Absolutist Prussia, Austria and Russia
Overview
Absolutist Prussia
Absolutism, in which a monarch holds unrestrained power, spread throughout Europe during the eighteenth century. Examples of absolutist governments include Austria under the Hapsburgs, Prussia under the Hohenzollerns, and Russia under Peter I and his Romanov successors.
Learning Objectives
Identify and connect major political events, characters, and turning points in Absolutist Prussia.
Evaluate the domestic and foreign affairs of Frederick the Great
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Frederick the Great: skilled Prussian King who introduced numerous, successful internal reforms and successfully defeated the Austrians in the war of Austrian Succession
Prussia: major, north German kingdom in the eighteenth century
Junkers: landholding, Prussian aristocrats who held significant power in the eighteenth century
Modernization of Prussia: set of internal, domestic reforms introduced under Frederick the Great
Absolutism in Prussia: Frederick the Great
In his youth, Frederick the Great was a sensitive man with tremendous appreciation for intellectual development, arts, and education. Despite his father’s fears, this did not prevent him from becoming a brilliant military strategist during his later reign as King of Prussia.
Frederick the Great’s Childhood
Frederick II, the son of Frederick William I and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, was born in Berlin in 1712. His birth was particularly welcomed by his grandfather as his two previous grandsons both died in infancy. With the death of Frederick I in 1713, Frederick William became King of Prussia, thus making young Frederick the crown prince.
Despite his father’s desire that his education be entirely religious and pragmatic, the young Frederick, with the help of his tutor Jacques Duhan, secretly procured a 3,000-volume library of poetry, Greek and Roman classics, and French philosophy to supplement his official lessons. As Frederick grew, his preference for music, literature, and French culture clashed with his father’s militarism, resulting in frequent beatings and humiliation from his father.
Frederick as Crown Prince
Frederick found an ally in his sister Wilhelmine, with whom he remained close for life. At age 16, he formed an attachment to the king’s 13-year-old page, Peter Karl Christoph Keith. Some biographers of Frederick, suggest that the attachment was of a sexual nature. As a result, Keith was sent away to an unpopular regiment near the Dutch frontier, while Frederick was temporarily sent to his father’s hunting lodge in order “to repent of his sin.” Around the same time, he became close friends with Hans Hermann von Katte.
When he was 18, Frederick plotted to flee to England with Katte and other junior army officers. Frederick and Katte were subsequently arrested and imprisoned. Because they were army officers who had tried to flee Prussia for Great Britain, Frederick William leveled an accusation of treason against the pair. The king briefly threatened the crown prince with the death penalty, then considered forcing Frederick to renounce the succession in favor of his brother, Augustus William, although either option would have been difficult to justify. Instead, the king forced Frederick to watch the decapitation of Katte at Küstrin, leaving the crown prince to faint right before the fatal blow was struck.
Frederick was granted a royal pardon and released from his cell, although he remained stripped of his military rank. Instead of returning to Berlin, he was forced to remain in Küstrin and began rigorous schooling in statecraft and administration. Tensions eased slightly when Frederick William visited Küstrin a year later and when Frederick was allowed to visit Berlin on the occasion of his sister Wilhelmine’s marriage to Margrave Frederick of Bayreuth in 1731. The crown prince returned to Berlin a year later.
Frederick eventually married Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern in 1733. She was a Protestant relative of the Austrian Habsburgs. He had little in common with his bride and resented the political marriage. Once Frederick secured the throne in 1740 after his father’s death, he immediately separated from his wife and prevented Elisabeth from visiting his court in Potsdam, granting her instead Schönhausen Palace and apartments at the Berliner Stadtschloss. In later years, Frederick would pay his wife formal visits only once a year.
Frederick came to the throne with an exceptional inheritance: an army of 80,000 men. By 1770, after two decades of punishing war alternating with intervals of peace, Frederick doubled the size of the huge army, which during his reign would consume 86% of the state budget.
Frederick Becomes Leader
Prince Frederick was twenty-eight years old when he acceded to the throne of Prussia. His goal was to modernize and unite his vulnerably disconnected lands, and he largely succeeded through aggressive military and foreign policies. Contrary to his father’s fears, Frederick proved himself a courageous colonel of the army and an extremely skillful strategist. Napoleon Bonaparte considered the Prussian king as the greatest tactical genius of all time. After the Seven Years’ War, the Prussian military acquired a formidable reputation across Europe. Esteemed for their efficiency and success in battle, Frederick’s army became a model emulated by other European powers, most notably Russia and France. Frederick was also an influential military theorist whose ideas emerged from his extensive personal battlefield experience and covered issues of strategy, tactics, mobility and logistics. Despite his dazzling success as a military commander, however, Frederick was not a fan of warfare.
