The Great Elector’s efforts were rewarded in 1701 when his successor, Frederick III (1688–1713), obtained from the emperor (who needed the Brandenburg army for the impending War of the Spanish Succession) the right to style himself Frederick I, King in Prussia (Prussian rulers renumbered themselves upon bestowal of the royal title). The title of king, recognized internationally upon the conclusion of the war in 1713, was of considerable importance to Brandenburg in its competition with Saxony, whose ruler had become king of Poland in 1697, for preeminence in northern Germany. But it was Frederick’s son, Frederick William I (1713–40), who perfected the combination of statist structure, productive energy, and ethical drive that came to be identified with modern Prussia. Known as the “soldier-king,” Frederick William built his standing army into a force of more than 80,000 men. Although Prussia was only the 13th most populous country in Europe, it had the continent’s fourth largest army (after those of France, Russia, and Austria), a superbly drilled and equipped force that served mainly defensive purposes. Only peasants and journeymen served in the ranks, while the middle classes were safe from the draft but obliged to quarter soldiers in their homes. A huge war chest obviated foreign subsidies, and reliable revenues, more than 70 percent of which went to the army, provided ample support.
For the state to continue to draw high taxes without ruining land and people, the country’s level of wealth had to be raised. Frederick William therefore pursued an aggressive policy (known as cameralism) of stimulating agriculture and manufacturing while reducing unnecessary expenditures; even his court was stripped of many of its royal trappings. Export bans preserved raw materials, and sumptuary laws limited indulgence in luxuries. Town governments were subordinated to royal commissioners, whose powers included supervision of urban production. A work ethos suffused society from the top; the king’s ascetic Calvinism, which dictated to him a life of hard work and personal engagement, was spread to his Lutheran subjects by a Pietist clergy who instilled in their flocks habits of intense labour, frugal living, and dutiful subservience to the state.
Organizationally, Frederick William completed the centralizing process begun by the Great Elector, its capstone being the General Directory, set up in 1723. Tied to regional and local organs by a network of commissioners, this supreme body of state policy and administration directed industry, trade, finance, internal affairs, and military matters in all the state’s territories. Upper-level bureaucrats came entirely from the nobility, as did the army’s officer corps; in this way nobles were bound more closely than ever to the state. Ruling, not merely reigning, over the entire edifice was the king-elector in his “cabinet,” a small circle of close advisers and trusted secretaries. So successful were these measures in lifting the state to influence and prestige that by 1740 Prussia counted as a full-fledged member of Europe’s concert of Great Powers.
In Austria the ruling Habsburg house’s lasting conflict with France and the Ottoman Empire dominated all questions of statecraft. With their powers as emperors greatly diminished, Leopold I (1658–1705), his son Joseph I (1705–11), and Joseph’s brother Charles VI (1711–40) bent all their efforts to the consolidation of their dynastic and crown lands in central and eastern Europe. Although they failed to achieve Prussian-style streamlining, they raised Austria to the rank of a major state. The Habsburgs’ conglomeration of territories included the Austrian lands (the duchies of Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Krain [in present-day Slovenia] and the county of Tirol), the Bohemian provinces (kingdoms of Bohemia and Moravia [both now in the Czech Republic] and of Silesia [in present-day Poland]), the kingdom of Hungary, and—after 1714, following the War of the Spanish Succession—the southern Netherlands (including Brabant and Flanders [both now in Belgium] and the duchy of Luxembourg [now divided between Belgium and Luxembourg]) and the duchy of Milan (in Italy).
These disparate lands were held together only by the Habsburg monarchy, but the monarchs were distracted from the task of integrating them. They were preoccupied by imperial concerns and by dynastic complications, notably the succession question. Until the reforms of Maria Theresa’s reign (1740–80), Austrian administration never became effective. Finances were especially muddled, because tax administration remained with the estates of the various territories, along with control over other sources of revenue. The army of 100,000 men, though the third largest in Europe, was barely adequate for the defense of so large and scattered a realm. A supreme war council and a central financial chamber overlapped with special commissions created by the emperor’s privy council, which also handled military and fiscal affairs. Nonetheless, the realm held together.
The prospect of a succession without a male heir, however, presented the severest test to the realm’s cohesion. It became the chief enterprise of Charles VI to persuade the estates of his territories to accept an order of succession, known as the “Pragmatic Sanction,” by which the Habsburg lands were declared indivisible and Charles’s oldest daughter, Maria Theresa, was to inherit them. The other European powers assented, because splitting the Habsburg complex would have thrown the European balance into disarray and played into the hands of France; the Sanction was proclaimed a basic law in 1713. By then Austria had met successfully a series of Turkish incursions from the east and French invasions in the west. The age of Louis XIV
For the empire as a whole, the half century following the Peace of Westphalia was almost entirely shaped by the dominant political figure of the time, King Louis XIV of France. The response of the empire and its members to the aggressive undertakings of this monarch, whose aim from his assumption of power in 1661 to his death in 1715 it was to make France the mightiest state in Europe, was largely reactive (for a different interpretation, see France: The age of Louis XIV: Foreign affairs). Only in its struggles against Louis’s ally in the east, the Ottoman Turks, did the empire show some initiative. After a Polish relief army had helped imperial, Bavarian, and Saxon troops to lift a three months’ Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 in the Battle of Kahlenberg, imperial armies took the offensive, winning battles at Ofen (1686), Mohács (1687), and, most notably, Zenta (1697). In the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699), Austria gained parts of Hungary, Transylvania (now in Romania), Slavonia (now in Croatia), and Croatia, all formerly occupied by the Turks. The eastern wars resumed in the early and mid-18th century, but the Turks were never again a threat to Europe, since Russia became the chief bulwark against Ottoman expansionism.