In the case of the army, continuity was provided by the
commitment of the Hohenzollern kings to establish Brandenburg- Prussia as a
strong military power through the presence of a standing army. It was also
helped by loyal commanders like Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau, who served
three of those rulers with distinction (1693–1747). The first, the Elector-King
Frederick, gave the army a strong sense of identity. From 1701 the various
contingents were known as ‘the Prussian army’, identified by uniforms based on
the colours of the king’s coat of arms: red, blue and black. Frederick William
went further. From 1725 he took to wearing military uniform at court as a
matter of routine— as did his courtiers—a custom which foreign visitors found
bizarre at first, but one which symbolized the army’s overriding significance.
It is no wonder that he was dubbed the ‘royal drill sergeant’.
Frederick, moreover, not only maintained the Great Elector’s
army and took over its leadership personally, but increased its manpower by one
third to about 40,000 men by 1713, doubling the number of grenadiers, the
‘shock troops’ of the infantry. He established a central armoury in Berlin
(1700) and with the encouragement of the scientist, Leibniz, continued the
modernization started by his father, approving the use of the flintlock musket
and socket bayonet to replace the matchlock and pike. As firepower and the
value of disciplined infantry formations overshadowed the role of the cavalry,
the latter were reduced in numbers. Frederick William was totally dedicated to
his guardsmen and encouraged unorthodox methods to conscript men of exceptional
height to the guards, from foreign states as well as his own territories. Under
him the number of soldiers rose dramatically to 80,000 by the time of his death
in 1740.
Both rulers, therefore, considered the army to be of the
utmost importance and made all the final decisions on military matters,
although in Frederick’s case only after consultation with his officers and
ministers in the War Council. It was his decision to take power from the
regimental colonels and to insist that officers were to be promoted,
disciplined and dismissed on the king’s order. Furthermore, promotion was to be
by merit, not simply by custom or seniority (1695). It was a change which
proved difficult to enforce on officers of noble birth and one that King
Frederick William decided to reverse. Both rulers, however, tried to safeguard
the quality of the officer class. Under Frederick middle-class recruits were
still able to become officers, but under Frederick William the officer corps
became the exclusive domain of the nobility. Frederick established cadet
academies for young officers in Berlin (1701) and Kolberg (1703). Both he and
his successor forbade the nobility to serve in foreign armies. In 1722
Frederick William urged nobles to compel their sons to join a cadet training
school but he also took the precaution of ordering the provincial councillor,
or Landrat, to forward a list of junkers’ sons to be registered for military
service in a Table of Vassals. The king combined his father’s two military
academies and set up another at Magdeburg (1719).
All these measures reflected a major problem facing the
Prussian kings: the question of recruitment. Draconian discipline did not
eliminate the problem of desertion, and the practice remained of recruiting
foreigners. But in 1693 Frederick issued a Recruiting Edict, forcing every
province to provide a stipulated number of recruits, and in 1708 he instituted
per capita fines if they failed to produce their quota of soldiers. In 1714
Frederick William decreed that the peasantry had a lifelong obligation to do
military service. He also returned to the principle of regional conscription in
his important Recruitment Edict of 1733. This introduced a cantonal system in
which the registration of soldiers was to take place within defined districts
or cantons of 5,000 households. By 1740 one in twenty-five subjects was serving
in the Prussian army.
In the course of forty years (1700–40) the two kings adopted
some different policies, as might be expected. In 1701 Frederick borrowed the
Great Elector’s strategy of raising a Land Militia to serve for five years and
defend the frontiers and fortresses of the territories. By 1703 some 20,000 men
aged between eighteen and forty years were under arms as militiamen. Frederick
William, however, discontinued this system, believing that it was both
inefficient and undermined recruitment to the standing army. As we have seen,
Frederick and his son also diverged on the social composition of the officer
corps. Frederick William oversaw the creation of a caste of noble officers as a
means of creating social cohesion. Indeed, military needs came to dictate the
social structure of the country. By 1740 a rigid system was in place, by which
the nobility was identified with the officer class and the exploited peasantry
with the military rank-and-file. This necessitated a careful balancing act. A
series of royal decrees (1709, 1714, 1739, 1749) sought to protect the peasants
from excessive service demands from their lords to ensure smooth recruitment of
the peasants to the army. Frederick William’s early interest in military
matters became an obsession. Generals took precedence over royal ministers at
court. He enjoyed the details of military administration, supervising military
drill and ensuring that off-duty soldiers worked as wool or cotton spinners. In
an unusual display of paternalism, he urged his son not to reduce his soldiers’
pay. He raised the expenditure on the army from 50 per cent, as it was under
King Frederick, to a phenomenal 80 per cent of the national revenue. By 1740
the army did not exist to serve the country; Brandenburg-Prussia was a country
existing for its army. This was an extraordinary state of affairs, which was
bound to have considerable political and economic consequences.
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