Prussia under Frederick the Great
Frederick the Great significantly modernized the Prussian economy, administration, judicial system, education, finance, and agriculture, but never attempted to change the social order based on the dominance of the landed nobility.
The Modernization of Prussia
As King of Prussia from 1740 until 1786, Frederick the Great helped transform Prussia from a European backwater to an economically strong and politically reformed state. During his reign, the effects of the Seven Years’ War and the gaining of Silesia greatly changed the economy. The conquest of Silesia gave Prussia’s industries access to raw materials and fertile agricultural lands. With the help of French experts, he organized a system of indirect taxation, which provided the state with more revenue than direct taxation. He also promoted the silk trade and opened a silk factory that employed 1,500 people. He protected Prussian industries with high tariffs and minimal restrictions on domestic trade. In 1781, Frederick decided to make coffee a royal monopoly. Disabled soldiers were employed to spy on citizens searching for illegally roasted coffee, much to the annoyance of the general population.
Frederick reformed the judicial system and made it possible for men outside the nobility to become judges and senior bureaucrats. He also allowed freedom of speech, the press, and literature, and abolished most uses of judicial torture.
Frederick laid the basic foundations of what would eventually become the Prussian primary education system. In 1763, he issued a decree for the first Prussian general school based on the principles developed by Johann Julius Hecker. In 1748, Hecker had founded the first teacher’s seminary in Prussia. The decree expanded the existing schooling system significantly and required that all young citizens, both girls, and boys, be educated from the age of five to thirteen or fourteen. Prussia was among the first countries in the world to introduce tax-funded and compulsory primary education.
An important aspect of Frederick’s efforts is the absence of social order reform. In his modernization of military and administration, he relied on the class of Junkers, the Prussian land-owning nobility. Under his rule, they continued to hold their privileges, including the right to hold serfs. Frederick’s attempts to protect the peasantry from cruel treatment and oppression by landlords and lower their labor obligations never really succeeded because of the economic, political, and military influence the Junkers exercised. The Junkers controlled the Prussian army, leading in political influence and social status, and owned immense estates, especially in the northeastern half of Germany.
Agriculture
Frederick was keenly interested in land use, especially draining swamps and opening new farmland for colonizers who would increase the kingdom’s food supply. He called it “peopling Prussia.” About a thousand new villages were founded in his reign that attracted 300,000 immigrants from outside Prussia. Using improved technology enabled him to create new farmland through a massive drainage program in the country’s marshland. This strategy created roughly 150,000 acres of new farmland, but also eliminated vast swaths of natural habitat, destroyed the region’s biodiversity, and displaced numerous native plant and animal communities. Frederick saw this project as the “taming” and “conquering” of nature, which he regarded as “useless” and “barbarous” in its wild form. He presided over the construction of canals for bringing crops to market and introduced new crops, especially potato and turnip, to the country. Control of grain prices was one of Frederick’s greatest achievements in that it allowed populations to survive in areas where harvests were poor. Frederick also loved animals and founded the first veterinary school in Germany. Unusual for his time and aristocratic background, he criticized hunting as cruel, rough, and uneducated.
Religious Policies
While Frederick was largely non-practicing and tolerated all faiths in his realm, Protestantism became the favored religion, and Catholics were not chosen for higher state positions. Frederick was known to be more tolerant of Jews and Catholics than many neighboring German states, although he expressed strong antisemitic sentiments and, in territories taken over from Poland, persecuted Polish Roman Catholic churches by confiscating goods and property, exercising strict control of churches, and interfering in church administration. Like many leading figures in the Age of Enlightenment, Frederick was a Freemason, and his membership legitimized the group and protected it against charges of subversion.
As Frederick made more wasteland arable, Prussia looked for new colonists to settle the land. To encourage immigration, he repeatedly emphasized that nationality and religion were of no concern to him. This policy allowed Prussia’s population to recover very quickly from the considerable losses it suffered during Frederick’s wars.
The Death of Frederick the Great
Frederick’s popularity continued in Prussia into the late eighteenth century. However, the King who had transformed Prussia gradually became more isolated and solitary. In August 1786, he died at home in Potsdam, at the age of seventy-two.
Absolutist Austria
The Holy Roman Empire was a multi-ethnic collection of territories in Central Europe that developed during the Early Middle Ages and continued until its dissolution in 1806. The term Holy Roman Empire was not used until the 13th century. As French philosopher and satirist, Voltaire, famously wrote of the entity in the eighteenth century, “The Holy Roman Empire was neither ‘Holy’, nor ‘Roman’, nor an ‘Empire’.”
Learning Objectives
- Evaluate the role of the Holy Roman Empire in the War of Austrian Succession.
- Investigate the foreign and domestic achievements of Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Joseph II.
