43
THE GERMAN CAMPAIGN AND FREDERICK WILLIAM
Leaving the Pruth behind, Peter and Catherine traveled north into Poland. There and in Germany, Peter’s objective was to pick up the momentum of Poltava and resume the war against Sweden. The first step was to reassure his allies, Augustus of Poland and Frederick IV of Denmark, that the disaster on the Pruth had not shaken his resolve to force Charles XII to an acceptable peace. More immediately, Peter meant to visit Germany in order to take a cure at Carlsbad and to witness the marriage of his son Alexis to Princess Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. All of these projects and even Peter’s travel route had been made possible by Poltava; before the destruction of the Swedish army, Charles XII had dominated Poland and made it physically impossible for the Tsar to pass through Poland into Germany. Now, the Swedes had vanished and Charles was far away in Turkey. For the rest of his life, Peter traveled through the German states almost as frequently and securely as he traveled through Russia.
Peter needed to rest and recover from the exhaustion, depression and illness which had attended his disastrous summer in the Balkans. Even as he traveled by water down the Vistula to Warsaw, where he spent two days, then farther to Thorn, where he left Catherine, the Tsar was sick. In Posen, he had a violent colic and remained in bed for several days before continuing on to Dresden and Carlsbad where he was to take the waters. This was a dreary process of drinking mineral water that was supposed to clear out the system; often it did so unpleasantly, and Whitworth, who was accompanying Peter, faithfully informed his masters in London that the Tsar was suffering “a violent looseness.” Peter found it dull from the beginning and complained to Catherine:
Katerinushka, my friend, how are you? We arrived here well, thank God, and tomorrow begin our cure. The place is so merry you might call it an honorable dungeon, for it lies between such high mountains that one scarcely sees the sun. Worst of all, there is no good beer. However, we hope God will give us health from the waters. I send you herewith a present, a new-fashioned clock, put under glass on account of the dust.… I could not get more [because] of my hurry, for I was only one day in Dresden.
From Carlsbad, Peter went back to Dresden, remaining a week. He stayed at the Golden Ring Inn, rather than at the royal palace, and at the inn he chose the low-ceilinged room of the porter rather than one of the main guest suites. He went to a tennis court, took a racquet and played. Twice he visited a paper factory and made sheets of paper with his own hands. He called on Johann Melchior Dinglinger, the court jeweler, whose gorgeous constructions in jewels, precious metals and enamel were famous throughout Europe. (A year later, visiting Dresden, Peter insisted on spending a week living in Dinglinger’s house.) He passed three hours with Andrew Gartner, the court mathematician and mechanician, who was famous for his inventions. Peter was especially interested in a machine which Gartner had designed to carry people or objects from one floor of a house to another: in short, an elevator. In gratitude for his visit, the Tsar gave Gartner an armful of sables, suggesting that he make himself a warm coat for the winter.
On October 13, Peter arrived at Torgau, the castle of the Queen of Poland, where his son was to be married. This site, rather than Dresden, had been chosen so that the ceremony could be private, without the necessity of inviting the King of Prussia, the Elector of Hanover and other German princes, thus avoiding problems of protocol and saving time for the Tsar and money for the bride’s father, the Duke of Wolfenbüttel. The wedding took place on Sunday, October 14, 1711, in the great hall of the palace. In order to increase the illuminated brilliance of the occasion, the windows were covered and the walls hung with mirrors to reflect the light of thousands of candles. The Orthodox service was performed in Russian, except that the bride, who had been converted from Lutheranism to become the consort of a future tsar, was ritually questioned in Latin. A marriage supper in the Queen’s apartments was followed by a ball, after which, reported a contemporary chronicler, “His Great Tsarish Majesty gave his fatherly blessing in a most touching manner to the newly married pair and himself conducted them to their bedchamber.” That same night, before retiring, Peter managed to write to Menshikov:
I will answer your letter later. I have no time now because of the marriage of my son, which was celebrated today, thank God, in a good way, with many notable people present. The marriage took place in the house of the Queen of Poland and the watermelon sent by you was put upon the table, which vegetable is a mighty wonder here.
