Practically the entire continent was united against this little state which a short time before had hardly entered into the calculations of European politics. But Frederick was undaunted. He overran Saxony, a neutral country, seized its treasury because he needed it, and, by a flagrant breach of international usage, forced its citizens to fight in his armies, which were thus considerably increased. When reproached for this unprecedented act he laconically replied that he rather prided himself on being original.
The war thus begun had its violent ups and downs. Attacked from the south by the Austrians, from the east by the Russians, and always outnumbered, Frederick, fighting a defensive war, owed his salvation to the rapidity of his manoeuvres, to the slowness of those of his enemies, to his generally superior tactics, and to the fact that there was an entire lack of coordination among his adversaries. He won the battle of Rossbach November 5, 1757, his most brilliant victory, whose fame has not yet died away. With an army of only 20,000, he defeated a combined French and German army of 55,000 in an engagement that lasted only an hour and a half, took 16,000 prisoners, seventy-two cannon, and sustained a loss of less than a thousand men himself. Immense was the enthusiasm evoked by this Prussian triumph over what was reputed to be the finest army in Europe. It mattered little that the majority of the conquered army were Germans. The victory was popularly considered one of Germans over French, and such has remained its reputation ever since in the German national consciousness, thus greatly stirred and vivified.
Two years later Frederick suffered an almost equally disastrous defeat at the hands of the Austrians and Russians at Kunersdorf August 12. "I have had two horses killed under me," he wrote the night after this battle, "and it is my misfortune that I still live myself. ... Of an army of 48,000 men I have only 3,000 left. ... I have no more resources and, not to lie about it, I think everything is lost."
Later, after another disaster, he wrote, "I should like to hang myself, but we must act the play to the end." In this temper he fought on, year after year, through elation, through depression, with defeat behind him and defeat staring him in the face, relieved by occasional successes, saved by the incompetence and folly the war of his enemies, then plunged in gloom again, but always fighting for time and for some lucky stroke of fortune, such as the death of a hostile sovereign with its attendant interruption or change of policy. The story is too crowded, too replete with incident, to be condensed here. Only the general impression of a prolonged, racking, desperate struggle can be indicated. Gritty, cool, alert, and agile, Frederick managed to hold on until his enemies were willing to make peace.
He came out of this war with his territories intact but not increased. Silesia he retained, but Saxony he was forced to relinquish. He came out of it, also, prematurely old, hard, bitter, misanthropic, but he had made upon the world an indelible impression of his genius. His people had been decimated and appallingly impoverished; nevertheless he was the victor and great was his renown. Frederick had conquered Silesia in a month and had then spent many years fighting to retain it. All that he had won was fame, but that he enjoyed in full and overflowing measure.
Frederick lived twenty-three years longer, years of unremitting and very fruitful toil. In a hundred ways he sought to hasten the recuperation and the development of his sorely visited land, draining marshes, clearing forests, encouraging industries, opening schools, welcoming and favoring immigrants from other countries. Indeed over 300,000 of these responded to the various inducements offered, and Frederick founded more than 800 villages. He reorganized the army, replenished the public treasury, remodeled the legal code. In religious affairs he was the most tolerant ruler in Europe, giving refuge to the Jesuits when they were driven out of Catholic countries - France, Portugal, Spain - and when their order was abolished by the Pope himself. "In Prussia," said he, "every one has the right to win salvation in his own way."
In practice this was about the only indubitable right the individual possessed, for Frederick's government was unlimited, although frequently enlightened, despotism. His was an absolute monarchy, surrounded by a privileged nobility, resting upon an impotent mass of peasantry. His was a militarist state and only nobles could become general officers. Laborious, rising at three in summer, at four in the winter, and holding himself tightly to his mission as 'first servant to the King of Prussia,' Frederick knew more drudgery than pleasure. But he was a tyrant to his finger tips, and we do not find in the Prussia of his day any room made for that spirit of freedom which was destined in the immediate future to wrestle in Europe with this outworn system of autocracy.
In 1772 the conqueror of Silesia proceeded to gather new laurels of a similar kind. In conjunction with the monarchs of Russia and Austria he partially dismembered Poland, a crime of which the world has not yet heard the last. The task was easy of partition of accomplishment, as Poland was defenseless. Frederick frankly admitted that the act was that of brigands, and his opinion has been ratified by the general agreement of posterity.
When Frederick died in 1786, at the age of seventy-four, he left his kingdom nearly doubled in size and with a population more than doubled. In all his actions he thought, not of Germany, but of Prussia, always Prussia. Germany was an abstraction that had no hold upon his practical mind. He considered the German language boorish, "a jargon, devoid of every grace," and he was sure that Germany had no literature worthy of the name. Nevertheless, he was regarded throughout German lands, beyond Prussia, as a national hero, and he filled the national thought and imagination as no other German had done since Luther. His personality, his ideas, and his methods became an enduring and potent factor in the development of Germany.
But the trouble with despotism as a form of government is that a strong or enlightened despot may so easily be succeeded by a feeble or foolish one, as proved to be the case when Frederick died and was succeeded in 1786 by Frederick William II, under whom and under whose successor came evil days, contrasting most unpleasantly with the brilliant ones that had gone before.
Lying beyond Austria and Prussia, stretching away indefinitely into the east, was the other remaining great power in European politics, Russia.
Though the largest state on the continent, Russia did not enter upon the scene of European politics as a factor of importance until very late, indeed until the eighteenth century. During that century she took her place among the great European powers and her influence in the world has gone on increasing down to the present moment. Her previous history had been peculiar, differing in many and fundamental respects from that of her western neighbors. She had lived apart, unnoticed and unknown. She was connected with Europe by two ties, those of race and religion. The Russians were a Slavic people, related to the Poles, the Bohemians, the Serbs, and the other branches of that great family which spreads over Eastern Europe. And as early as the tenth century they had been converted to Christianity, not to that form that prevailed in the West, but to the Orthodox Greek form, which had its seat in Constantinople. The missionaries who had brought religion and at the same time the beginnings of civilization had come from that city. After the conquest of Constantinople by the infidel Turks in 1453 the Russians considered themselves its legitimate heirs, the representatives of its ideas and traditions. Constantinople and the Eastern Empire of which it had been the capital exercised over their imaginations a spell that has only increased with time.
But the great central fact of Russian history for hundreds of years was not her connection with Europe, which, after all, was slight, but her connection with Asia, which was close and profound in its effects. The Principality of Muscovy, as Russia was then called, was conquered by the Mongols, barbarians from Asia, in the thirteenth century, and for nearly three hundred years Russian princes paid tribute