Kingdom of Prussia

A state assembled out of scattered, indefensible territory that made itself the strongest power in Germany and then dissolved into the country it had created. Its origin is a duchy the Teutonic Knights had conquered on the Baltic, secularised in 1525 when the grand master converted to Lutheranism and made himself duke. Inheritance joined it to Brandenburg in 1618, producing a realm in three disconnected pieces across the north German plain with no natural frontier anywhere - which is the standard explanation for the army it built. The Great Elector created a standing force and a centralised tax administration to pay for it; Frederick William I raised it to a size wholly out of proportion to the population and ran a famously austere court; and Frederick the Great used it in 1740 to seize Silesia from Austria and then held it through the Seven Years War against three great powers, surviving partly by luck when Russia changed sides on the death of its empress. Collapse at Jena in 1806 produced reforms - serfdom abolished, the army reorganised, the University of Berlin founded - that made the recovery possible. Bismarck's three wars between 1864 and 1871 unified Germany under Prussian leadership, and the kingdom's institutions became the empire's. The monarchy ended in 1918 and the Allies formally abolished the state in 1947. Its historic core is now divided between Poland, Russia and Germany. Berlin was the capital from 1618 and Konigsberg before it. The kingdom covered around three hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres by 1871. Its general staff was copied by every major army. Konigsberg is now Kaliningrad. The 1947 Allied law abolishing the state called it a bearer of militarism and reaction. Prussian blue, the pigment, was first made in Berlin around 1706.

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