In Torgau, Peter finally met Gottfried von Leibniz. Ever since Peter’s first visit to Germany at the time of the Great Embassy, the famous philosopher and mathematician had waited for a chance to get the Tsar’s ear and to urge on him new institutions for learning and research. When he finally met Peter, Leibniz achieved at least a partial success. The Tsar did not turn over to him the future of Russian culture and education, but the following year he did appoint Leibniz a Councilor of Justice, assign him a salary (never paid) and ask him to draw up a list of proposed educational, legal and administrative reforms. As Leibniz described their next meeting, at Carlsbad in 1712, to the Electress Sophia:
I found His Majesty on the point of finishing his cure. He nevertheless desired to wait some days before leaving here, because last year he found himself unwell from having begun to travel immediately after his cure.… Your Electoral Highness will find it extraordinary that I am to be in a sense the Solon of Russia, although at a distance. That is to say that the Tsar has told me through Golovkin, his Grand Chancellor, that I am to reform the laws and draw up some regulations for the administration of justice. As I hold that the best laws are shortest, like the Ten Commandments or the Twelve Tables of Ancient Rome, and as this subject is one of my earliest studies, this will scarcely keep me long.
The Duke of Wolfenbüttel, a regular correspondent of Leibniz’, jokingly warned the “new Solon” that he might receive little for his efforts other than the Cross of St. Andrew. Leibniz replied, disparaging his new assignment:
I am very glad to have made Your Highness laugh a little at my Russian Solon. But a Russian Solon does not need the wisdom of the Greeks and can get along with less. The Cross of St. Andrew I should like very well if it were set in diamonds, but these are not given in Hanover, but only by the Tsar. Still my promised five hundred ducats were very acceptable.
At the end of December 1711, Peter returned to St. Petersburg after an absence of almost a year. Once there, he threw himself into the administration of domestic affairs which had languished while he was on the Pruth and in Germany. He gave instructions for the expansion of trade withPersia, formed a company of merchants to trade with China and, in April 1712, commanded his newly established Russian Senate to move from Moscow to St. Petersburg. His presence spurred much new construction along the Neva, and, in May, Peter laid the cornerstone for the new Cathedral of Peter and Paul which Trezzini was to erect within the fortress.
That spring was a worrisome time for Peter—he still had not evacuated his garrisons in Azov and Tagonrog and the Turks had declared war a second time—but he was reassured by an unusual vision which he described to Whitworth and which the ambassador faithfully reported to London:
Some nights ago the Tsar dreamed: he saw all sorts of wild beasts fighting together, from among which a fierce tiger made at him with open jaws and put him into such confusion that he could neither defend himself nor retreat. But a voice, he could not tell from whence it came, called out to him several times that he should not fear, and the tiger stopped short of a sudden without any further attempt [to harm him]. Then four people appeared in white and, advancing into the middle of the wild beasts, their rage immediately ceased and all separated in peace. The dream has made such an impression on his [the Tsar’s] fancy that he noted it down in his table book with the day of the month. I find it has really increased his confidence.
On February 19, 1712, Peter formalized and publicly proclaimed his marriage to Catherine. The ceremony, which took place at seven a.m. in Prince Menshikov’s private chapel, was intended to clarify her position as his wife and official consort to those who said that their private marriage in November 1707 was insufficient for a tsar and tsaritsa. It also was a mark of Peter’s gratitude to this calm, devoted woman whose sturdy courage during the Pruth campaign had helped carry him through that disastrous episode. Peter was married in the uniform of a rear admiral, with Vice Admiral Cruys acting as his sponsor, and other naval officers acting as witnesses. Returning to his own palace in sledges between lines of trumpeters and drummers, Peter halted his sledge before he reached his front door so that he could go inside and hang over the dinner table his wedding gift to Catherine. It was a six-branched candelabrum of ivory and ebony which he himself had made in two weeks of work. That evening, wrote Whitworth, “the company was very splendid, the dinner magnificent, the wine good, from Hungary, and what was the greatest pleasure, not forced on the guests in too large quantities. The evening was concluded with a ball and fireworks.” Peter was in a jolly mood; at one point in the festivity, he confided to Whitworth and the Danish ambassador that it was “a fruitful wedding, for they already had had five children.”
