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- By 1871, Prussia had established its military and economic superiority in central Europe. This, combined with the decline of Austrian influence, resulted in the unification of the German states.
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The Kingdom of Prussia was an absolute monarchy until the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states, after which Prussia became a constitutional monarchy and Adolf Heinrich von Arnim-Boitzenburg was appointed as Prussia's first Minister President.
- Overview
- Ducal Prussia and the Kingdom of Prussia, to 1786
Prussia, in European history, any of certain areas of eastern and central Europe, respectively (1) the land of the Prussians on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea, which came under Polish and German rule in the Middle Ages, (2) the kingdom ruled from 1701 by the German Hohenzollern dynasty, including Prussia and Brandenburg, with Berlin as its capital, which seized much of northern Germany and western Poland in the 18th and 19th centuries and united Germany under its leadership in 1871, and (3) the Land (state) created after the fall of the Hohenzollerns in 1918, which included most of their former kingdom and which was abolished by the Allies in 1947 as part of the political reorganization of Germany after its defeat in World War II.
The original Prussians, mainly hunters and cattle breeders, spoke a language belonging to the Baltic group of the Indo-European language family. These early Prussians were related to the Latvians and Lithuanians and lived in tribes in the then heavily forested region between the lower Vistula and Neman rivers. Their social organization was loose—although some elements of stratified society can be traced—and they were pagans. Early attempts to convert the Prussians to Christianity—notably those made by Saint Adalbert and Saint Bruno of Querfurt at the turn of the 11th century—were unsuccessful. In the 13th century, however, the Prussians were conquered and Christianized by the German-speaking knights of the Teutonic Order, which had been awarded Prussian lands by the Polish duke Conrad of Mazovia for help against Prussian incursions. The Prussian countryside was subdued, castles were built for German nobility, and many German peasants were settled there to farm the land. By the middle of the 14th century, the majority of the inhabitants of Prussia were German-speaking, though the Old Prussian language did not die out until the 17th century. By the 17th century the indigenous population was thoroughly assimilated.
The Teutonic Order’s last grand master in Prussia, Albert of Hohenzollern, became a Lutheran and, in 1525, secularized his fief, which he transformed into a duchy for himself. Thereafter until 1701 this territory (i.e., East Prussia) was known as Ducal Prussia. When Albert’s son and successor, Albert Frederick, died sonless in 1618, the duchy passed to his eldest daughter’s husband, the Hohenzollern elector of Brandenburg, John Sigismund.
The union of Ducal Prussia with Brandenburg was fundamental to the rise of the Hohenzollern monarchy to the rank of a great power in Europe. John Sigismund’s grandson Frederick William of Brandenburg, the Great Elector (reigned 1640–88), obtained by military intervention in the Swedish-Polish War of 1655–60 and by diplomacy at the Peace of Oliva (1660) the ending of Poland’s suzerainty over Ducal Prussia. This made the Hohenzollerns sovereign over Ducal Prussia, whereas Brandenburg and their other German territories were still nominally parts of the Reich under the theoretical suzerainty of the Holy Roman emperor. Frederick William was also able to set up a centralized administration in Prussia and to wrest control of the duchy’s financial resources from the nobility.
The most significant achievement of the Great Elector’s son Frederick (reigned 1688–1713) was to secure the royal dignity for himself as Frederick I, king in Prussia, crowning himself at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) on January 18, 1701. Thereafter, the other Hohenzollern possessions, though theoretically remaining within the German Reich and under the ultimate overlordship of the Holy Roman emperor, soon came to be treated in practice rather as belonging to the Prussian kingdom than as distinct from it.
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Frederick I’s son Frederick William I began his reign in 1713 shortly before the conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht, which assigned to him not only the so-called Upper Quarter of Geldern on the Meuse River but also the principality of Neuchâtel and Valengin on the border of France and Switzerland. Through participation in the Second Northern War, he further acquired much of western Pomerania (1720).
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The creation of this Borussian myth (Borussia is the Latin name for Prussia) established Prussia as Germany's savior; it was the destiny of all Germans to be united, this myth maintains, and it was Prussia's destiny to accomplish this. [125]
According to this story, Prussia played the dominant role in bringing the German states together as a nation-state; only Prussia could protect German liberties from being crushed by French or Russian influence.
May 12, 2021 · Why did Prussia hold the seat of power in the new Bismarckian imperial state? Prussia was the single most dominant German power in the late nineteenth century – where has it gone? Read on to discover the history of Europe’s forgotten superpower: The Kingdom of Prussia.
Prussia—which lost part of Silesia, Posen, West Prussia, Danzig, Memel, northern Schleswig, some small areas on the Belgian frontier, and the Saar district as a result of the Treaty of Versailles or the ensuing plebiscites—became a Land under the Weimar Republic, with more-restricted powers than before and with little influence on the ...
1 day ago · After his death in 899, the German kingdom came under the nominal rule of the last Carolingian king of Francia Orientalis, his young son, Louis IV (Louis the Child), and in the absence of strong military leadership it became the prey of the Magyar horsemen and other invaders from the east.
