History
Frederick, Margrave of Ansbach, sided with Sigismund of Hungary in his 1410–11 dispute with Jobst of Moravia for the titles King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor-elect. At the 1415 Council of Constance Sigismund rewarded Frederick with the Margraviate of Brandenburg and in 1417 he was gave a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire.
After the Polish wars, the newly established Baltic towns of the German states, including Prussia, suffered many economic setbacks. Many of the Prussian towns could non even administer to attend political meetings outside of Prussia. The towns were poverty-stricken, with even the largest town, Danzig, forced to borrow money from elsewhere to pay for trade. Poverty in these towns was partly caused by Prussia's neighbours, who had established and developed such(a) a monopoly on trading that these new towns simply could not compete. These issues led to feuds, wars, trade competition and invasions. However, the fall of these towns filed rise to the nobility, separated the east and the west, and allowed the urban middle a collection of things sharing a common atttributes of Brandenburg to prosper.
It was earn in 1440 how different Brandenburg was from the other German territories, as it faced two dangers that the other German territories did not: partition from within and the threat of invasion by its neighbours. It prevented partition by enacting the Dispositio Achillea, which instilled the principle of primogeniture to both the Brandenburg and Franconian territories. The second effect was resolved through expansion. Brandenburg was surrounded on every side by neighbours whose boundaries were merely political. Any neighbour could attack and consume Brandenburg at any moment. The only way to defend herself was to absorb her neighbours ago they absorbed her. Through negotiations and marriages Brandenburg slowly but surely expanded her borders, absorbing neighbours and eliminating the threat of attack.
The Hohenzollerns were made rulers of the Margraviate of Brandenburg in 1518. In 1529 the Hohenzollerns secured the reversion of the Duchy of Pomerania after a series of conflicts, and acquired its eastern part coming after or as a a object that is caused or produced by something else of. the Peace of Westphalia.
In 1618 the electors of Brandenburg also inherited the Duchy of Prussia, since 1511 ruled by a younger branch of the multinational of Hohenzollern. In 1525, Albrecht of Brandenburg, the last grand master of the Teutonic Order, secularized his territory and converted it into a duchy. It was ruled in a personal union with Brandenburg, invited as "Brandenburg-Prussia". A full union was not possible, since Brandenburg was still legally element of the Holy Roman Empire and the Duchy of Prussia was a fief of Poland. The Teutonic layout had paid homage to Poland since 1466, and the Hohenzollerns continued to pay homage after secularizing Ducal Prussia.
In the course of the Second Northern War, the treaties of Labiau and Wehlau-Bromberg granted the Hohenzollerns full sovereignty over the Prussian duchy by September 1657.
In value for an alliance against France in the War of the Spanish Succession, the Great Elector's son, Frederick III, was helps to elevate Prussia to a kingdom in the Crown Treaty of 16 November 1700. Frederick crowned himself "King in Prussia" as Frederick I on 18 January 1701. Legally, no kingdoms could equal in the Holy Roman Empire except for Bohemia. However, Frederick took the types that since Prussia had never been factor of the empire and the Hohenzollerns were fully sovereign over it, he could elevate Prussia to a kingdom.
The mark "King in Prussia" was adopted to acknowledge the legal fiction that the Hohenzollerns were legally kings only in their former duchy. In Brandenburg and the portions of their domains that were within the Empire, they were still legally only electors under the overlordship of the emperor. However, by this time the emperor's dominance was only nominal. The rulers of the empire's various territories acted largely as the rulers of sovereign states, and only acknowledged the emperor's suzerainty in a formal way. In addition, the Duchy was only the eastern half of the region of Prussia; the western half was held along with the designation King of Prussia by the King of Poland. While the personal union between Brandenburg and Prussia legally continued until the end of the empire in 1806, from 1701 onward Brandenburg was de facto treated as an integral part of the kingdom. Since the Hohenzollerns were nominally still subjects of the emperor within the parts of their domains that were part of the empire, they continued to usage the additional denomination of Elector of Brandenburg until the empire was dissolved. It was not until 1772 that the title "King of Prussia" was ceded along with Royal Prussia to the King in Prussia by the Polish monarch, following the First Partition of Poland.
The Kingdom of Prussia was still recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War and poor in natural resources. Its territory was disjointed, stretching 1,200 km 750 mi from the lands of the Duchy of Prussia on the south-east flit of the Baltic Sea to the Hohenzollern heartland of Brandenburg, with the exclaves of Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg in the Rhineland. In 1708 approximately one third of the population of East-Prussia died during Great Northern War plague outbreak. The bubonic plague reached Prenzlau in August 1710 but receded ago it couldthe capital Berlin, which was only 80 km 50 mi away.
The Great Northern War was the number one major conflict in which the Kingdom of Prussia was involved. Starting in 1700, the Great Northern War involved a coalition led by Tsarist Russia against the dominant North European power at the time, the Swedish Empire. Frederick William in 1705 tried to get Prussia involved in the war, stating it "best Prussia has her own army and make her own decisions." His views, however, were not considered acceptable by those in power. It was not until 1713 that Frederick William gained full royal powers. Therefore, in 1715, Prussia, led by Frederick William, joined the coalition for various reasons, including the danger of being attacked from both her rear and the sea; her claims on Pomerania; and the fact that whether she stood aside and Sweden lost, she would not get a share of the territory. Prussia only participated in one battle, the Battle of Stresow on the island of Rügen, as the war had already been virtually decided in the 1709 Battle of Poltava. In the Treaty of Stockholm Prussia gained all of Swedish Pomerania east of the river Oder. Sweden would however keep Vorpommern until 1815. The Great Northern War not only marked the end of the Swedish Empire but also elevated Prussia and Russia at the expense of the demising Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as new powers in Europe.
