapters setting out the history of the empire’s political institutions.107 And his Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe, published in 1682 during Pufendorf’s tenure as official historian to the royal court at Stockholm, opened with a plea for the importance of studying the history of the recent past. It was all very well, Pufendorf wrote, for young people to spend years reading Cornelius Nepos and Livy, ‘but to neglect the history of later times is a notorious piece of indiscretion and want of understanding’. Those entrusted with the management of public affairs in particular would benefit more from studying the contemporary history of their own country and its neighbouring territories than from poring over the accounts of ancient conquests in the Roman classics. And the chapter dedicated to Germany offered, among other things, an analysis of the threats posed to Germany (or not) by every nearby power, from the Swiss and the Italians to the Poles, the Danes, the Swedes, and the French.108

It took some time to persuade Pufendorf to leave Sweden and take up a post as the court historian in Berlin. Pufendorf conveyed his formal agreement to the Brandenburg envoy at Stockholm in the summer of 1686, four years after the first approach, but it was not until mid-January 1688, after some wrangling with his current employers, that he arrived in Berlin. By this time, the Elector had only a few months to live. Pufendorf was given free access to the Electoral archives and provided with the services of a full-time research assistant.

Packed with material closely paraphrased from the archives and running to over fourteen hundred densely printed pages in the 1695 Latin edition, Pufendorf’s De rebus gestis Friderici Wilhelmi Magni (over twelve hundred pages in Erdmann Uhse’s slightly abridged German translation of 1710) does not make easy or enjoyable reading.109 There is no broad sweep to the narrative and no attempt to situate the protagonists within a current of change. The counsellors, courtiers, and family members around the prince are scarcely visible in their individuality. The Elector himself appears only as the personification of his monarchy—we learn next to nothing of his pastimes, intellectual interests, tastes, or relationships. And yet in two respects Pufendorf did succeed in endowing his narrative with historical momentum.

First, he acknowledged the importance of the domestic consolidation of Electoral sovereignty. At the centre of Pufendorf’s story is the monarchical executive: ‘The measure and focal point of all his reflections was the state, upon which all initiatives converge like lines towards a central point’.110 Personified by the Great Elector, the Brandenburg state in Pufendorf’s account projects and consolidates its power both outwards and inwards. Pufendorf offers detailed accounts—even more so in the Latin edition of 1695 than in the German translation of 1710—of the conflicts between the Electoral administration and the Prussian, Kleve, and Magdeburg Estates. In Ducal Prussia after the Peace of Oliva (1660), for example, he juxtaposes the efforts of the Elector to consolidate his sovereignty within Ducal Prussia with the Estates’ insistence that their age-old privileges (irreconcilable with the assertion of Electoral sovereignty) be reaffirmed. He relates how the Electoral administration circumvented this corporate resistance by instructing the Calvinist Prince Radziwill, governor of Ducal Prussia, to approach the most influential grandees individually: ‘he was to get those who held the highest offices in the land to swear an oath [of fealty] according to the new formula after the acquisition of sovereignty, not all at the same time, however, but rather one by one and as the opportunity arose’. He should begin with those who he knew were willing to swear such an oath, ‘so that the others would follow their example, and those who refused should be threatened with removal from their posts and he should not appoint anyone new to any office, except for those who promised that when the meeting [of the Estates] was convened they would support the Elector in his wish’.111

In Magdeburg, as in Prussia, Pufendorf depicts the central administration rolling back the traditional power of the Estates by playing the city of Magdeburg off against the countryside.112 When the city of Königsberg continued to agitate against the new regime in the name of its traditional rights and status, the Elector, Pufendorf reports, ‘did not conceal his anger and displeasure at such obstinate behaviour’. ‘His Electoral Highness Himself decided to push the matter through by his own authority, but he also took a good number of troops with him, to tame the disobedient ones’. The passage in the text where Pufendorf describes the resolution of the quarrel in the Elector’s favour is printed opposite an engraving showing the Ducal Prussian Estates swearing an oath of fealty to their new sovereign in the court of the Königsberg Palace on 18 October 1663.113