Two years later, Peter further honored Catherine by creating a new decoration, the Order of St. Catherine, her patron saint, which consisted of a cross hanging on a white ribbon inscribed with the motto, “Out of Love and Fidelity to My Country.” The new order, Peter declared, commemorated his wife’s role in the Pruth campaign, where she had behaved “not as a woman, but as a man.”
At the beginning of 1711, even before the ill-fated campaign on the Pruth, Peter’s interest was to make peace with Sweden. He had richly achieved his war aims. St. Petersburg had been given its “cushion” to the north by the capture of Vyborg and the province of Karelia. It was secured from the south by the occupation of Ingria and Livonia. Two additional seaports, Riga and Reval, along with St. Petersburg, had opened Russia’s Baltic “Window on the West” as wide as could conceivably be needed. There was nothing more that Peter wanted, and he sincerely desired peace.
The governing Council and the people of Sweden also wanted peace. Sweden was defeated, the war was ruinous and the only realistic prospect was that if it continued, it would get worse. In the summer of Poltava, 1709, the harvest in Sweden failed. That autumn, emboldened by the Russian victory, Denmark reentered the war. In 1710 and 1711, the plague swept across Sweden; Stockholm lost one third of its population. Now, at the end of 1711, as the Tsar roamed freely through Germany meeting kings and princes and taking the waters, Sweden was exhausted. It had no allies, while ranged against it was the formidable coalition of Russia, Denmark, Saxony and Poland. Before long, Hanover and Prussia would also enter the anti-Swedish alliance.
If reason dictated peace, why did peace not come? Primarily, because the King of Sweden forbade it. To Charles, Poltava was only a temporary setback. New Swedish armies could be raised to replace the one lost in the Ukraine. His flight and exile in Turkey could be transformed into a brilliant opportunity if he could persuade the Sultan and the vast Ottoman army to join him in a march to Moscow. Certainly, there was no question of concluding a peace which would leave an inch of Swedish territory in Russian hands. Everything, including the Tsar’s new capital on the Neva, must be returned. As the Tsar would not surrender it any other way, it must be wrenched back with the sword. Peter, accepting his opponent’s stubbornness, was equally determined not to give up St. Petersburg. And so the war continued.
In 1711 and 1712, the new Russian and allied offensives against the crumbling Swedish empire were directed against the Swedish possessions in North Germany. These territories—Pomerania with its seaports of Stralsund, Stettin and Wismar; and Bremen and Verden on the Weser—were Sweden’s entry ports into the continent, the springboards used by her armies. Naturally, the disposition of these territories became a matter of keenest interest for all the states on which they bordered—Denmark, Prussia and Hanover—and eventually all three became Peter’s allies.
The attack on Swedish Pomerania began in the summer of 1711. Even as Peter, Catherine, Sheremetev and the main body of the Russian army were marching south to the Pruth, another Russian army of 12,000 men was moving westward through Poland to attack this Swedish territory north of Berlin. It was to be an allied effort, and in mid-August 12,000 Russian, 6,000 Saxon and 6,000 Polish troops passed through Prussia within a few miles of Berlin. A Danish contingent joined them, and together the multinational army besieged Stralsund and Wismar. Unfortunately, because of disagreements between commanders and a lack of siege artillery, nothing was achieved. Autumn came, the siege was lifted and the troops remained in Pomerania for the winter. In the spring of 1712, they moved on to besiege Stettin. Once again, the confusion of allied purposes and lack of artillery led to failure. The Russian army, now commanded by Menshikov, invested the fortress port, but could not mount an effective siege. King Frederick IV of Denmark had promised to supply the artillery, but was actually using the guns in an attempt to seize the—to him—juicier Swedish plums on the opposite side of the Danish peninsula, Bremen and Verden. The Danes protested to Menshikov that it was the duty of the Poles to supply the artillery.