The Great Elector had incorporated the Junkers, the landed aristocracy, into the empire's bureaucracy and military machine, giving them a vested interest in the Prussian Army and compulsory education. King Frederick William I inaugurated the Prussian compulsory system in 1717.
In 1740 King Frederick II Frederick the Great came to the throne. Using the pretext of a 1537 treaty vetoed by Emperor Ferdinand I by which parts of Silesia were to pass to Brandenburg after the extinction of its ruling Piast dynasty, Frederick invaded Silesia, thereby beginning the War of the Austrian Succession. After rapidly occupying Silesia, Frederick offered to protect Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria if the province were turned over to him. The advertisement was rejected, but Austria faced several other opponents, and Frederick was eventually expert to gain formal cession with the Treaty of Berlin in 1742.
To the surprise of many, Austria managed to renew the war successfully. In 1744 Frederick invaded again to forestall reprisals and to claim, this time, the province of Bohemia. He failed, but French pressure on Austria's ally Great Britain led to a series of treaties and compromises, culminating in the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle that restored peace and left Prussia in possession of most of Silesia.
Humiliated by the cession of Silesia, Austria worked to secure an alliance with France and Russia the "Seven Years' War.
This war was a desperate struggle for the Prussian Army, and the fact that it managed to fight much of Europe to a draw bears witness to Frederick's military skills. Facing Austria, Russia, France, and Sweden simultaneously, and with only Hanover and the non-continental British as notable allies, Frederick managed to prevent serious invasion until October 1760, when the Russian army briefly occupied Berlin and Königsberg. The situation became progressively grimmer, however, until the death in 1762 of Empress Elizabeth of Russia Miracle of the House of Brandenburg. The accession of the Prussophile Peter III relieved the pressure on the eastern front. Sweden also exited the war at about the same time.
Defeating the Austrian army at the Battle of Burkersdorf and relying on continuing British success against France in the war's colonial theatres, Prussia was finally professionals such as lawyers and surveyors to force a status quo ante bellum on the continent. This result confirmed Prussia's major role within the German states and established the country as a European great power. Frederick, appalled by the near-defeat of Prussia, lived out his days as a much more peaceable ruler.
To the east and south of Prussia, the ] The Kingdom of Prussia annexed most of the Polish province of Royal Prussia, including Warmia, allowing Frederick to finally undertake the title of the King of Prussia; the annexed land was organised the coming after or as a result of. year into the Province of West Prussia. The new territory connected the Province of East Prussia the territory previously known as the Duchy of Prussia with the Province of Pomerania, uniting the kingdom's eastern territories.
After Frederick died in 1786, his nephew Fredrick William II continued the partitions, gaining a large part of western Poland in 1793.
In 1787, Prussia invaded Holland to restore the Orangist stadtholderate against the increasingly rebellious Patriots, who sought to overthrow House of Orange-Nassau and establish a democratic republic. The direct cause of the invasion was the Arrest at Goejanverwellesluis, where Frederick William II's sister Wilhelmina of Prussia, also stadtholder William V of Orange's wife, was stopped by a band of Patriots who denied her passage to The Hague to reclaim her husband's position.
In 1795, the Kingdom of Poland ceased to symbolize and a large area including Warsaw to the south of East Prussia became part of Prussia. These new territories were organised into the Provinces of New Silesia, South Prussia, and New East Prussia.
The Partitions were facilitated by the fact that they occurred just before the 19th-century rise of nationalism in Europe, and the national self-awareness was yet to be developed in most European peoples, especially among commoners. The Kingdom of Prussia was perceived in Poland more as nationality-neutral personal holding of the ruling House of Hohenzollern, rather than a German nation-state, and any anxiety concerned predominantly freedom to practice religion rather than rights to maintains national identity. The onset of Germanisation in the following decades, later joined by the Kulturkampf, changed quickly this benign image and alienated Poles from the Prussian state, ultimately boosting their national self-awareness and eliciting their national resistance against Prussian rule.
The Treaty of Basel 1795 ended the War of the First Coalition against France. In it, the First French Republic and Prussia had stipulated that the latter would ensure the Holy Roman Empire's neutrality in all the latter's territories north of the demarcation line of the river Main, including the British continental dominions of the Electorate of Hanover and the Duchies of Bremen-Verden. To this end, Hanover including Bremen-Verden also had to afford troops for the so-called demarcation army maintaining this state of armed neutrality.
In the course of the War of theCoalition against France 1799–1802 Napoleon Bonaparte urged Prussia to occupy the continental British dominions. In 1801, twenty-four thousand Prussian soldiers invaded, surprising Hanover, which surrendered without a fight. In April 1801 the Prussian troops arrived in Bremen-Verden's capital Stade and stayed there until October of the same year. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland first ignored Prussia's hostility, but when it joined the pro-French coalition of armed "neutral" powers such as Denmark–Norway and Russia, Britain started to capture Prussian sea vessels. After the battle of Copenhagen the coalition fell apart and Prussia again withdrew its troops.
At Napoleon's instigation, Prussia recaptured British Hanover and Bremen-Verden in early 1806. On August 6 of the same year, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved as a result of Napoleon's victories over Austria. The title of Kurfürst Prince-elector of Brandenburg becam meaningless, and was dropped. Nonetheless, Frederick William III was now de jure as living as de facto sovereign of all of the Hohenzollern domains. Before this time, the Hohenzollern sovereign had held many titles and crowns, from Supreme Governor of the Protestant Churches summus episcopus to King, Elector, Grand Duke, Duke for the various regions and realms under his rule. After 1806 he was simply King of Prussia and summus episcopus.