In drawing this dynamic picture of the state in its struggle to overcome the structures of provincial privilege, Pufendorf was able to draw not only on archival documents but also the earlier history composed by Elias Loccelius (also known as Lockelius or Löckel), Lutheran pastor at Bärwalde in the Neumark and later (from 1674) in Crossen. Completed after decades of research and writing and presented to the court in manuscript in 1680, Loccelius’s compendious Marchia Illustrata represented a transitional phase between the naïve chronicles of sixteenth-century Brandenburg and the analytically driven historical treatise of Pufendorf. Loccelius’s rigorously chronological approach, his decision to begin with the creation of the world by God, and his inclusion of disparate fragments of information—the price of rye, the appearance of comets, multiple suns or spots of blood in bowls of peas—recall the baggy and credulous chronicles of the Middle Ages. But there are also passages of impressive complexity and depth, especially on the subject of the devastations of the Thirty Years’ War, the protests of the Prussian Estates in the early 1660s, and the Elector’s pacification of rebellious Magdeburg.114 Indeed, there is little reason to doubt that Pufendorf’s account of these latter episodes was drawn substantially from Loccelius.

Pufendorf did not go so far as to articulate the linkage between these domestic measures and the outward projection of power and prestige, but his translator, Erdmann Uhse, made the connection explicit in his preamble to the edition of 1710, when he observed that the acquisition of undiluted territorial sovereignty ‘paved the road to [Prussia’s later acquisition of] the royal crown’ in 1701.115 And of course Pufendorf himself had often made the argument that the sovereign’s ability to provide protection against external threat and inner mayhem justified his claim on a portion of his subjects’ resources.

The other moment of dynamism in Pufendorf’s narrative relates to his depiction of sovereign decision making. What we would describe as the ‘historical events’ of that era play a subordinate role in his account of the Elector’s reign; they are viewed primarily through the prism of the choices faced by the Elector and his advisers. And this is precisely where Pufendorf’s otherwise rather one-dimensional account acquires analytical texture. In 1645, for example, the Elector was invited by King Wladislaw IV of Poland (1632–48) to send a delegation of Reformed clergy to an event that would become known as the Colloquy of Thorn, a conference of Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic clergy whose ostensible purpose was to allow peaceful and informed debate of the issues that divided the confessions. In reconstructing the response of the Elector and his aides, Pufendorf laid bare a logic tree of options, in which the consequences of each possible course of action were weighed up.

‘When it was discussed [among the Elector’s counsellors] whether the Elector should acquiesce in this request’, Pufendorf wrote, ‘the votes diverged’. The counsellors liked the idea of an irenic summit of this kind and the Polish city of Thorn was believed to be a safe location. Yet there were also reasons why one might not accept the invitation. The fact that the Polish bishops appeared to be controlling the event, arrogating to themselves the right to determine the format of the discussion and even the size of the delegations, was a cause for concern. Then there was the danger that a conference of this kind might intensify the tensions between the Reformed and the Lutherans in Prussia. The Colloquy might also have deleterious effects on the status of Polish Protestants. And what if the Catholics claimed that they had won the argument and used it as missionary propaganda? But then, on the other hand, if the Brandenburg Calvinists decided to stay away from the event, the Catholics might exploit their absence as evidence that the Reformed were not confident of their cause. And it was surely one’s duty to bear witness to the truth at every opportunity. This would be a chance to present the Reformed doctrine in a clearer light and thus to defend it from the misrepresentations of enemies.116 These contending viewpoints were not assigned to individual named persons from among the Elector’s entourage; rather they were woven together using a kind of free indirect speech. Their purpose was not to commemorate the role played by specific advisers, but to expose the nature of the decision-making task itself.

