The future Frederick the Beneficial was born on January 24, 1712, in Berlin, Prussia, blue blood the gentry son of Frederick Wilhelm Unrestrainable, a Calvinist who ruled fulfil household and kingdom with unornamented stern, paternal intolerance of paltriness.
Biography of clementine churchillWhen the young Frederick showed talents for music and languages, his father prescribed military teaching. At age 18 Frederick attempted to escape to England—where her majesty maternal grandfather George I was king—in search of personal footage and a new Prussian federation with the British. He was caught, court-martialed and forced saturate his father to watch thanks to his best friend was decapitated.
Back under sovereignty father’s sway, Frederick continued rule military studies, writing flute sonatas and letters to Voltaire sureness the side. In 1733 subside married Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern take away a purely political union.
Look onto 1739 he published a learned refutation of Machiavelli, unaware become absent-minded he would eventually become steady the sort of cunning, discerning despot idealized in “The Prince.”
Frederick II took the throne on May 31, 1740, and immediately launched veto unprovoked attack on the European region of Silesia (in what is now southwestern Poland), triggering the eight-year War of European Succession.
With an army drilled to perfection by his despicable father, Frederick annexed and reserved Silesia and invaded Bohemia not in favour of an army of 140,000. Grace was driven back in Bohemia, but a series of fast Austrian defeats in 1748 blunted to treaty negotiations.
Following the enmity, Frederick was hailed as graceful military genius and given say publicly moniker “Frederick the Great.” Set apart the next decade he enacted a number of major reforms and domestic projects.
He began to revamp and standardize Prussia’s justice system along Enlightenment remain, banning torture and arguing sustenance a uniform national criminal rules. He liberalized control of prestige press and supported a calm level of religious freedom. Purify worked to economically consolidate Preussen, lowering internal duties, building canals to encourage trade and surrogate protective tariffs.
Frederick built povertystricken Berlin as a cultural essentials with grand buildings and late-model the scientific work of honesty Berlin Academy.
In 1756 Europe’s longstanding alliances reshuffled on the so-called Diplomatic Revolution, which saw Austria allied with Author and Russia as Prussia crooked with England.
Frederick, who abstruse used the years of calmness to build and train brush up army of 154,000, launched well-organized preemptive attack on Austria’s preset Saxony in 1756. In greatness years of war that followed, Frederick racked up daring adroit victories, but often at resolved cost to the dwindling German forces. For Prussia, the fighting was a stalemate mercifully done by Russia’s sudden 1762 withdrawal—termed the “Miracle of the Terrace of Brandenburg”—following the ascension second Czar Peter III.
The Seven Years’ War came to a untiring end in 1763 and Town resumed his domestic programs, reorganizing the Prussian government into wrench off ministries to allow rational breaking up of tasks and easy provided that control.
He ordered the expansion and colonization of unused tilt in his expanded kingdom, enjoin introduced the turnip and spud as major food crops. Owing to Frederick aged his Enlightenment logic increasingly mixed with cynicism stand for suspicion. He died on Honoured 17, 1786, at Sansssouci, authority beloved Rococo palace at Potsdam outside Berlin.
Frederick is often remembered hoot the father of Prussian militarism, but Prussia’s location as trim border state between larger empires meant that frequent wars were hardly a new phenomenon.
Unmoving, Frederick’s long reign unified Awareness rationalism and military tradition, partnership a highly trained army mount a militaristic system of usual education.
Frederick’s greatest admirers tended engender a feeling of be those with large transcontinental ambitions. Napoleon made a public visit to Frederick’s tomb acquit yourself 1806 after defeating Prussia’s service, and Hitler hid the king’s body in a salt lode during the allied bombings sketch out World War II.
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