When we think about the factors that shape the course of history, a wide range of influences comes to mind. To borrow a line from the great 19th-century French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, the spirit of an age also shapes the search for historical causes. According to Tocqueville, ages dominated by an aristocratic spirit place great emphasis on the decisions of exceptional individuals—the great men who lead nations. Ages shaped by a democratic spirit, on the other hand, encourage historians to look instead at the structural forces that determine the course of history.
As is often the case, however, the truth lies somewhere in between. No leader, no matter how capable, determined, or clear-sighted, can defy the limits imposed by the society they govern, the geography of their country, or the technological constraints of their age.
Likewise, a country’s economic, demographic, or military potential is no guarantee of success unless those making the decisions are able to harness that potential toward a particular goal.
Few examples illustrate this better than Brandenburg-Prussia, the small and, until the 18th century, largely insignificant German principality whose rise shook Europe like a thunderbolt. By the 19th century, it had succeeded in transforming Germany into a unified empire.
Yet Prussia’s rise also demonstrated that potential and capable leadership alone guarantee nothing. Although the process of German unification may appear almost predestined in hindsight, it was anything but. As I will show below, alongside determined monarchs and a formidable army, Prussia also benefited from extraordinary good fortune that aided its rise in both the 18th and 19th centuries.
Frederick the Great admitted as much in the early months of 1762:
“What a strange thing is the human heart, and how fragile are the foundations on which the peace of empires rests! The death of a single woman changes the face of Europe; a month ago I was on the brink of a precipice, today I am in a state of tranquility.”
The woman Frederick referred to was Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia, whose death brought her Prussophile nephew, Peter III, to the throne. He immediately made peace with Prussia, sparing Frederick from what had seemed almost inevitable defeat. Had Elizabeth lived only a few years longer, Prussia might have been worn down in a war of attrition, and the course of German—and with it European—history could have been fundamentally different.
The same could be said of another towering figure of European history: Napoleon Bonaparte. Few commanders have ever matched his military genius, and few statesmen have reshaped the political landscape of Europe so profoundly. Yet Napoleon's fate—and with it the fate of France and Europe—was no more predetermined than Frederick's. Fortune, both good and bad, played its part here as well. A handful of seemingly minor incidents could have dramatically altered the course of the Napoleonic Wars.
Unlike Frederick, however, Fortuna did not grant Napoleon a decisive stroke of luck in his darkest hour. Instead, the tide gradually turned against him. The French Emperor's armies were worn down by years of relentless warfare, his enemies united in an increasingly determined coalition, and after a series of defeats he was forced to abdicate. He spent the final years of his life in exile on the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic.
When Frederick the Great became king in 1740, he inherited a relatively small kingdom from his father, but one with enormous military potential. Through thrift, discipline, and administrative reform, Frederick William I had built an army of 80,000 men, drawn from a population of little more than two million. By comparison, the similarly sized Electorate of Saxony and the more populous Electorate of Bavaria could each field armies of only around 30,000 men. Even the Habsburg Empire, whose population was roughly eight times larger than Prussia’s, maintained an army of only about 108,000 soldiers.
The reform that made this extraordinary military establishment possible was the Canton System, introduced by Frederick William I in 1733. The kingdom was divided into recruiting districts, or cantons, each assigned to a particular regiment. In principle, every able-bodied male living within a canton could be called upon to serve, although numerous exemptions meant that the burden of military service fell primarily upon the rural population. Nobles continued to provide the officer corps, while many skilled craftsmen and economically valuable townsmen were exempt in order to avoid disrupting the kingdom’s fragile economy.
Although this was not yet universal conscription in the modern sense, it came closer than any military system in Europe before the French Revolution. Most contemporary armies relied heavily on expensive long-service professionals or foreign mercenaries. Prussia, by contrast, created a permanent pool of partially trained soldiers who could be mobilized rapidly in wartime. During peacetime, conscripts spent only a few months under arms before returning to their farms and villages, where they resumed civilian life until called up again. The result was a remarkably economical military system. Prussia maintained an army far larger than its demographic resources should have allowed, while simultaneously creating a substantial reserve of trained manpower capable of replenishing battlefield losses. Few European states were able to mobilize such a large proportion of their population for war without permanently crippling their economy.
The machine was ready by the later years of Frederick William I, but despite his resentment of how the Habsburgs at time treated him, he chose to remain loyal to the Emperor. His son, Frederick, was cut from a very different cloth. Ambitious to a fault, he was determined to expand his inheritance and win glory for himself in the process. He did not have to wait long for an opportunity.
In October 1740, Emperor Charles VI died. Lacking a male heir, he was to be succeeded by his daughter, Maria Theresa. The problem, however, was that under Salic Law succession through the female line was prohibited. Charles had spent the final decades of his reign securing recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction, the edict intended to guarantee Maria Theresa’s inheritance, offering concessions to every European power willing to recognize it. Whether those same powers would honour their promises after his death, however, remained an open question.
