Kingdom of Prussia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingdom of Prussia was proclaimed on the 18th of January 1701, when Frederick III of Brandenburg crowned himself "King in Prussia" in an act that sidestepped the rules of the Holy Roman Empire. Legally, kingdoms could exist inside the empire only in Bohemia and Italy. Frederick found a workaround: because Prussia had never been part of the empire, and because the Hohenzollern dynasty held full sovereignty over the Prussian duchy, he declared himself a king there, while remaining only an elector inside the empire's borders. Emperor Leopold I, who needed Frederick's soldiers for the looming War of the Spanish Succession, quietly agreed.

  From that careful legal maneuver in 1701, Prussia would grow over the next two centuries into the engine of a united Germany. The questions that drive this story are not simply about conquest, though there was plenty of that. They are about how a fragmented, resource-poor state stretched across 1,200 kilometers of disconnected territory became the dominant power on the European continent. How did a kingdom still recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War end up dictating the terms of German nationhood? And what brought the whole enterprise to an end on the 9th of November 1918, when Kaiser William II announced his abdication and boarded a train for exile in the Netherlands?

• 2. A State Built on Legalism

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  Frederick's title "King in Prussia" rather than "King of Prussia" was a precise diplomatic construction. The Hohenzollerns held Brandenburg within the Holy Roman Empire, where they were subject to the emperor. They held Prussia outside the empire, where they were sovereign. Ruling both territories under one crown required a legal fiction: inside the empire they were still electors; outside it they were kings. They continued using the title of Elector of Brandenburg alongside that of king until the empire itself dissolved in 1806.

  It was not until 1772, after Prussia annexed most of the Polish province of Royal Prussia in the First Partition of Poland, that Frederick II finally dropped the qualifier. Only then did he take the title "King of Prussia", because only then did his kingdom encompass the full region the name implied. The western portion of historical Prussia, known as Royal Prussia, had remained under the King of Poland. Absorbing it closed the geographical gap and allowed the title to match the territory.

  This insistence on legal precision was not mere pedantry. The Hohenzollern dynasty had secured the Margraviate of Brandenburg in 1518 and, in 1618, inherited the Duchy of Prussia through a dynastic connection to a younger branch of their own family. Full sovereignty over the duchy came even later, in September 1657, through the treaties of Labiau and Wehlau-Bromberg signed during the Second Northern War. Each expansion came packaged in treaties and formal concessions rather than pure force, a pattern that would persist across the kingdom's history.

• 3. Frederick the Great's Gamble

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  In 1740, the year Frederick II came to the throne, he seized Silesia from Austria on the basis of a 1537 treaty that Emperor Ferdinand I had vetoed. The move was audacious because the treaty was flimsy pretext, and because Austria's Queen Maria Theresa was unlikely to accept the loss. Frederick occupied the province rapidly and offered to protect Austria from its other enemies if she ceded Silesia formally. She refused. Austria was fighting for survival on multiple fronts, and Frederick extracted formal cession through the Treaty of Berlin in 1742.

  Austria then regrouped. By 1744, Frederick invaded again, this time targeting Bohemia, and failed. A series of European compromises produced the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which left Prussia holding most of Silesia but settled nothing permanently. Austria spent the following years forging an alliance with France and Russia, a diplomatic shift known as the Diplomatic Revolution, while Prussia moved into Britain's orbit through the Anglo-Prussian Alliance.

  In 1756-1757, Frederick preemptively invaded Saxony and Bohemia and triggered the Seven Years' War. What followed was a near-catastrophe. Prussia faced Austria, Russia, France, and Sweden simultaneously. The Russian army briefly occupied Berlin and Konigsberg in October 1760. The kingdom's survival hinged on an unlikely event: the death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia in 1762, known afterward as the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg. Her successor, the Prussophile Peter III, withdrew from the war. Sweden followed. Frederick defeated the Austrian army at the Battle of Burkersdorf and forced a status quo on the continent. Frederick, having come close to annihilation, ruled far more carefully for the rest of his life.

• 4. Bismarck and the Three Wars

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  Otto von Bismarck took office as Prussia's minister-president on the 23rd of September 1862, appointed by King William I to break a deadlock with parliament over the army budget. The liberals in the lower house refused to fund William's plan to expand the number of regiments. Bismarck's solution was to argue that since king and parliament had failed to agree, a constitutional "hole" existed, and the government could continue collecting taxes and disbursing funds under the old budget. Prussia ran without a legally approved budget from 1862 to 1866.

