The lifetime of Peter the Great and the rise of Russia also saw the emergence of a new, highly disciplined military state in North Germany, the kingdom of Prussia. It sprang from the electorate of Brandenburg, whose ruling house, the House of Hohenzollern, had descended from the Teutonic Knights. Its capital, Berlin, was still only a town in Peter's day, with a population in 1700 of 25,000. Its people were Protestant, frugal and efficient, with a capacity for organization, a willingness to sacrifice and a belief that duty was the highest call. Other Germans—Rhinelanders, Bavarians, Hanoverians and Saxons—though of Brandenburgers as semi-feudal, less civilized and more aggressive than themselves.
The weakness of the state was geographical. A product of dynastic marriages and inheritances, it was scattered in unconnected fragments all across the Northern European plain. Its westernmost territory, the duchy of Cleves, lay on the Rhine near the point where the great river flows into Holland; its easternmost fief, the duchy of East Prussia, lay on the Neman, over 500 miles east of Cleves. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War, had left the state of Brandenburg with gloomy prospects. It was cut off from the sea. It lacked natural resources; because of its poor soil, it was called "the sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire." Its countryside had been ravaged and depopulated by the constant passage of foreign Protestant and Catholic armies. In 1640, however, the ancient House of Hohenzollern, which had ruled Brandenburg since 1417, had produced a remarkable ruler, the Elector Frederick William. Although his territories were scattered and impoverished, he dreamed of a new Hohenzollern state which should be independent, united and powerful. Frederick William, who came to be called the Great Elector, created the machinery which was to raise Prussia to the front rank of European states. He organized an efficient, centralized government with a disciplined civil service, a postal system, a graduated income tax. And by 1668, after forty-eight years as ruler, the Great Elector had given Brandenburg, which had a population of only one million people, a modern, standing army of 30,000 men.
The Great Elector's descendants built faithfully on his foundations. By 1701, the power of the Prussian state had grown to the point that the Great Elector's son Frederick was no longer content with the title of elector. He wanted to be a king. The Emperor in Vienna, who awarded such titles, was reluctant; if he made Frederick a king, then the electors of Hanover, Bavaria and Saxony would also want to be kings. But in this case the Emperor had no choice. About to enter what he knew would be a long and difficult war with France (the War of the Spanish Succession), he badly needed the Prussian regiments which Frederick was only too happy to rent to him—if he could become a king. The Emperor bowed, and on January 18, 1701, Frederick placed a crown on his own head in Konigsberg to become King Frederick I of Prussia.
He was succeeded in 1713 by twenty-five-year-old King Frederick William I, who became the friend and ally of Peter of Russia. Even more single-mindedly than his father or grandfather, Frederick William I set as the unique purpose for the Prussian state the achievement of maximum military power. Everything was bent toward it: a sound economy which would support a larger army; an efficient bureaucracy which would make it easier to collect taxes to pay for more soldiers; an excellent system of public education which would create more intelligent soldiers. In contrast to France, where national wealth was poured into public architectural grandeur, Prussian buildings were constructed exclusively for military purpose: powder mills, cannon factories, arsenals, barracks. The King of Prussia's goal was a professional army of 80,000 men. Yet, despite this waxing military power, Prussian diplomatic policy was cautious. Like his father, Frederick William I coveted new territories and new seaports, but he did not rush to seize them. Prussian troops fought in Hapsburg imperial armies in Flanders and Italy, but always under contract; Prussa itself was never at war. In its dealings with the participants in the Great Northern War, which raged around its frontiers, Prussia was especially careful. During all the years that Charles XII was marching back and forth in Poland, Prussia remained neutral. Only after Poltava, when Sweden had dropped to its knees, did Prussia join Hanover to declare war and pick up the spoils.
In his personal life, Frederick William I was a curious and unfortunate man. Eccentric, homely, apoplectic, a martinet, he hated everything his father had loved, especially everything French. Frederick William despised the people, the language, the culture and even the food of France. When criminals were hanged, the King first had them dressed in French clothes. On the surface, Frederick William was a plain Protestant monarch, a faithful husband, a stodgy, bourgeois father. He stripped his court of frills, selling most of his father's furniture and jewels and dismissing most of his courtiers. He fell in love with and married his Hanoverian first cousin, Sophia Dorothea, the daughter of the future King George I of England. He referred to her as "my wife" instead of "the Queen" and his son as "Fritz" instead of "the Heir to the Throne." Every night, he ate dinner with his family.
What spoiled this pretty domestic scene were Frederick William's violent rages. Quite suddenly, he would flare out brutally at his children or anyone near him. Triggered by small, harmless remarks or even looks, he would begin to swing his wooden cane, hitting people in the face, sometimes breaking their noses or teeth. When he did this in a Berlin street, there was nothing the victim could do; to resist or strike back at the enraged monarch was punishable by death. The explanation, apparently, was porphyria, the disease supposedly descended from Mary Queen of Scots which later afflicted King George III. A derangement of the metabolism whose symptoms are gout, migraines, abscesses, boils, hemorrhoids, and terrible pains in the stomach, the disease plunged the King into agony and tinged him with insanity. He became very fat, his eyes bulged and his skin glistened like polished ivory. Seeking distraction from these miseries, Frederick William learned to paint and signed his canvases "FW in tormentis pinxit." Every evening after dinner, he convoked his ministers and generals to drink tankards of beer and smoke long pipes. At these crude, masculine gatherings, the leaders of the Prussian state delighted in teasing and tormenting a pedantic court historian, whom they once actually set on fire.
The King's most famous obsession was his collection of giants, for which he was renowned throughout Europe. Known as the Blue Prussians or the Giants of Potsdam, there were over 1,200 of the, organized into two battalions of 600 men each. None was under six feet tall, and some, in the special Red Unit of the First Battalion, was almost seven feet tall. The King dressed them in blue jackets with gold trim and scarlet lapels, scarlet trousers, white stockings, black shoes and tall red hats. He gave them muskets, white bandoleers and small daggers, and he played with them as a child would with enormous living toys. No expense was too great for this hobby, and Frederick William spent millions to recruit and equip his giant grenadiers. They were hired or bought all over Europe; especially desirable specimens, refusing the offer of the King's recruiting agents, were simply kidnapped. Eventually, recruiting in this way became too expensive—one seven-foot-two-inch Irishman cost over 6,000 pounds—and Frederick William tried to breed giants. Every tall man in his realm was forced to marry a tall woman. The drawback was that the King had to wait fifteen or twenty years for the products of these unions to mature, and often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted. The easiest method of obtaining giants was to receive them as gifts. Foreign ambassadors advised their masters that the way to find favor with the King of Prussia was to send him giants. Peter especially appreciated his fellow sovereign's interest in nature's curios, and Russia supplied the Prussian King with fifty new giants every year. (Once, when Peter recalled some of the Russian giants lent to Frederick Willian and replaced them with men who were a trifle shorter, the King was so upset that he could not discuss business with the Russian ambassador; the wound in his heart, he said, was still too raw.)