- Understand how Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire, constitute an absolutist society
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Holy Roman Empire: landlocked empire in central Europe occupying present-day southeastern Germany, Austria, western Poland, northern Italy, and Holland
Austria: German-speaking, core kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire
Hapsburgs: ruling family dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire
Empress Maria Theresa: only female to ever hold the title, “Holy Roman Empress” who is remembered for her progressive reforms
War of Austrian Succession: series of wars sparked by succession crisis in the Holy Roman Empire
Emperor Joseph II: son of Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Emperor remembered as one of Europe’s best monarchs because of his progressive reforms
Enlightened Despotism: Set of practices carried out by autocratic/despotic European monarchs who were influenced by the progressive reforms of the Enlightenment
Josephism: set of practices/policies implemented by Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II
Edict of Tolerance: decree under Joseph II that granted religious toleration in the Holy Roman Empire to Lutherans, Calvinists, Orthodox Serbs, and ultimately, Jews
The Holy Roman Empire
Traditionally, the office of Holy Roman Emperor was elective, although frequently controlled by dynasties, such as the Hapsburgs of Austria. The German prince-electors, the highest-ranking noblemen of the empire, usually elected one of their peers to be the emperor and he would later be crowned by the Pope. In time, the empire evolved into a decentralized, limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of sub-units, principalities, duchies, counties, free imperial cities, and other domains. The power of the emperor was limited and while the various princes, lords, bishops and cities of the empire were vassals who owed the emperor their allegiance, they also possessed an extent of privileges that gave them de facto independence within their territories.
The Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire
The Habsburgs held the title of Holy Roman Emperor between 1438 and 1740 and again from 1745 to 1806. Although one family held the title for centuries, the Holy Roman Emperor was elected and the position never became hereditary. This contrasted with the power that the Habsburgs held over territories under their rule, which did not overlap with the Holy Roman Empire. From the 16th century until the formal establishment of the Austrian Empire in 1804, those lands were unofficially called the Habsburg or Austrian Monarchy. They changed over the centuries, but the core always consisted of the Hereditary Lands (most of the modern states of Austria and Slovenia, as well as territories in northeastern Italy and southwestern Germany); the Lands of the Bohemian Crown; and the Kingdom of Hungary. Many other lands were also under Habsburg rule at one time or another.
Empress Maria Theresa
Maria Theresa was the only female to bear the title, "Holy Roman Empress," and also to wield the political power associated with that position. Law at the time forbade the ascension of women to the throne. Although technically a co-regent (along with her husband, Francis Stephen) of the Holy Roman Empire, Maria Theresa privately retained the power of her house. A supreme autocrat in charge of all decision-making regarding domestic and foreign affairs. She is widely remembered for her sweeping internal reforms in religion, education, and public health; and her role in the War of Austrian Succession.
The War of Austrian Succession
Frederick the Great’s 1740 invasion of resource-rich and strategically located Silesia, marked the onset of the War of Austrian Succession and aimed to unify the disconnected lands under Frederick’s rule.
Background
In 1740, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI died. His daughter, Maria Theresa, succeeded him as ruler of the Hapsburg lands. She was not, however, a candidate for the title of Holy Roman Emperor, which had never been held by a woman. The plan was for her to succeed to the hereditary lands and her husband, Francis Stephen, would be elected Holy Roman Emperor.
Also in 1740, Frederick the Great became King of Prussia. As such, a fight between the monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire and Prussia was imminent. Frederick was to rule Brandenburg because Prussia and Brandenburg, a kingdom in northern Germany, had maintained close connections since the early 17th century. But legally, Brandenburg was still part of the Holy Roman Empire.
The War Consumes Europe
Hoping to unify his disconnected lands and secure the prosperous, resource-rich, Austrian province of Silesia, Frederick disputed the succession of Maria Theresa. Instead, he made his own claim on Silesia. The War of Austrian Succession began on December 16, 1740, when Frederick invaded and quickly occupied Silesia.
The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) escalated and eventually involved most of the powers of Europe. Frederick the Great's repeated victories on the battlefields of Bohemia and Silesia forced his enemies to seek peace terms. Under the terms of the Treaty of Dresden, signed in December 1745, Austria gave Silesia to Prussia. In exchange, Frederick recognized Maria Theresa’s husband/consort—Francis I—as the Holy Roman Emperor. Maria Theresa officially gained the title of "Holy Roman Empress" by being married to her husband, the emperor. Despite being the "emperor's wife," the real power of the monarchy was held by Maria-Theresa. She remained responsible for all decisions, spoke with court advisors, and determined royal decrees.
