Frederick the Great

About this figure

Frederick the Great, Frederick II of Prussia (1712-1786), became one of the most formidable military and political figures of eighteenth-century Europe during his forty-six-year reign as King of Prussia. His early relationship with his domineering father, Frederick William I, was difficult; as a young man he attempted to flee the country with a close companion and was forced to watch the companion's execution as punishment, an episode that shaped him profoundly before he came to the throne in 1740. He soon put Prussia's disciplined army to use, seizing the wealthy province of Silesia from Austria in the War of the Austrian Succession, and successfully defending his gains through the far larger Seven Years' War (1756-1763), in which Prussia, with British support, held off a coalition of Austria, Russia, and France.

His campaigns established Prussia as a major European power and gave rise to his lasting reputation as a master of maneuver, speed, and the "oblique order" of attacking an enemy line at an angle to concentrate force against one flank. Frederick set down his military thinking in confidential writings for his officers, including the treatise known in English as "Military Instructions," which drew directly on the lessons of his own campaigns and was intended strictly for his commanders rather than publication. Away from the battlefield, Frederick cultivated an image as an Enlightenment monarch, corresponding for years with Voltaire, who lived at his court for a period in the 1750s before a bitter falling-out, and he himself wrote philosophy, history, and poetry, almost entirely in French, much of it collected in his posthumously published works. As king, he expanded religious toleration, reformed Prussian civil administration and law, and encouraged agricultural improvement and immigration to rebuild territories devastated by war. He died in 1786 without a surviving child, and was succeeded by his nephew, Frederick William II.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.