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1660-88]

Cultivation and immigration

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In his western dominions, also, Frederick William had to maintain a strenuous struggle on behalf of the state unity towards which he was intent upon steadily advancing. After, in 1660 and 1661, he had obliged the Estates of Cleves and Mark to accept de facto his full sovereignty, it was formally acknowledged, together with that over Ravensberg, by the Treaty of Cleves (1666), concluded by him with Duke Philip William of Neuburg. In this they agreed to a permanent division between them of the long-contested Rhenish duchies; and Frederick William, according to his custom, at once set about a thorough reorganisation of the administrative system of his western possessions.

But, while he was thus establishing the authority of his dynasty and securing its continuance in both the eastern and the western portions of his dominions, he was naturally not less anxious to promote the prosperity of his electorate, and to reinvigorate it by the infusion of new elements of population. The awful scourge of the Thirty Years' War had left the naturally sterile soil of the Mark Brandenburg desolate, with a population sunk to 210,000 soulssomething between one-third and one-half of the earlier number of its inhabitants. Berlin was little better than the centre of a desert, through whose sands a traveller might plod by the hour without meeting either man or beast. The industry and trade of many parts at least of the country were practically extinct. Frederick William perceived that the primary and paramount need of the Mark was human life and labour; and, following alike the historical traditions of the territory, the lessons of his Dutch experience, and the inspiration of his deep-seated principles of religious tolerance, he engaged in a system of home colonisation which, as carried on by himself and his successors the first three Prussian Kings is almost without a parallel in modern history. It has been calculated that, at the close of a single century of immigration (1670–1770), not less than 600,000 persons or one-sixth of what had then come to be the total population of the Prussian monarchy- were immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Under the Great Elector, at all events, the foreign nationalities which contributed most largely to the formation of the "true-born Prussian" of later days-a type probably all the more vigorous and alert because of this intermixture were the Dutch and the French. The Dutch, of whose aptitude for colonisation Frederick William had learnt something both in his juvenile experiences and from the tastes of his first consort, taught the impoverished and disheartened inhabitants of the Mark how to drain their lands, to manage dairy-farms (Holländereien) and to cultivate potato-fields; and their example stimulated the Brandenburg Government to dig canals for the diffusion of trade and industry-in particular, the Frederick William Canal, which with the aid of Spree and Havel

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Industrial activity. Colonial policy [1647-88

connects Oder and Elbe. Of equal importance, as advancing the material prosperity of the Brandenburgers, and of incomparable significance for the future intellectual life of the nation, were the French newcomers; though the full tide of their immigration sets in at a date in the reign later than the interval of peace after Oliva. Some French families had, however, so early as 1660, laid the foundations of the long-lived French colony at Berlin, where from 1672 onwards it celebrated divine service in its own church and in its own tongue. But the great influx came, after, in the "Edict of Potsdam" (November 8, 1685), “a sure and free refuge in all the lands and provinces of our dominions" had been offered to all persecuted French Protestants. Every facility was afforded to make good the ample promise of this both generous and politic summons; and by 1687 the number of French immigrants in the Elector's dominions was reckoned at 20,000. To this response and its sequel the future Prussian monarchy owed many benefits: it gave a stimulus, both direct and indirect, to many of the skilled industries (of which the woollen manufacture was only one) in the Mark; it encouraged horticulture; it led to the quick rise into prominence of Berlin, among whose inhabitants (nearly tripled in numbers during the reign) were numbered many French religious ministers, doctors, and lawyers whose names were to survive in those of descendants celebrated in science and art; finally, it brought about a very notable infusion of soldiers and officers into the electoral army, five infantry regiments of which were largely composed of French refugees, while these were specially numerous in the artillery, and the corps of the Gardes Mousquetaires was entirely composed of gentlemen of French descent.