Maria Theresa's Domestic Reforms
Religion
Maria Theresa was a devout Roman Catholic. Consequently, she explicitly rejected the idea of religious toleration but never allowed the Church to interfere with what she considered to be the prerogatives of a monarch. She controlled the selection of religious officials within the Holy Roman Empire. The empress supported conversion to Roman Catholicism. She tolerated Greek Catholics and emphasized their equal status with Roman Catholics. Convinced by her advisors that the Jesuits posed a danger to her monarchical authority, she hesitantly issued a decree that removed them from all the institutions of the monarchy. Though she eventually gave up trying to convert her non-Catholic subjects to Roman Catholicism, Maria Theresa regarded both the Jews and Protestants as dangerous to the state and actively tried to suppress them. The empress was arguably the most anti-Semitic monarch of her time yet like many of her contemporaries, she supported Jewish commercial and industrial activity.
Administrative and State Reforms
Maria Theresa implemented significant reforms to strengthen Austria’s military and bureaucratic efficiency. She employed Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz, who modernized the empire by creating a standing army of 108,000 men. Under Haugwitz, she centralized administration with permanent civil service. She also oversaw the unification of the Austrian and Bohemian chancelleries in May 1749 and doubled the state revenue between 1754 and 1764. These financial reforms greatly improved the economy.
In 1760, Maria Theresa created the council of state, which served as a committee of experienced people who advised her. The council lacked executive or legislative authority but nevertheless was distinguishable from the form of government employed by Frederick II of Prussia. Unlike the latter, Maria Theresa was not an autocrat who acted as her own minister.
Public Health
Maria Theresa invested in reforms that advanced public health. She recruited Gerard van Swieten, who founded the Vienna General Hospital, revamped Austria’s educational system, and served as the Empress’s personal physician. After calling in van Swieten, Maria Theresa asked him to study the problem of infant mortality in Austria. Following his recommendation, she made a decree that autopsies would be mandatory for all hospital deaths in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city. This law – still in effect today – combined with the relatively stable population of Graz, resulted in one of the most important and complete autopsy records in the world. Maria Theresa banned the creation of new burial grounds without prior government permission, thus countering wasteful and unhygienic burial customs. Her decision to have her children inoculated after the smallpox epidemic of 1767 was responsible for changing Austrian physicians’ negative view of inoculation.
Education
Aware of the inadequacy of bureaucracy in Austria, Maria Theresa reformed education in 1775. In a new school system, all children of both genders had to attend school between ages six and twelve. Education reform was met with much hostility. Maria Theresa crushed the dissent by ordering the arrest of those who opposed. The reforms, however, were not as successful as expected since no funding was offered from the state, education in most schools remained substandard, and in many parts of the empire forcing parents to send their children to school was ineffective.
The empress permitted non-Catholics to attend university and allowed the introduction of secular subjects such as law, which influenced the decline of theology as the main foundation of university education. Educational reform also included that of Vienna University by Swieten from 1749, the founding of the Theresianum (1746) as a civil service academy, and other new military and foreign service academies.
Maria Theresa's Later Years
Maria Theresa was devastated by her husband’s death in 1765. She abandoned all ornamentation, had her hair cut short, painted her rooms black, and dressed in mourning for the rest of her life. She completely withdrew from court life, public events, and theater. She described her state of mind shortly after Francis’s death: “I hardly know myself now, for I have become like an animal with no true life or reasoning power.” Following Francis' death, their eldest son, Joseph, became Holy Roman Emperor.
A New Light for the Hapsburgs: Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II
As a proponent of enlightened despotism, Joseph II introduced a series of reforms that affected nearly every realm of life in his empire; however, his commitment to modernization caused significant opposition to his plans, which eventually led to a failure to fully implement his programs.
Rise of Joseph II
Joseph II was Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 to 1790. He was the eldest son of Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis I. As women were never elected to be Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph took the title after his father’s death in 1765 yet it was his mother who remained the ruler of the Habsburg lands. However, Maria Theresa, devastated after her husband’s death and always relying on the help of advisors, declared Joseph to be her new co-ruler the same year. From then on, mother and son had frequent ideological disagreements. Joseph often threatened to resign as co-regent and emperor. When Maria Theresa died in 1780, Joseph became the absolute ruler over the most extensive realm of Central Europe.
Joseph, deeply interested in the ideals of the Enlightenment, was always positive that the rule of reason would produce the best possible results in the shortest time. He issued 6,000 edicts in all and 11,000 new laws designed to regulate and reorder every aspect of the empire. He intended to improve his subjects’ lives but strictly in accordance with his own criteria. This made him one of the most committed enlightened despots.
Josephism
Josephism, as his policies were called, is notable for the very wide range of reforms designed to modernize the creaky empire in an era when France and Prussia were rapidly advancing. However, it elicited grudging compliance at best and more often vehement opposition from all sectors in every part of his empire. Joseph set about building a rational, centralized, and uniform government for his diverse lands but with himself as supreme autocrat. No parliament existed to challenge his policies. He expected government servants to all be dedicated agents of Josephism and selected them without favor for class or ethnic origins. Promotion was solely by merit. To impose uniformity, he made German the compulsory language of official business throughout the Empire.