Again and again, Pufendorf unfolded decision positions in this manner, granting the reader a view of each predicament before its resolution had been found and exposing the ratiocinations of the decision maker and his advisers. In 1678, for example, the Elector faced a plurality of potential threats. In the course of an exhausting four-year campaign, he had succeeded in driving every last Swede out of Pomerania. But this was not enough to place him in possession of his claim, because Louis XIV had no intention of leaving his Swedish ally at Brandenburg’s mercy. France, whose powers were waxing as the Dutch Wars came to an end, insisted that the conquered Pomeranian territories should be restored in their entirety to Sweden.

Pufendorf offered a detailed account of the issues involved, together with the potential consequences of choosing each of the options on offer. ‘Regarding the question of what the Elector should undertake on the military front this year’, he wrote, ‘they [the Elector and his advisers] were at first undecided’. The Dutch had urged the Elector to concentrate his forces against France in the west and merely hold off the Swedes in Pomerania. There was something to be said for this course, because concentrating his forces there would motivate the Dutch to stay in the fight and discourage the French from breaking into Kleve and using it as a bargaining chip at later peace negotiations. On the other hand, if the Elector went to the Rhine, he would expose Prussia, Pomerania, and the Mark to danger and alienate his ally the King of Denmark, who was also at war with Sweden and was urging him to deploy his forces in Pomerania. And yet if he concentrated on securing Pomerania and driving out the Swedes, this might well leave France in a strong enough position after the cessation of hostilities to demand the return of the conquered Pomeranian territories to its Swedish ally.117 What is interesting about these decisional moments in Pufendorf’s narrative (and they are very frequent) is how they situate the decision maker within a threat map in which his task is to balance options, each of which implies a possible future. ‘Impending danger’ [bevorstehende Gefahr] is as central to Pufendorf’s narrative as it was to the arguments levelled against the Estates by the Great Elector.

Making decisions was hard in part because the process had to take into account the existence of other decision makers. In a discussion of the Elector’s foreign policy at the beginning of the Northern War, for example, Pufendorf reconstructed the efforts of the councillors to second-guess the king of Sweden. Would the Swedes attack the Commonwealth of Poland? ‘It was difficult to believe that the Swedes would breach a peace treaty that still had six years to run. . . . On the other hand, Sweden had seldom been free of inner turmoil during long periods of peace; war might thus seem a good means of countering these. The king was still young, undaunted, bold and desirous of acquiring fame by feats of arms’. Yet he also lacked an heir, faced domestic rivals, and risked domestic rebellion if he raised taxes to fund a campaign.118 In this passage, the Elector was depicted as trying to anticipate the behaviour of another decision maker whose predicaments and calculations were no less complex than the Elector’s own. Running through all of these episodes was an interest in choice-making situations that was not merely historical, but philosophical.119

Pufendorf thus fashioned an unprecedentedly sophisticated account of the place of a sovereign decision maker within the European states system. What strikes the reader about his handling of international relations is the open-endedness of the predicaments in which the state finds itself. The predicaments are open-ended because the future behaviour of the other states in the system can never be predicted with certainty. Among Pufendorf’s most influential interventions in the earlier essay known as ‘Monzambano’ was his demolition of the translatio imperii—an influential thesis according to which the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as the inheritor and continuation of ancient Rome, was the ‘fourth monarchy’ prophesied in the Book of Daniel. By rejecting this claim to continuity with the ancient past, Pufendorf ‘deprived the empire of a genetic, historical self-justification’.120 At the same time he dislodged the contemporary history of the empire and, by extension, of Europe from the diachronic grip of prophecy, allowing it to unfold under secular auspices as the unforeordained outcome of interactions among states jostling for power and influence.

The interaction among powers in the same synchronous time envelope was the very antithesis of tradition and continuity, because the interests of states and the possible actions implied by them were constantly changing. While it was true, Pufendorf conceded, that the interests of a state were determined in part by immutable factors, such as ‘the situation and character of the country’, they were also a function of ‘the condition, strength and weakness of the neighbours, with whose alteration the interest also changes’.121 This was the flux that Pufendorf’s history was made of. This was not a world of pure contingency, because the interaction among powers continued to be governed by the relation of force and the imperative of self-preservation. But the laws governing this ‘system’ merely described processes; they did not predict outcomes. Under such a dispensation, acting historically in the present meant discarding tradition, apprehending the multiplicity of possible futures, identifying the threats posed by each, and selecting among them. And therein lay the chief strength of Pufendorf’s Great Elector as a sovereign decision maker. ‘When opinions differed greatly on a complicated matter’, Pufendorf wrote in a concluding appraisal of his protagonist, ‘he chose one of them in accordance with his thoughts and the outcome subsequently showed that [he had chosen] the best’.122

