ABSTRACT
W hat did the Great Elector achieve? By a policy of practical absolutism, which entailed continual compromise, he established the ruler as the leading political figure in all his territories and ensured that their revenues would be largely applied to his own objectives. The dynasty’s own religion had been finally accepted by his subjects, although on the basis of tolerating Lutheranism. The nobles were beginning to be tamed and conditions created which would see them transformed into the service nobility of the next century. A standing army was created, one capable of establishing internal order and defending all the Hohenzollern lands from their neighbours. Frederick W illiam ’s territories, which were very much separate entities at his accession, were beginning to be ruled as a dynastic whole and the institutions established to create the unitary state or Gesamtstaat of the future. It would be far too premature to speak of a unity of his territories under the Great Elector: there was rather ‘a coloured palette of solutions’.7 In the Holy Roman Empire Brandenburg-Prussia was now clearly the leading northGerman state and beginning to draw ahead from Saxony and Bavaria. It was already being seen in Vienna as a threat to the Emperor’s own influence. In the international arena, although the Hohenzollerns were considered a mainstay of European Protestantism, they could still not pursue policies independent of one of the major power blocs. The frustrations and rapid shifts of Frederick W illiam ’s policy came largely from this. His motto might very well have been an
observation by Pufendorf in 1672 that Tor princes there is but one true and fitting basis of faith, necessity’.8