Tax and Land Reform
In 1781, Joseph issued the Serfdom Patent, which aimed to abolish aspects of the traditional serfdom system and to establish basic civil liberties for the serfs. The Patent granted the serfs some legal rights in the Habsburg monarchy, but it did not affect the financial dues and the unpaid labor that the serfs legally owed to their landlords. In practice, it did not abolish serfdom; rather, it expanded selected rights of serfs.
Joseph II recognized the importance of further reforms, continually attempting to destroy the economic subjugation through related laws, such as his Tax Decree of 1789. This new law would have finally realized Emperor Joseph II’s ambition to modernize Habsburg society, allowing for the end of corvée and the beginning of lesser tax obligations. Despite the attempts to improve the fate of the peasantry, Joseph’s land reforms met with the resistance of the landed nobility. Serfdom was not abolished in the Empire until 1848.
Joseph inspired a complete reform of the legal system, abolished brutal punishments and the death penalty in most instances, and imposed the principle of complete equality of treatment for all offenders. He also ended censorship of the press and theater.
Public Health and Education
Joseph continued education and public health reforms initiated by his mother. To produce a literate citizenry, elementary education was made compulsory for all boys and girls and higher education on practical lines was offered for a select few. Joseph created scholarships for talented poor students and allowed the establishment of schools for Jews and other religious minorities. In 1784, he ordered that the country change its language of instruction from Latin to German, a highly controversial step in a multilingual empire.
By the eighteenth century, centralization was the trend in medicine because more and better-educated doctors were requesting improved facilities. Cities lacked the budgets to fund local hospitals and the monarchy wanted to end costly epidemics and quarantines. Joseph attempted to centralize medical care in Vienna through the construction of a single, large hospital, the famous Allgemeines Krankenhaus, which opened in 1784. Centralization worsened sanitation problems causing epidemics and a 20% death rate in the new hospital. However, the city became preeminent in the medical field in the next century.
Religion
The most unpopular of all his reforms was his attempt to modernize the highly traditional Catholic Church. Clergymen were deprived of the tithe and ordered to study in seminaries under government supervision, while bishops had to take a formal oath of loyalty to the crown. As a man of the Enlightenment, Joseph ridiculed the rigid church orders. He suppressed a third of the monasteries (over 700 were closed) and reduced the number of monks and nuns from 65,000 to 27,000. Marriage was defined as a civil contract outside the jurisdiction of the Church. Joseph also sharply cut the number of holy days to be observed in the Empire and forcibly simplified the way the Mass was celebrated. Opponents of the reforms insisted they revealed Protestant tendencies, along with the rise of Enlightenment rationalism and the emergence of a liberal class of bourgeois officials.
Joseph’s enlightened despotism also included the Patent of Toleration in 1781 and the Edict of Tolerance in 1782. The Patent granted religious freedom to the Lutherans, Calvinists, and Serbian Orthodox, but it wasn’t until the 1782 Edict of Tolerance that Joseph II extended religious freedom to the Jewish population. Providing the Jewish subjects of the Empire with the right to practice their religion came with the assumption that the freedom would gradually force Jewish men and women into the mainstream German culture. While it allowed Jewish children to attend schools and universities, adults to engage in jobs from which there had been excluded, and all Jewish men and women not to wear gold stars that marked their identity, it also stipulated that the Jewish languages—the written language Hebrew and the spoken language Yiddish—were to be replaced by the national language of the country. Official documents and school textbooks could not be printed in Hebrew.
Absolutist Russia
Absolutist Russia is characterized by the reign of Peter I (Peter the Great). Peter's years as tsar were marked by power struggles, Peter’s European travels, sweeping domestic reform, and territorial expansion.
Learning Objectives
- Identify the major domestic reforms introduced by Peter I of Russia
- Evaluate how Russia was an absolutist society
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Peter I (Peter the Great): Romanov tsar of Russia who introduced significant internal reforms during the eighteenth century
Romanov: Imperial family of Russia from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries
Tsar: the Russian emperor
Westernization of Russia: Peter the Great’s internal reforms that sought to turn Russia into a country socially and military akin to those in Western Europe
Boyars: Russian nobles
Serfs: Russian peasantry who were forced to work (primarily in agriculture) on estates of the boyars
beard-tax: tax implemented by Peter I in which men who wore long beards had to pay a tax as part of Peter's westernization of Russia
Great Northern War: war between Russia and its allies; and Sweden that established Russia as a dominant naval power in Eastern Europe
Eastern Orthodox Church: branch of Christianity separate from Catholicism that is traditionally practiced in Eastern Europe, including Greece and Russia
Holy Synod: governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church under Peter I that blended secular and clerical committee members
Saint Petersburg: Russian capital city located on the Baltic Sea founded by Peter the Great
Russia under Peter I
Background
Tsar Peter I (Peter the Great) was a member of the Romanov family who ruled Russia and later the Russian Empire from 1682 until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his elder half-brother, Ivan V. The Romanovs took over Russia in 1613, and the first decades of their reign were marked by attempts to restore peace, both internally and with Russia’s rivals, most notably Poland and Sweden.