Conclusion

It is worth reflecting on the dynamism of the idea of sovereign authority projected through the public utterances, actions, and historiographical articulations of the Elector’s regime. Gathering authority and resources to itself, the state tears through the bonds of tradition, emancipating itself from the legacy of a provincial past, anticipating possible futures, and inventing new instruments to confront them. It is a time machine, an engine that makes history happen. Two centuries later, Max Weber would capture this confrontation in the tension between ‘traditional’ and ‘rational’ forms of rule: while the estates founded their claims on ‘the sanctity of immemorial traditions’, Frederick William did away with the need, still present in traditional structures, to legitimise ‘rules which in fact are innovations . . . by the claim that they have been “valid of yore”, but have now been recognized by means of “Wisdom” ’.123 Of course we have to be careful here about imputing to the Elector thoughts that are ours, not his. The danger of reading into his utterances the ‘hypotheses and patterns of interpretation’ of a later age is especially great in his case, because he was later elevated by historians to pivotal status as the founder and anticipator of the modern Prussian state.124 The Great Elector was not driven by a vision of ‘modernisation’, nor did he seek consistently to unitarise or centralise his state—on the contrary, he recorded in his will an order to the effect that his patrimony should be divided upon his death among several of his male offspring, a decision that, had it been carried out by his successor, would have put an early end to Brandenburg-Prussia’s long journey to great-power status. He possessed neither an elaborate vision nor privileged knowledge of the future.

On the other hand, as we have seen, his words and actions did betray a markedly preemptive and dynamic understanding of his place in historical time. The past appeared under a pall of destruction, walled off from the present by the great peace of 1648. The lesson of that past was that to stand still would mean sliding backwards into mayhem. The future appeared under a sign of threat, partly for the reason that, as Jeremy Bentham observed, ‘of the invisible future, fear is more powerful than hope’.125 The anticipation of impending peril lay at the heart of Pufendorf’s account of sovereignty and its claims on the citizen. And the same trope ran like a red thread through the Elector’s arguments against the defences of tradition offered by his estates. Underpinning this existential condition was the Elector’s youthful memory of the Thirty Years’ War, whose trauma resounds in the doleful phrases of the Political Testament to his heir: ‘For one thing is quite certain, if You simply sit still, in the belief that the fire is still far from Your borders: then Your lands will become the theatre on which the tragedy is played out’.126 Only by pressing forward, disarming threats in advance, and choosing among futures could one secure oneself against the ‘troubles’ and ‘difficulties’ that were the signature of the international system. And this required in turn that the claims of ‘tradition’—both as a way of justifying domestic power structures and as a framework for conceptualizing the relations among states—be drastically curtailed.

The Elector and his historiographer did not carve out this path in solitude. His appeal to the futurity of the state should be set in the context of a broader European shift in political and historical awareness that was not confined to the Protestant territories. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, forms of political rationalisation grounded in the application of universal principles made way for a new framework in which the future appeared as ‘available for manipulation’ (verfügbar). The early seventeenth-century ‘wish-lists’ of scholars such as Francis Bacon and Jakob Bornitz exemplified, as Vera Keller has shown, a reorientation of knowledge away from the past towards an open future, now imagined as an ‘ever advancing frontier’ of understanding. The seventeenth-century ‘scientific revolution’ brought not the triumph of certainty, as has sometimes been claimed, but rather a ‘willingness to engage with doubt, probability, and the murkiness of knowledge in motion’.127 Providential and prophetic schemata may still have been invoked as guarantees for the remote future concerned with the end of days, Peter Burke has suggested, but the immediate and medium-term future opened up in the seventeenth century as a space for discretionary human action.128 And in the process, as J.G.A. Pocock argued, Europe relinquished the idea of history as providentially ordained.129 Precariously situated on the advancing frontier of events, the state was obliged, as Andrea Brady and Emily Butterworth have put it, to be ‘cognizant of multiple futures in order to secure its desired one’.130