The general industrial and commercial activity of Brandenburg. Prussia under Frederick William's rule did not reach its height till his later years, to which also belong the attempts made by him to carry out a colonial policy. Before his accession the foreign trade of his electorate and duchy were in the hand of other States, chiefly in those of Hamburg, to which so large a share of the mercantile enterprise of the Hansa had descended. Frederick William, who from the first had turned his attention to the opportunities of maritime trade, had already in 1647 taken up the question of the establishment of a Brandenburg East India Company; and, three years later, he entered into negotiations with Denmark as to the purchase of a site for a Brandenburg colony on the coast of Coromandel. But the essential was wanting-namely, capital; nor was it till 1675, when (as will be seen) Sweden had declared war against Brandenburg, that the Elector began naval operations, by approving the equipment of privateers under the Brandenburg flag, who soon brought in many prizes. The venture was undertaken by Benjamin Raule, a Middelburg merchant, whose reckless spirit of enterprise had involved him in difficulties nearer

1675-1725]

The Brandenburg African Company

647 home and who had in consequence become a refugee at Berlin. In the following year Raule was nominated “Director-General of the Navy," and ordered to make ready for sea a flotilla which was to sail under the Brandenburg flag, and to be commanded by his brother Jacob. The Peace of St Germain (1679) put no stop on the speculative ambition of Raule; for (in spite of personal drawbacks against which he had to contend through nearly the whole of his life) he was in the following year placed at the head of an "Electoral Board of Trade and Admiralty," established at Königsberg; and his privateers did excellent execution against the Spaniards, gaining on October 10 the "victory of Saint Vincent" over a supposed silver fleet. In the same year two merchantmen sailed for Upper Guinea and Angola; and in 1682 the Brandenburg African Trading Company was in due course established at Königsberg. (Pillau in East Prussia had been originally intended to be the base of its operations; and when Brandenburg seemed likely to take permanent possession of the coveted coastland of East Frisia, there seemed a prospect of transferring the seat of the Company to Emden.) Under the protection of a fort erected on the Guinea coast, and named Grossfriedrichsburg, a not inconsiderable trade appears to have been set on foot. The collapse of the undertaking cannot be investigated here. It was due partly to the jealousy of the Dutch East African Company, partly to suspicions, which proved unfounded, as to the proceedings of Raule; and, above all, to the fact that, after the death of the Great Elector in 1688, no support of any kind was to be expected from Berlin. The successor of Frederick William had other ambitions to gratify, and other expenses to meet; although, so long as Danckelmann was at the head of affairs, Raule and his schemes were not entirely dropped. In West Africa, the garrison of Grossfriedrichsburg had died out, and very little was left of the settlement of which it was the centre, when the accession of Frederick William I, who had neither thought nor money to bestow on such secondary ends, sounded the knell of his grandsire's interesting colonial scheme. In 1717 the isolated fortress that remained as a token of it was sold to the Dutch; and eight years later the negro chief to whom it had been made over in trust by the last Prussian commander withdrew inland. The Brandenburg African Company, which had been taken up by the Great Elector, survived him for a very brief time. As for the Brandenburg-Prussian navy, organised by the ingenious and much misunderstood Raule, though, like the English privateers of Elizabeth's reign, it had served the purpose of irritating Spain, it came to an early end.

The attitude of Frederick William towards questions of religion possesses a significance beyond its connexion with his economic policy. The wide range of his intellectual and spiritual interests forms one of his most valid claims to the epithet of "Great." In him breadth of mind was

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coupled with a strong personal religiosity, and to both was united a constant reasonableness in action. His conception of the true relations between State and Church, and of the right of the individual to liberty of conscience, was the same as that which found so notable an expression in the treatise De habitu christianae religionis ad vitam civilem, dedicated to him in 1687 by Samuel Pufendorf, who was afterwards to commemorate the achievements of the Great Elector in a work acknowledged to be one of the classics of earlier German historiography. Nothing in the public life of Frederick William- no catch resulting from all his fishing in troubled waters," as it was called by Lisola, one of the most capable of contemporary diplomatists - redounded so much to Frederick William's enduring honour as his consistent adherence to the principle of religious toleration. With him this principle was by no means a deduction from the easy-going philosophy of indifference that had found a home at Heidelberg under Charles Lewis, and afterwards made its way from Hanover to Berlin. For this Frederick William still stood too near to the confessional conflicts of earlier generations. In 1662-3, he had actually arranged a religious disputation between Lutherans and Calvinists, which had proved as futile as many of its predecessors. Calixtus, whose wise teaching had probably inspired Frederick William's earlier efforts for a religious reconciliation, had striven in vain, as Leibniz was to labour at a later date; and Frederick William himself was to discover, what his successor and namesake ignored half a century afterwards, that a population has to be educated into reason. Its sympathy is usually on the side of the resisters; and the Great Elector is popularly remembered rather for his "expulsion," in 1666, of the bigoted Paul Gerhardt Germany's greatest hymn-writer since Luther-than for having cherished ideals to which that worthy was not, either before or after his return to Berlin, capable of rising. In Prussia, too, Frederick William's appointment of "syncretist" incumbents actually brought down upon him the threat of an appeal to his suzerain at Warsaw.