Charles’s greatest general, Prince Eugene of Savoy, had long warned that a full treasury, well-manned fortresses, and strong field armies offered better protection than any piece of paper ever could. Events would soon prove him right.
In December 1740, Frederick invaded Silesia without even issuing a declaration of war, rapidly overrunning the lightly defended province. He justified the invasion with a series of dubious legal claims, but these were little more than a convenient pretext. In reality, he seized Silesia because he believed the opportunity was too good to ignore. Maria Theresa’s succession remained uncertain, while Russia—traditionally Vienna’s strongest ally—had been thrown into political uncertainty following the death of Tsarina Anna, leaving the empire under the regency governing the infant Ivan VI. Had Frederick hesitated, he feared another claimant might seize the prize first. The Elector of Saxony was simultaneously King of Poland-Lithuania, and had Saxony acquired Silesia, its two realms would have shared a common frontier. Even without Prussia’s military efficiency, such a personal union would have dwarfed Frederick’s own kingdom.
Despite the strategic logic behind the invasion, Frederick had nevertheless committed a naked act of aggression without even the semblance of a legitimate pretext. Unsurprisingly, initially no European power came to his assistance while he waited for Vienna’s response.
That response arrived in the spring of 1741. To the astonishment of Europe, however, the army of little Prussia defeated the Habsburgs at the Battle of Mollwitz, securing Frederick’s hold over Silesia. The consequences reached far beyond the battlefield. Austria’s defeat shattered the aura of Habsburg invincibility and encouraged the formation of a broad anti-Habsburg coalition consisting of Prussia, France, Spain, Bavaria, Saxony, Savoy, and Genoa, each hoping to profit at Austria’s expense. Fortunately for Maria Theresa, Britain and the Dutch Republic had no intention of allowing the Habsburg Monarchy to collapse, while Russia eventually entered the conflict on Austria’s side. Even Saxony abandoned the coalition after 1743.
The Habsburg Monarchy survived the ordeal, but Frederick retained Silesia. Vienna, however, had no intention of accepting the loss permanently. After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, Maria Theresa’s ministers embarked upon an ambitious programme of military and administrative reform, all with a single objective: preparing the monarchy for a second reckoning with Prussia.
Austria renewed its alliance with Russia while simultaneously pursuing an even more remarkable diplomatic objective—a rapprochement with its centuries-old rival, France. The agreement represented one of the greatest diplomatic reversals of the eighteenth century. For nearly two centuries the Habsburgs and Bourbons had contested influence across Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. Yet Maria Theresa’s determination to recover Silesia outweighed generations of hostility, while France increasingly regarded Britain, rather than Austria, as its principal rival. Old enemies became reluctant partners in what contemporaries soon recognised as the Diplomatic Revolution.
Frederick, meanwhile, committed one of the greatest political miscalculations of his reign. Convinced that an Austro-French alliance was inconceivable, he instead concluded the Convention of Westminster with Britain in 1756, promising to respect the neutrality of the Electorate of Hanover, then ruled by George II. The agreement was not a formal alliance, yet the news nevertheless outraged Versailles. Ironically, it was Frederick’s own diplomatic initiative that finally persuaded Louis XV to abandon centuries of French foreign policy and conclude an alliance with Austria.
The news of the Austro-French alliance came as an unpleasant surprise to Frederick. At first, however, he was not overly alarmed, since the agreement was purely defensive in nature. What truly unsettled him was the intelligence gathered by his spies, who uncovered secret Austro-Russian discussions concerning a coordinated invasion of Prussia. Convinced that his kingdom lacked the resources to withstand such a coalition, Frederick resolved upon one of the greatest gambles of his career.
In August 1756, he launched a pre-emptive invasion of Saxony. Suspecting that the Electorate had already aligned itself with his enemies, Frederick rapidly overran the country and incorporated the Saxon army into his own ranks, a move that outraged much of Europe. From Saxony, he advanced into Bohemia, hoping to knock Austria out of the war before Russia and France could intervene in force. The plan, however, immediately encountered difficulties. Although the Prussians won the Battle of Lobositz, Austrian resistance proved far stronger than anticipated, preventing Frederick from establishing winter quarters in Bohemia and forcing his army to withdraw.
Despite this setback, Frederick remained convinced that 1757 would be the decisive year of the war. His strategy depended upon speed. If Austria could be defeated before its allies fully mobilized, Prussia might yet escape the encirclement threatening it. Accordingly, the Prussians invaded Bohemia once again in the spring of 1757, winning a costly victory outside Prague before laying siege to the city. Yet the campaign soon ground to a halt. At the Battle of Kolin, Frederick suffered the first major defeat of his military career and was forced to abandon both the siege and his invasion.