The Elector’s mobilisation of the future against the inherited structures of privilege was thus symptomatic of a broader cultural change, as was Pufendorf’s centring of his history of the reign on moments of decision. And yet the ‘historical culture’ of late seventeenth-century Brandenburg was also distinctive in one important respect, in that it aligned the holder of sovereign authority and the advancement of the fortunes of the state with the overriding of tradition and the disruption of continuity.131 In the context of the royal histories of early modern Europe, this was unusual. The greatest historian of early modern Spain, Juan de Mariana, whose General History of Spain remained the model for seventeenth-century Spanish historians, offers a narrative of impressive subtlety and depth in which the interplay of diverse trains of events are depicted in a dynamic and engaging way. But in Mariana’s account, the pretensions of kings are the disasters of their states; they bring wars, diseases, and financial ruin. Their sequestrations of the wealth of their subjects are not exactions licensed by need, but acts of wanton theft.132 The argument from necessity could not be advanced here, because Mariana saw in the external threats to Spanish security the consequences of provocations issuing from the Spanish monarch himself.133 And this was in keeping with Mariana’s political understanding of monarchy: a king could govern well only if he ceded control of his government to senior churchmen and refrained from altering in any way the fundamental laws and traditions of his lands, especially those that governed taxation and religion.134 It was a far cry from Pufendorf’s sympathetic account, which tended to baptise the operations of monarchical power in approving rhetoric and saw the monarch as beleaguered by external threats that justified his interventions in domestic power structures.

In France, historians of the royal house constructed a myth of unruffled continuity that effaced the changes of dynasty and embedded the history of kings in an ‘immobile dynastic time punctuated by the accession and the disappearance of princes who, with their qualities and faults, took part in the sacredness of power and the permanence of an ethical and political ideal’. The result was a highly conventional narrative tradition, in which new authors preferred to market themselves as the ‘continuators’ of established chronicles.135 The cult around Louis XIV, to be sure, disrupted this pattern to some extent. It produced an outpouring of panegyric from historians, some of whom were so enthusiastic in their praises that they doubted whether the whole of history could contain anything of interest to compare with a monarch who had superseded all the ages. But the apotheosis of the ‘sun-king’ also implied, as Chantal Grell has shown, a devaluation of the future, which could never be expected to rise to the challenge of the present, and thus disqualified ‘progress’ as a framework for thinking about the future.136

In Britain, the Whig historiography that sprang up in support of the Dutch ‘usurper’ William III after 1688 insisted that the new regime was not an innovation, but a ‘restoration’ and a vindication of ‘ancient rights’. Whig historians invoked a recursive continuum time, in which recent events were charged with meaning by ancient precedents: William III was the new King David; the ‘Revolution’ of 1688 was the return from Babylonian exile. The present and near future were imagined as foreordained, as a realignment with long-standing rights and verities, belying the reality that one legal system had been overturned and another inaugurated.137

This is the kind of history the Estates of Krefeld might have written, if they had prevailed over the Elector and his councillors, installed a monarch of their own choosing, and hired a historian of their own. Set against this background, the historical culture that began to emerge around the Electoral authority stands out for its vision of the princely authority as an institute that ruptures—must rupture—the threads of continuity in order to meet new exigencies and make history happen. And this in turn is a reminder that we must rescue this era from the vast condescension of modernisation theory. To blend the Great Elector and his court historian into an ocean of time extending from Homer to Chateaubriand, in which history was a storehouse of examples and the present lived under the authority of the past, does poor justice to the open-endedness and dynamism of their historicity, their willingness to challenge tradition and to privilege the future over the past.138