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It would, at the same time, be an error to suppose that Frederick William's religious tolerance rendered him well-disposed towards Rome. On one occasion, Louis XIV enquired whether it was the Elector's intention to pose as the Protector of the Protestants before the eyes of Europe; and, almost with his dying breath, Frederick William enjoined upon one of the Princesses of his House the duty of remaining true to the Protestant religion in which she had been nurtured. But he had never been a fanatic either abroad or at home. In his earlier days, the Elector had turned a deaf ear to Oliver Cromwell's invitation, suggesting that he should place himself at the head of a kind of Protestant crusade. In his own dominions, he tolerated Arians, Socinians and Mennonites, and readmitted the Jews to Brandenburg, whence they had been excluded for more than a century. He frankly carried out the principle of a preference for Protestantism, but tolerated

1660-72]

Years of peace and preparation

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Catholics, allowing them where necessary (as in Cleves) equality of rights, and even here and there opportunity for a little persecution. Brandenburg and Prussia were, as in his will of 1667 he "thanked God" that they remained, wholly free from popish abuses; so that it was not till the end of his reign that Jesuit influence in schools was directly prohibited. Still, speaking broadly, even Catholicism was in the main treated throughout his dominions on the basis of liberty of conscience, and of the admissibility to public offices of adherents of all creeds. It may thus be asserted that Brandenburg-Prussia was, during the period of the Great Elector's reign, the only country in Europe which upheld the principle of religious toleration-except the United Provinces, where it was honoured in name rather than in fact.

During the twelve years of peace (1660-72), so sorely needed for the advancement of prosperity in his own dominions, Frederick William vigilantly observed the course of events outside. In other words, he followed every turn in the aggressive policy of France, the Power which dominated contemporary European politics, and shaped his own conduct accordingly. In 1665 he mustered in his Rhenish lands a force of 18,000 men; on the strength of which, besides asserting, in the following year, the recognition of the permanence of his authority there, he induced the enterprising Bishop of Münster to desist from an armed inroad into the United Provinces, which would have given Louis XIV an opportunity of intervention on their behalf. The warlike prelate accepted the mediation proffered by the Elector; and any French interference in the dispute was thus rendered superfluous.

With England in particular, Frederick's relations were throughout friendly; and, in truth, the interests of the two Powers were continually making for a co-operation between them. Though the English Government had declined to guarantee the Peace of Oliva, it concluded, so early as July, 1661, a defensive alliance with Brandenburg, accompanied by a commercial treaty, which opened a long and varied series of political combinations between the two Powers. But, although there was so much to bring and keep them together, each had to deal, according to its own immediate point of view, with the situations successively created by the dominant action of Louis XIV. The records of the personal experience of Count Otto von Schwerin "the younger," who held the post of plenipotentiary at the Court of St James' from 1674 to 1678, illustrate this relation in a period of only less critical importance than that which had preceded it for the affairs of Europe at large.

In the War of Devolution (1667-8), which laid bare the ulterior as well as the immediate purposes of the policy of France, Frederick William remained neutral-actuated perhaps chiefly by jealousy of Sweden, with whom he declined to associate himself in forming what would thus have become a "Quadruple " instead of a "Triple Alliance " with England and the United Provinces, but probably also moved

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