This was the situation which Peter found when he arrived with Catherine before Stettin in June 1712. The Tsar was exasperated. “I consider myself very unfortunate to have come here,” he wrote to Menshikov. “God sees my good intentions and the crooked dealings of others. I cannot sleep at night on account of the way I am treated.” Peter also wrote to Frederick of Denmark, complaining of the wastage of another summer. Angry as he was, Peter could do no more than complain. The Danish fleet was an essential ingredient in the allied effort; no other Baltic power had a naval force capable of dealing with the Swedish fleet and cutting off the Swedish army on the continent from its homeland base. Nevertheless, Peter’s tone was tart:
I think Your Majesty knows that I have not only furnished the number of troops agreed upon last year … with the King of Poland, but even three times as many, and besides that, for the common interest, I have come here myself, not sparing my health with the constant fatigue and long journey. But on my arrival here I find the army idle, because the artillery promised by you has not come, and when I asked your Vice Admiral Segestet about it, he replied that it could not be given without your particular order. I am greatly at a loss to understand why these changes are made and why favorable time is thus being wasted, from which, besides the loss of money and to the common interests, we shall gain nothing except the ridicule of our enemies. I have always been, and am, ready to help my allies in everything that the common interest demands. If you do not comply with this request of mine to [send the artillery], I can prove to you and the whole world that this campaign has not been lost by me, and I shall then not be to blame if, as I am inactive here, I am obliged to withdraw my troops, because on account of the expense of things here it is a waste of money, and I cannot endure being dishonored by the enemy.
Peter’s letter did no good; the Danish artillery continued to batter at Bremen, not Stettin. In this frustrated mood, Peter left the army at the end of September 1712 to return for the third straight autumn to take the waters at Carlsbad. On the way, passing through Wittenberg, he visited the grave of Martin Luther and the house in which Luther had lived. In the house, the curator showed him an ink spot on the wall which supposedly dated to the moment when Luther had seen the Devil and thrown his inkpot at him. Peter laughed and asked, “Did such a wise man really believe that the Devil could be seen?” Asked to sign the wall himself, Peter chidingly wrote, “The ink spot is quite fresh, so the story obviously is not true.”
Traveling to Carlsbad, Peter also passed through Berlin and called on the elderly King Frederick I of Prussia and his son Frederick William, the Prince Royal. “The Tsar arrived here last Tuesday at seven p.m.,” wrote a member of the Prussian court.
We were in the tabiage [smoking room] when the Field Marshal came to inform the King, who asked me how the Tsar had been received in Dresden. I said that although the King [Augustus] was absent, all sorts of honors had been offered to him, but he had accepted nothing and had lodged in a private house. His Majesty replied that he would likewise offer him everything.…
The Tsar went to the palace and going up the private staircase surprised the King in his bedroom playing chess with the Prince Royal. The two Majesties stayed half an hour together. Then the Tsar looked at the apartments in which the King of Denmark had stayed, admired them, but refused to occupy them. A supper was given by the Prince Royal, there being eight at the table besides the Tsar, who allowed no toasts, ate though he had already supped, but did not drink.…
Yesterday the Tsar went to the King in the tabiage, put on a fine red coat embroidered with gold, instead of his pelisse, which he found too hot, and went to supper. He was gallant enough to give his hand to the Queen, after having put on a rather dirty glove. The King and all the royal family supped with him.… The Tsar surpassed himself during all this time. He neither belched, nor farted, nor picked his teeth—at least I neither saw nor heard him do so—and he conversed with the Queen and with the Princesses without showing any embarrassment. The crowd of spectators was very great. He embraced the King for goodbye, and, after making a general bow to all the company, went off with such long strides that it was impossible for the King to keep up with him.
