Frederick William, the Great Elector
The Great Elector inherited a scattered set of territories that the Thirty Years' War had marched across for twenty years, and in forty-eight years made them into the state that his grandson could call a kingdom and his great-great-grandson could use to fight Europe. He was born in 1620, spent his youth in the safety of Küstrin and then at Leiden, where he saw the Dutch republic work, and became Elector of Brandenburg in December 1640 at twenty with his lands occupied by Swedes and Imperialists, his army mutinous and his father's minister paid by Vienna. He made a truce with Sweden, disbanded the unreliable regiments and raised his own, and at Westphalia in 1648 came out with eastern Pomerania, Halberstadt, Minden and the reversion of Magdeburg, which he collected in 1680. The army was the point. He kept it standing after the peace, which nobody in the empire did, paid for it by a bargain with the Brandenburg estates in 1653 that gave him money and them serfdom, and used it in the Northern War to make both sides bid for him: Sweden at Labiau and Poland at Wehlau in 1657 released the Duchy of Prussia from Polish overlordship, so that he held it as a sovereign, which is what the kingdom of 1701 would be named for. When the estates of Königsberg objected he arrested their leader and let him die in a fortress. In June 1675, while the Swedes were in Brandenburg at France's request, he marched back from the Rhine in a fortnight and beat them at Fehrbellin, the first time a Brandenburg army had beaten a Swedish one, and the newspapers began calling him great; Louis XIV made him give Pomerania back anyway. The Edict of Potsdam of 1685 invited the Huguenots Louis had just expelled, and twenty thousand came with their trades and made a fifth of Berlin. He had a navy briefly, a fort on the Gold Coast and a canal from the Oder to the Spree. He died in April 1688, and the will that would have divided the lands among his sons was set aside by the eldest, who became King in Prussia.
- Lived: 1620 CE – 1688 CE
- Nationality: Prussian
- Roles: elector, monarch
