ABSTRACT
The courts of the central European absolutist princes were once not thought worthy of serious attention. Their great expense seemed to corroborate the nineteenth-century bourgeois critique of them as a wasteful extravagance. Worse, they appeared politically irrelevant, merely a source of intrigue and gossip that could fill the pages of anecdotal popular history but provide nothing of interest to those who sought the true locus of political power. The Prussian example is important in this context. Frederick William dramatically cut back court spending after his succession in 1713 and concentrated all available resources on developing his monarchy’s military potential; drawing the admiration from generations of nationalist historians who endorsed this policy as contributing to Prussia’s subsequent rise to great power status.