To avoid more civil war, the Boyars cooperated with the first Romanovs, enabling them to finish the work of bureaucratic centralization. Thus, the state required service from both the old and the new nobility; primarily in the military. In return, the tsars allowed the boyars to enserf the peasants. With the state now fully sanctioning forced labor on the noble's estates, serf rebellions were rampant.
Peter the Great’s Childhood
From an early age, Peter’s education was put in the hands of several tutors. In 1676, Peter’s father Tsar Alexis died, leaving the throne to Peter’s elder half-brother Feodor III. Throughout this period, the government was largely run by Artamon Matveev—an enlightened friend of Alexis, one of Peter’s greatest childhood benefactors. This changed when Feodor died without an heir in 1682. A dispute immediately arose between the Miloslavsky family and the Naryshkin family over who should inherit the throne. Peter’s other half-brother, Ivan V, was next in line for the throne, but he was chronically ill. Consequently, the Russian council (Duma) chose 10-year-old Peter to become tsar, with his mother as regent.
Taking Power
While Peter was not particularly concerned that others ruled in his name, his mother sought to force him to adopt a more conventional approach. She arranged his marriage to Eudoxia Lopukhina in 1689, but the marriage was a failure. Ten years later Peter forced his wife to become a nun and thus freed himself from the union.
By the summer of 1689, Peter planned to take power from his half-sister Sophia, whose position had been weakened by two unsuccessful Crimean campaigns. After a power struggle, Sophia was eventually overthrown, with Peter I and Ivan V continuing to act as co-tsars. Still, Peter was not able to acquire actual control over Russian affairs. When Nataliya died in 1694 Peter became an independent ruler, and, after his brother Ivan’s death in 1696, the sole ruler.
Early Reign and the "Westernization of Russia."
Peter implemented sweeping reforms designed to modernize Russia in ways that modeled Western Europe's social and military structures. His advisors--largely from Western Europe--argued that Russia lagged two hundred years behind the rest of Europe in terms of its societal development. This argument proved quintessential to Peter. He refused to accept Russia's status as a large but backward and underdeveloped country.
Peter Restructures the Russian Military
Background
One of the primary threats to the Russian Empire was the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey). Peter knew that Russia could not face the Ottoman Empire alone. In 1697 he traveled Europe. Keeping the tsar's journey a secret was essential for his protection but also challenging. The black-haired, athletic tsar stood nearly seven feet tall and always traveled with an entourage of a few hundred servants and advisors. Equally identifying was Peter's volatile, but passionate temperament which he inflamed by indulging in alcohol. Still, the tsar embarked incognito on an eighteen-month journey with a large Russian delegation to seek the aid of the European monarchs. However, the mission failed, as Europe was at the time preoccupied with the question of the Spanish succession. Peter’s visit was cut short in 1698 when he was forced to rush home because of an internal rebellion. The rebellion was easily crushed, and Peter acted ruthlessly towards the mutineers. Over 1,200 of the rebels were tortured and executed, and Peter ordered that their bodies be publicly exhibited as a warning to future conspirators.
Although Peter’s delegation failed to complete its political mission of creating an anti-Ottoman alliance, Peter continued the European trip, learning about life in Western Europe. He learned the shipbuilding craft in Holland in 1697. While visiting the Netherlands, he studied shipbuilding and visited families of art and coin collectors. From Dutch experts, craftsmen, and artists, Peter learned how to draw teeth, catch butterflies, and paint seascapes. In England, he also engaged in painting and navy-related activities. He visited Manchester in order to learn the techniques of city building that he would later use to great effect at Saint Petersburg. Furthermore, in 1698 Peter sent a delegation to Malta to observe the training and abilities of the Knights of Malta and their fleet.
Peter Restructures the Russian Military
In 1699, Peter prioritized restructuring the Russian military. Whereas it had previously been disorganized, small, and poorly trained, Peter transformed it. Having born witness to, and heard of Western armies from his advisors, Peter dramatically increased its size by creating a standing army of over 130,000 soldiers. When recruits could not be found, Peter drafted serfs. Each of the new soldiers received uniform training and severe discipline, thereby creating strong camaraderie and strength among the units. Additionally, he created two separate, elite units. The result was a large and strong Russian army that was on par with its western counterparts.
Similarly, Russia had no navy before Peter I. Inspired by his visit to England where he had studied the English navy, Peter sought to develop Russian naval power. In 1703, the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet was founded and later expanded. Naval schools were established where sailors were taught navigation, astronomy, and mathematics, as well as military tactics. By the end of Peter's reign, roughly 30,000 sailors were in the Russian navy.