Five months later, on his way back to Russia, Peter again passed through Berlin. King Frederick I had just died and the twenty-five-year-old Prince Royal now sat on the throne as King Frederick William I. “I have found the new King very pleasant,” Peter wrote to Menshikov, “but cannot decide him on any action. As far as I can understand from two reasons: first, because he has no money, and second, because there are still here many dogs of Swedish heart. The King himself is unskilled in political matters and when he asks his Ministers for advice, they help the Swedes in every way.… The Court here is not so grand as it was before.” As for joining an active alliance against Sweden, the new King of Prussia said that he needed at least a year to put his army and finances in order.
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—thought 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 1688, 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 Königsberg 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; Prussia 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 them, 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, were 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 to 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 William 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.)
Needless to say, the King never risked his cherished colossi in the face of enemy fire. In turn, they provided the ailing monarch with his greatest delight. When he was sick or depressed, the entire two battalions, preceded by tall, turbaned Moors with cymbals and trumpets and the grenadiers’ mascot, an enormous bear, would march in a long line through the King’s chamber to cheer him up.
Not surprisingly, Frederick William’s Queen, Sophia Dorothea, was unhappy with this strange man. She wanted more grandeur, more courtiers, more jewels, more balls. Especially after her father became King of England and a potentate on a par with the Emperor in Vienna, she looked down on the House of Hohenzollern and this frugal little court in Berlin. Nevertheless, she bore her husband fourteen children and protected them by hiding them in her private rooms when her enraged husband was chasing them through the palace with his stick. Their two firstborn were sons, both named Frederick, and both died quickly. The third, also named Frederick, survived, along with nine younger brothers and sisters. He was a delicate, polite little boy who loved everything French—the language, clothes, even hair styles—and whose tongue was so quick he could run circles around his father in an argument. Despite his sensitive nature, he was brought up as a warrior prince, the heir to a military state. His father gave him his own toy regiment, the Crown Prince Cadets, made up of 131 little boys whom the Prince could command and play with as he liked. At fourteen, the small boy (he never grew to be more than five feet seven inches) was made a major of the giant Potsdam Grenadiers, and on the parade ground he commanded these titans, who towered over him.
Relations worsened between father and son. The King, who was often in a wheelchair suffused with agony, treated his son contemptuously. At the same time, realizing what he was doing, the King told Frederick, “If my father had treated me as I treat you, I wouldn’t have put up with it. I would have killed myself or run away.”
In 1730, at the age of eighteen, Frederick did run away. He was quickly recaptured, and the King treated his son and Frederick’s companion, the esthetic Hans Hermann von Katte, a Francophile and the son of a general, as deserters from the army. They were imprisoned, and one morning the Prince awoke to see Von Katte led into the prison courtyard and beheaded by a saber stroke.
In 1740, the disintegrating King Frederick William died, and Prince Frederick, at twenty-eight, succeeded to the Prussian throne. Within several months, he had put the Prussian war machine so carefully created by his father and grandfather into motion. To the astonishment of Europe, he invaded Silesia, provoking war with the Hapsburg Empire. It was the first of the brilliant military campaigns which were to proclaim the military genius of the slight young monarch and earn him the title of Frederick the Great.