The consequences of Kolin were profound. Frederick’s failed offensive triggered the full weight of the coalition that had been gathering against him. Russian armies advanced into East Prussia, while France honoured its obligations to Austria and dispatched two armies into western Germany. Sweden, eager to recover territories lost decades earlier, entered the war later that same year. Although Frederick brilliantly restored his reputation with the spectacular victories of Rossbach and Leuthen in the autumn of 1757, these triumphs merely bought him time. They did not alter the underlying strategic reality. Prussia remained hopelessly outnumbered, and with each passing campaign the coalition’s numerical superiority became more difficult to resist.
By late 1761, Frederick’s situation had become desperate. Five years of continuous warfare had left his army still impressive in size, but a shadow of the highly trained force that had crossed the frontier in 1756. Many veteran soldiers had been killed, while replacements lacked the experience and discipline that had once made the Prussian infantry the finest in Europe.
To make matters worse, Frederick’s alliance with Britain also began to unravel. By this stage of the conflict Britain had largely secured its principal objectives, emerging victorious in the global struggle against France. With Spain preparing to enter the war on the Bourbon side, London increasingly viewed the naval and colonial theatres as more pressing than the struggle in Germany. A redistribution of British resources therefore became all but inevitable. Although Britain continued to subsidize Prussia and maintained the army of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, whose victories after Rossbach successfully shielded Hanover from French invasion, Frederick could no longer rely upon unlimited British support.
British subsidies had certainly been valuable after 1758, but they never constituted the largest share of Prussia’s war finances. Frederick’s greatest financial asset had instead been Saxony. Since occupying the electorate in 1756, the Prussian administration had ruthlessly exploited its manpower, industry, and tax revenues to sustain the war effort. Modern estimates suggest that as much as forty percent of Prussia’s military expenditure was financed through the occupation of Saxony.
By the end of 1761, however, even this source of strength was beginning to disappear. Austrian and Imperial forces gradually pushed the Prussians back from southern Saxony, steadily reducing the territory available for exploitation. Elsewhere the Russians and Swedes made similar progress in Pomerania, while the fall of the fortress-port of Kolberg promised to alleviate the severe logistical problems that had long hampered Russian operations. For the first time since the war began, Frederick’s enemies appeared capable not merely of defeating his armies in battle, but of slowly strangling the Prussian war effort itself.
As the calendar turned to 1762, Frederick himself began to lose hope. In a private letter to his minister, Count Finckenstein, he openly acknowledged the hopelessness of his position:
“We ought now to think of preserving for my nephew, by way of negotiation, whatever fragments of my territory we can save from the avidity of my enemies.”
As matters stood, it seemed that only a miracle could save Frederick and his kingdom.
Unbeknownst to him, that miracle had already occurred.
On 5 January 1762, Empress Elizabeth of Russia—the driving force behind Russia’s participation in the war—died after a brief illness. Her nephew and successor, Peter III, was an ardent admirer of Frederick, having long regarded the Prussian king as the model of an enlightened monarch. Within weeks of ascending the throne, Peter ended hostilities with Prussia, restored all conquered territory, and went even further by offering Frederick a military alliance, requesting only Prussian assistance in his planned war against Denmark.
For Frederick, the news was almost beyond belief. What had appeared only days earlier to be an unwinnable struggle had suddenly been transformed by an event entirely beyond his control. No military victory, no diplomatic initiative, nor any reform of the Prussian state could have produced such an outcome. The fate of his kingdom had been altered by the death of a single ruler hundreds of miles away in faraway Saint Petersburg.
Though the Russo-Prussian alliance proved short-lived—Peter rapidly alienated much of the Russian elite and was overthrown by his wife, Catherine, in the summer of 1762—the damage had already been done. Catherine had little desire to resume the costly conflict, and Russia withdrew from the war. Sweden, deprived of its principal ally, likewise made peace with Prussia, leaving Austria to continue the struggle largely alone.
Initially, the Austrians resolved to continue the war despite Russia’s withdrawal. Yet their strategic position had been transformed. Without Russian pressure in the east, Frederick was free to concentrate the full strength of his army against Austria. Matters deteriorated further for Vienna when Prince Henry, Frederick’s younger brother and arguably the most capable commanders of the war, inflicted a decisive defeat upon the Austrians at Freiberg, effectively driving them from Saxony. At that point, the Habsburg court could no longer ignore reality. The opportunity to recover Silesia had slipped away. The Treaty of Hubertusburg, signed in February 1763, restored the pre-war status quo, confirming Prussia’s possession of Silesia and bringing seven years of devastating conflict to an end.
Despite coming perilously close to ruin, Frederick and his kingdom had survived. It is difficult, however, not to wonder how events might have unfolded had Empress Elizabeth lived only a few years longer. Frederick himself entertained few illusions. His private correspondence with Finckenstein leaves little doubt that, by the beginning of 1762, he considered his position virtually hopeless.