Peter the Great’s Foreign Policies
Great Northern War
Between 1560 and 1658, Sweden created a Baltic empire centered on the Gulf of Finland. Peter I wanted to re-establish a Baltic presence by regaining access to the territories that Russia had lost to Sweden in the first decades of the seventeenth century.
In 1700, Peter, supported by his Danish and Norweigian allies, declared war on Sweden. Sweden parried the Danish and Russian attacks. Charles XII moved from Saxony into Russia to confront Peter, but the campaign ended with the destruction of the main Swedish army at the decisive 1709 Battle of Poltava. The last city, the Swedish-held city, Riga (present-day Latvia) fell to the Russians in 1710. Sweden proper was invaded from the west by Denmark and Norway and from the east by Russia, which had occupied Finland by 1714. The Danish forces were defeated. Swedish king Charles XII opened up a Norwegian front, but he was killed in 1718.
The war ended with Sweden’s defeat, leaving Russia as the new dominant power in the Baltic region and a major force in European politics. The formal conclusion of the war was marked by the Swedish–Hanoverian and Swedish–Prussian Treaties of Stockholm and the Russo–Swedish Treaty of Nystad. In all of them, Sweden ceded some territories to its opponents. As a result, Russia gained vast Baltic territories and became one of the greatest powers in Europe.
Peter's Domestic Reforms
Background
By the time Peter the Great became tsar, Russia was the largest country in the world, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Much of Russia’s expansion had taken place in the seventeenth century, culminating in the first Russian settlement of the Pacific in the mid-seventeenth century. However, most of the land was unoccupied, travel was slow, and most of the fourteen million citizens were farmers. Russian agriculture, with its short growing season, was ineffective and lagged behind that of Western Europe. And Russia remained isolated from the sea trade, and its internal trade communications and many manufactures were dependent on the seasonal changes.
Peter Implements Change at Home
Peter I was a strong reformer who implemented modernized Russia in many ways, but he was also a ruthless autocrat. His visits to the West impressed upon him the notion that European customs were superior to Russian traditions. Unlike most of his predecessors and successors, he attempted to follow Western European traditions, fashions, and tastes. He also sought to end arranged marriages, which were the norm among the Russian nobility, because he thought such a practice was barbaric and led to domestic violence.
He forced social modernization at home by introducing French and western dress to his court. Courtiers, state officials, and the members of the military were now forced to shave their beards, abandon traditional Russian clothing, and wear western European clothing styles. To achieve this goal, Peter introduced taxes on long beards and traditional Russian robes in September 1698.
The beard-tax incited the boyars who had worn robes and long beards for centuries. For Peter, their outrage was a victory. He saw the boyars as outdated, irrelevant, and an internal threat to his reign. They opposed westernization and promoted Russian traditionalism. Reducing their influence became a central goal for Peter. He introduced numerous taxes that directly targeted the boyars and required numerous services of them.
Finance
Peter’s government was constantly in dire need of money. At first, it responded by monopolizing highly-valuable industries, such as salt, vodka, oak, and tar. Peter also taxed many Russian cultural customs and issued tax stamps for paper goods. However, with each new tax came new loopholes and new ways to avoid them, and so it became clear that tax reform was simply not enough.
The solution was a sweeping new poll tax, which replaced a household tax on cultivated land. Now, each peasant was assessed individually for a tax paid in cash. This new tax was significantly heavier than the taxes it replaced, and it enabled the Russian state to expand its treasury almost sixfold between 1680 and 1724. Peter also pursued protective trade policies, placing heavy tariffs on imports and trade to maintain a favorable environment for Russian-made goods.
Subjugation of the Peasants
Peter’s reign deepened the subjugation of serfs by landowners. He firmly enforced class divisions and his tax code significantly expanded the number of taxable workers, shifting an even heavier burden onto the shoulders of the working class.
Legislation under Peter’s rule covered every aspect of life in Russia with exhaustive detail, and it significantly affected the everyday lives of nearly every Russian citizen. The success of reform contributed greatly to Russia’s military successes and the increase in revenue and productivity. More importantly, Peter created a state that further legitimized and strengthened authoritarian rule in Russia. Testaments to this lasting influence are the many public institutions in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, which trace their origins back to Peter’s rule.