In 1701, thirteen years after the Great Elector’s death, his son was elevated into the ranks of the German kings. At a coronation staged in Königsberg on 18 January 1701, Frederick III of Brandenburg became Frederick I, ‘king in Prussia’. The ceremony reveals how deeply the public life of the state was imprinted by the historicity of the Great Elector’s time. Although many details of the ritual and the festivities associated with it were derived from the traditional representational culture of European royalty, the design of the coronation ritual and its accoutrements was in fact an extravagant exercise in bricolage. The know-how that informed the ceremony derived from the printed canon of ‘Ceremonialwissenschaft’, the highly mediated and rationalised corpus of knowledge that was enjoying a boom in the last decades of the seventeenth century.139 From this resource, fragments of diverse ‘traditions’ were assembled, modified, and recombined in such a manner as to achieve a highly focused array of effects.

This artificiality is in itself unsurprising—all coronations incorporate an element of invention and there existed no direct precedent for a royal ritual in Brandenburg-Prussia. What is interesting and distinctive about the Prussian case is the fact that the makers of the coronation were proud to acknowledge the artificiality of the spectacle. It has often been observed that coronation rituals falsely assert their continuity with an ancient tradition in order to adorn themselves with an authority that transcends time. But the designers of the Prussian coronation adopted an overtly instrumental approach to their task. It was essential, the Prussian envoy in Warsaw wrote in June 1700, that a bishop be engaged to oversee the ecclesiastical part of the proceedings and that these include a ritual anointment of some kind, since omitting these features might jeopardise the Elector’s future claim to the potentially useful title Sacra Regia Majestas.140 The use of a bishop along the lines seen in the recent Swedish coronation, another advisor suggested, ‘will give a great effect’ (donnera un grand lustre).141 Publicists and councillors alike were quick to point out that the function of the anointment (Salbung) was purely symbolic. This was not a traditional sacrament, but merely an edifying spectacle designed to elevate the spirits of those present.142

The publicity surrounding the Prussian coronation of 1701 stressed precisely the newness of the royal foundation. To be sure, there was some talk in the summer of 1700 of the ‘discovery’ in the works of the sixteenth-century geographer Abraham Ortelius that Prussia (meaning the Baltic principality of Prussia) had been a ‘kingdom’ in ancient times, but no one seems to have taken this seriously.143 Even Johann von Besser’s effusive coronation chronicle stated only that this was ‘a belief held by some’. Instead of submerging the new king in an imagined continuity, the publicists celebrated him as a self-made monarch. There was no talk of blood or ancient title. The remarkable thing about the new king, Besser observed in a foreword addressed to Frederick I, was that ‘Your Majesty came to His throne entirely through His own agency and in His own Land’. It was a matter of pride that the Prussian monarch had acquired his throne ‘neither by inheritance, nor by succession, nor through elevation, but rather in an entirely new way, through his own virtue and establishment’.144

We can discern in these arrangements a further elaboration of that rejection of tradition that had informed the arguments of the Electoral administration in its disputes with the provincial estates during the reign of the Great Elector. The coronation ritual, after all, carried a powerful anti-Estates message. The Estates of Ducal Prussia were never consulted over the coronation and were alerted to the event only a few weeks before it was due to take place. Moreover, the king, in contrast to the prevailing European practice, crowned himself and his wife in a separate ceremony before being acclaimed by his Estates. A description of the coronation by Johann Christian Lünig, a renowned contemporary expert on the courtly science of ceremony, explained the significance of this step. ‘Kings who accept their kingdom and sovereignty from the Estates usually only . . . mount the throne after they have been anointed: . . . but His Majesty [Frederick I], who has not received his kingdom through the assistance of the Estates, or of any other [party], had no need whatever of such a handing-over’.145 The message was clear: power was what defined the legitimacy of the Brandenburg-Prussian state, not tradition, inheritance, or continuity with the past. This was the idea at the heart of the coronation ritual, and it had been the animating thought behind Pufendorf’s De rebus gestis. Pufendorf had been dead for seven years by the time the coronation took place, but he would have welcomed its bald artificiality.