That said, Prussia’s defeat was by no means inevitable, even had Elizabeth survived. Austria and Russia were themselves beginning to feel the enormous strain imposed by a conflict whose cost had exceeded all expectations. In preparation for the 1762 campaign, financial difficulties forced Vienna to reduce its army by some 20,000 men. Meanwhile, despite their gradual advances, the coalition’s progress remained frustratingly slow. Since his catastrophic defeat at Kunersdorf in 1759, Frederick had largely abandoned hopes of winning the war through another decisive battlefield victory. Instead, he adopted an increasingly defensive strategy, conserving his dwindling manpower while forcing his enemies to pay dearly for every mile of Prussian territory they occupied.
Even so, the strategic balance continued to move against him. The territories available to sustain the Prussian war effort steadily diminished as Austrian forces established themselves in Silesia and Saxony, while Russian and Swedish armies tightened their grip on Pomerania. East Prussia had already been lost in 1758, and British subsidies were beginning to dry up as London shifted its attention to the wider global conflict against France and Spain. Frederick’s resources were shrinking with every passing campaign, while his enemies, despite their own mounting difficulties, continued to press in from every direction.
Whether Prussia could have survived long enough for Austria’s finances to collapse remains one of the great unanswered questions of European history. It is entirely possible that Maria Theresa might eventually have concluded that the price of recovering Silesia had become too great. Yet it is equally possible that Frederick’s kingdom would simply have been worn down by a war it could no longer afford to fight. We cannot know the answer.
What we can say with confidence is that the death of Empress Elizabeth fundamentally altered the balance of the war. It deprived Austria of its strongest ally at the very moment victory appeared within reach and transformed what seemed to be Prussia’s inevitable defeat into a negotiated peace. Frederick’s military genius and the formidable institutions created by his father had carried Prussia to the brink of survival. It was fortune that carried it the final step.
The consequences extended far beyond the Seven Years’ War itself. Prussia emerged from the conflict recognized as one of Europe’s great powers and retained possession of Silesia, the wealthiest province it had acquired. A century later, it would be Prussia—not Austria—that succeeded in forging a unified German state. The political traditions, military institutions, and strategic culture of Prussia would come to dominate the new German Empire, shaping the history of Europe well into the twentieth century.
Had Empress Elizabeth lived only a little longer, that history might have unfolded very differently.
By 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte stood at the very height of his power. In less than a decade, he had transformed Revolutionary France into the dominant military power on the European continent. Austria had been humbled at Austerlitz, Prussia shattered at Jena-Auerstedt, and Russia defeated at Friedland. The Treaties of Tilsit, concluded between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I on a raft floating in the middle of the Niemen River, appeared to inaugurate a new era in European politics. The continent was effectively divided into French and Russian spheres of influence, with few powers still capable of challenging Napoleon’s supremacy.
Only Britain remained beyond his reach. Protected by the Royal Navy and victorious at Trafalgar, Britain had become virtually immune to invasion. Unable to defeat his greatest rival by force of arms, Napoleon instead turned to economic warfare. Through the Continental System, he sought to exclude British goods from European markets, believing that if Britain could be deprived of continental trade, its economy would eventually buckle under the strain. As part of the agreements reached at Tilsit, Tsar Alexander also committed Russia to enforcing this vast economic blockade.
Yet the Continental System, conceived as the instrument that would finally bring Britain to its knees, ultimately planted the seeds of Napoleon’s own downfall. Enforcing the blockade drew France into two increasingly costly and ultimately disastrous conflicts. In 1808, French intervention in the Iberian Peninsula sparked the Peninsular War, a brutal struggle that tied down hundreds of thousands of French soldiers for years while providing Britain with a permanent foothold on the continent. Four years later, Russia’s growing reluctance to enforce the blockade convinced Napoleon to launch his fateful invasion of the Russian Empire.
The result was catastrophic. By December 1812, as the shattered remnants of the Grande Armée staggered back across the Niemen, the finest army Europe had ever seen had effectively ceased to exist. Of the more than half a million soldiers who had crossed into Russia in June, barely 93,000 emerged from the campaign. Most had perished in battle, from disease, starvation, desertion, the relentless Russian winter delivering the coup de grace to the already heavily depleted army while it was retreating.
Those who survived returned exhausted, demoralized, and incapable of mounting another major campaign without extensive rebuilding. Equally alarming for Napoleon, the political foundations of his empire were beginning to crumble. Austria and Prussia, long reluctant allies, were steadily distancing themselves from France, while Tsar Alexander rejected all thoughts of negotiation and resolved to carry the war into Central Europe. For the first time since his rise to power, Napoleon’s empire appeared genuinely vulnerable.
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