Church Reforms
The Russian tsars traditionally exerted some influence on church operations. However, until Peter’s reforms, the church had been relatively free to operate as it saw fit. Peter lost the support of the Russian clergy over his modernizing reforms because priests and churches became very suspicious of his friendship with foreigners and his alleged Protestant leanings. The tsar did not abandon Orthodoxy as the main ideological core of the state, but he attempted to start a process of westernization of the clergy, relying on those with Western theological education. Simultaneously, Peter remained faithful to the canons of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The traditional leader of the church was the Patriarch of Moscow. In 1700, when the office became vacant, Peter refused to name a replacement and created the position of "the custodian of the patriarchal throne", which he controlled by appointing his own candidates. He could not tolerate the thought that a patriarch could have power superior to the tsar. In 1721, he established the Holy Synod that replaced the Patriarch. It was administered by an educated, but secular director. The Synod changed in composition over time, but it remained a committee of churchmen headed by an appointee of the emperor. Furthermore, a new ecclesiastic educational system was begun under Peter. It aimed to improve the usually very poor education of local priests and monks. However, the curriculum was so westernized that monks and priests, while being formally educated, received poor training in preparation for a ministry to a Russian-speaking population steeped in the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Saint Petersburg
In 1703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great established the Peter and Paul fortress on small Hare Island, by the north bank of the Neva River. The fortress was the first brick and stone building of the new projected capital city of Russia and the original citadel of what would eventually be Saint Petersburg. The city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia, and tens of thousands of serfs died building it. Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712 but referred to Saint Petersburg as the capital as early as 1704.
Succession
Peter had two wives, with whom he had fourteen children, but only three survived to adulthood. Upon his return from his European tour in 1698, he ended his unhappy, arranged marriage to Eudoxia Lopukhina. He divorced the empress and forced her into joining a convent. Only one child from the marriage, Tsarevich Alexei, survived past his childhood. In 1712, Peter formally married his long-time mistress, Martha Skavronskaya, who upon her conversion to the Russian Orthodox church took the name Catherine.
Peter suspected his eldest child and heir, Alexei, of being involved in a plot to overthrow the emperor. Alexei was tried and confessed under torture during questioning conducted by a secular court. He was convicted and sentenced to be executed. The sentence could be carried out only with Peter’s signed authorization, but Peter hesitated before making the decision and Alexei died in prison. In 1724, Peter had his second wife, Catherine, crowned as empress, although he remained Russia’s actual ruler. He died a year later without naming a successor.
As Catherine represented the interests of the “new men,” (commoners who had been brought to positions of great power by Peter based on competence), a successful coup was arranged by her supporters to prevent the old elites from controlling the laws of succession. Catherine was the first woman to rule Imperial Russia (as empress), opening the legal path for a century almost entirely dominated by women, including her daughter Elizabeth and granddaughter-in-law Catherine the Great, all of whom continued Peter the Great’s policies in modernizing Russia.
Primary Source: "On Forms of Government" (by Frederick II)
Frederick II of Prussia (r. 1740-1786), “Essay on the Forms of Government” [Abridged]
A sovereign must possess an exact and detailed knowledge of the strong and of the weak points of his country. He must be thoroughly acquainted with its resources, the character of the people. and the national commerce.... Rulers should always remind themselves that they are men like the least of their subjects. The sovereign is the foremost judge, general, financier, and minister of his country, not merely for the sake of his prestige. Therefore, he should perform with care the duties connected with these offices. He is merely the principal servant of the State. Hence, he must act with honesty, wisdom, and complete disinterestedness in such a way that he can render an account of his stewardship to the citizens at any moment. Consequently, he is guilty if he wastes the money of the people, the taxes which they have paid, in luxury, pomp and debauchery. He who should improve the morals of the people, be the guardian of the law, and improve their education should not pervert them by his bad example. Princes, sovereigns, and king have not been given supreme authority in order to live in luxurious self-indulgence and debauchery. They have not been elevated by their fellow-men to enable them to strut about and to insult with their pride the simple-mannered, the poor and the suffering. They have not been placed at the head of the State to keep around themselves a crowd of idle loafers whose uselessness drives them towards vice. The bad administration which may be found in monarchies springs from many different causes, but their principal cause lies in the character of the sovereign. A ruler addicted to women will become a tool of his mistresses and favourites, and these will abuse their power and commit wrongs of every kind, will protect vice, sell offices, and perpetrate every infamy.... The sovereign is the representative of his State. He and his people form a single body. Ruler and ruled can be happy only if they are firmly united. The sovereign stands to his people in the same relation in which the head stands to the body. He must use his eyes and his brain for the whole community, and act on its behalf to the common advantage. If we wish to elevate monarchical above republican government, the duty of sovereigns is clear. They must be active, hard-working, upright and honest, and concentrate all their strength upon filling their office worthily. That is my idea of the duties of sovereigns.
From Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University
Attributions
Images from Wikimedia Commons
Boundless World History
"Frederick the Great and Prussia"
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/frederick-the-great-and-prussia/
"The Holy Roman Empire"
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/the-holy-roman-empire-2/
"The Modernization of Russia"
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/the-modernization-of-russia/
"On Forms of Government." Frederick II. Fordham University. Internet History Sourcebooks (fordham.edu)