Protestant Prussia

The north German plain east of the Elbe, where a Protestant state was built on an aristocracy of estate owners. This was land colonised in the medieval Ostsiedlung and by the Teutonic Order, settled with German farmers on Slavic and Baltic ground, and organised into large estates east of the Elbe worked by peasants whose obligations hardened into serfdom just as western Europe's were loosening - the second serfdom, and the structural fact behind everything else. The Junker families who owned those estates supplied the officer corps and the civil service, and the bargain between them and the Hohenzollern crown is what made the Prussian state work: the nobility served, and kept its authority over the land. Lutheran and Calvinist confession, an early state school system, and a legal code that Frederick II promoted as enlightened absolutism completed it. Berlin grew from a modest town into a capital. The region's estates were expropriated in 1945 and its eastern half transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union, with the German population expelled. Prussia was formally abolished in 1947. Potsdam's palaces are a World Heritage site. The landscape is flat, sandy and lake-strewn. The historic region covered Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia. Berlin holds around 3.8 million people. Konigsberg, where Kant spent his life, is now Kaliningrad. The Elbe divided western and eastern land tenure so sharply that historians use it as a boundary. Much of the old territory is now Polish or Russian. Around twelve million Germans were expelled from those lands after 1945. Frederick II is buried at Sanssouci beside his dogs, as he asked.

• Existed: 1525 CE – present
• Type: Entity