In the autumn of 1712, while Peter’s army was mired before Stettin and the Tsar himself was traveling between Dresden, Carlsbad and Berlin, Sweden, incredibly, was preparing a final offensive on the continent. Charles XII had commanded that still another army be raised and sent to North Germany. Its mission was to march south through Poland to rendezvous with him and an Ottoman army to pursue his dream of invading Russia. The poverty-stricken Swedes heard this command with despair. “Tell the King,” wrote one of his officials, “that Sweden can send no more troops to Germany, if she has to defend herself against Denmark and especially against the Tsar, who has already conquered the Baltic provinces and part of Finland and now threatens to invade the country and lay Stockholm in ashes. The patience of Sweden is great but not so great as to wish to become Russian.” Nevertheless, the King’s command was finally obeyed, and with great difficulty a new army was raised. Magnus Stenbock landed in Swedish Pomerania with a mobile field army of 18,000 men. Stenbock’s mission was badly damaged from the beginning when the Danish fleet intercepted a convoy of Swedish cargo ships, their holds crammed with provisions, ammunition and powder needed by his troops, and sent thirty of the ships to the bottom. Even so, Stenbock’s landing caused great concern among the allies, and the destruction of his force became an urgent priority for their combined armies. From Dresden, where he was resting after his cure, Peter urged Frederick of Denmark to lead his troops from Holstein against the Swedes: “I hope Your Majesty recognized the necessity of such action. I beseech you in the most friendly and brotherly way, and at the same time I declare that although my health demands repose after my cure, yet, seeing the urgent need, I will not neglect this profitable affair and will go to the army.” To Menshikov, Peter was even more insistent: “For God’s sake, if there be a good opportunity, even if I do not succeed in getting to you, do not lose time, but in the Lord’s name attack the enemy.”
Faced by converging forces of Danes, Saxons, and Russians, Stenbock decided to attack the Danes separately before the Tsar with the main Russian and Saxon armies could arrive. Marching through a snowstorm on December 20, 1712, he caught 15,000 Danes in their camp at Gadebusch and severely mauled them, almost capturing King Frederick IV. But his victory had limited results; his force was reduced to 12,000, and he was soon being pursued by 36,000 Saxons, Russians and Danes. Still waiting for fresh supplies and reinforcements from Sweden, he saw the ice crusting in the Baltic harbors and realized that no help would come from home that winter. Seeking refuge, he marched west toward Hamburg and Bremen. He demanded of Altona, a town near Hamburg, a ransom of 100,000 thalers for his expenses, and when the town could raise only 42,000 thalers, Stenbock’s men burned it to the ground, leaving only thirty houses. Two days later, a Swedish detachment came back and burned twenty-five of the thirty. Peter, reaching Altona with his pursuing army eight days later, was shaken by the sight of the refugees without shelter among the ruins, and distributed a thousand roubles among them. Stenbock’s retreat eventually came to an end in the fortress of Tonning on the North Sea coast, where he was surrounded and closed in for the winter by allied troops.
On January 25, 1713, with no further military action possible until spring, Peter left the army, giving command of the Russian troops to Menshikov and leaving the allied force under the command of the King of Denmark. From Tonning, Peter traveled to Hanover to meet the Elector George Louis, soon, on the death of Queen Anne, to become King George I of England. Peter wanted not only to persuade Hanover to enter the war against Sweden but, through the Elector, to determine the attitude of England. After his visit, Peter wrote to Catherine, “The Elector appeared very favorably inclined and gave me much advice, but does not wish to do anything actively.”
The Tsar then returned to St. Petersburg, and four months later, in May 1713, Stenbock capitulated at Tonning. Menshikov led the Russian army back to Pomerania, along the way threatening Hamburg and extracting a 100,000-thaler “contribution” from the free city to punish it for its highly profitable trade with Sweden. Peter was delighted with this action and wrote to Menshikov, “Thanks for the money which was taken from Hamburg in a good manner and without loss of time. Send the greater part of it to Kurakin [in Holland]. It is very necessary for the purchase of ships.” From Hamburg, Menshikov marched eastward and besieged Stettin. This time, he was equipped with Saxon siege artillery, and on September 19, 1713, Stettin fell. As agreed, Stettin was then turned over to Frederick William of Prussia, who so far had not been required to fire a shot.
Now, of all Charles’ once-great empire south of the Baltic Sea, only the ports of Stralsund and Wismar remained under the blue-and-yellow flag of Sweden.