  Bismarck's deeper intention was not to crush liberalism but to outmaneuver it. He had concluded that German unification was inevitable and that the conservative establishment had to lead it or be swept aside. He believed middle-class liberals wanted a united Germany more than they wanted to dismantle the old social order. His plan was to deliver unification and trade that achievement for their acquiescence. He guided Prussia through three wars in sequence to make it happen.

  The Second War of Schleswig in 1864 was first, fought alongside Austria against Denmark, which surrendered both Schleswig and Holstein. The resulting joint administration of those duchies then served as the pretext for the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, also known as the Seven Weeks' War. Prussia, allied with the Kingdom of Italy and several northern German states, crushed the Austrian-led coalition. Four of Prussia's smaller allies were annexed outright: the Kingdom of Hanover, the Electorate of Hesse, the Duchy of Nassau, and the Free City of Frankfurt. The victory allowed Bismarck to dissolve the German Confederation and replace it with the North German Confederation under Prussian dominance.

  The final act came on the 2nd of September 1870, when Prussian forces captured Napoleon III of France during the Franco-Prussian War. Bismarck had maneuvered the French emperor into declaring war first, which activated German military alliances and flooded the campaign with patriotic support. On the 18th of January 1871, the 170th anniversary of Frederick I's coronation, the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles while Paris remained under siege.

• 5. Power's Internal Contradictions

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  Prussia held two-thirds of the German Empire's territory and three-fifths of its population. Its dominance looked absolute: the imperial crown was a hereditary Hohenzollern office, Prussia held 17 of the Bundesrat's 58 votes, and no other state had more than six. Bismarck served simultaneously as prime minister of Prussia and chancellor of the empire for most of his tenure, instructing Prussian deputies in the Bundesrat in both capacities.

  Yet the architecture contained a structural flaw that widened over time. The empire granted universal male suffrage for the national parliament. Prussia retained its three-class franchise, in which votes were weighted by the taxes a voter paid. In one documented election, the top class, representing 4% of voters, chose the same number of electors as the bottom class, representing 82%. Since the imperial chancellor was almost always also the Prussian prime minister, the same man had to build majorities in two legislatures elected by entirely different rules.

  Urbanisation compounded the problem. At the empire's founding, both Prussia and Germany were roughly two-thirds rural. Within twenty years the balance had reversed, with cities and towns accounting for two-thirds of the population. Neither the kingdom nor the empire reapportioned constituencies to reflect this shift, leaving rural areas grossly overrepresented from the 1890s onward. The Prussia that Frederick II had built on military discipline and agrarian Junker loyalty was now governing an industrial nation it had structurally excluded from full political voice.

  William II, who became Kaiser at age 29 in 1888 after his father Frederick III died of throat cancer after only 99 days on the throne, made the contradictions personal. He alienated the British and Russian royal families, to whom he was closely related, turning potential allies into rivals. Before and during World War I, Prussian Junkers dominated the higher military ranks while portions of the eastern front were fought on Prussian soil.

• 6. Collapse and Abolition

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  By late 1918, the Social Democratic Party of Germany controlled the Prussian House of Representatives. William II understood he had lost his imperial crown but hoped to retain his Prussian one. He reasoned that as ruler of two-thirds of Germany he could remain a significant figure in whatever government emerged. The imperial constitution destroyed that hope: it explicitly tied the imperial crown to the Prussian crown. To abdicate one was to abdicate both.

  William also discovered the military would not fight for him. His abdication as both King of Prussia and German Emperor was announced on the 9th of November 1918. He was in exile in the Netherlands the following day. In Berlin, armed revolts, mass strikes, and street fighting followed. The Guards Cavalry Rifle Division, commanded by Waldemar Pabst, moved against strikers in the capital. By the 16th of March, approximately 1,200 people had been killed, many of them unarmed and uninvolved.

  Prussia was reconstituted as the Free State of Prussia within the Weimar Republic, receiving a new republican constitution in 1920. The Free State of Prussia was abolished in 1947, ending a political entity whose origins reached back to the Hohenzollern inheritance of Brandenburg in 1518. The 1920 republican constitution was itself a historical footnote to something larger: the question of whether any successor to Prussian statecraft could hold together a Germany that Prussia itself had unified through war rather than consent.