The music-loving prince who became Prussia's most famous soldier king
As a boy, Frederick cared more for music and philosophy than for warfare, infuriating his harsh father. Once crowned in 1740, he went on to seize the wealthy Austrian province of Silesia, reorganised the army, and turned Prussia into a major European military power, while also welcoming Enlightenment thinkers and a free press.
Frederick was born late on the night of 24 January 1712 in the Berlin Palace. His grandfather Frederick I was delighted, since two earlier grandsons had died as infants. When the old king died in 1713, the boy's father became Frederick William I, the Soldier King, a violent-tempered absolute ruler who hoarded state wealth and built a huge army including his famous Potsdam Giants. Frederick's mother Sophia Dorothea, daughter of the man who became George I of Britain, was by contrast charming and cultured, and the clash between the two parents shaped the son.
He spent his early years with his mother and his elder sister Wilhelmine, with whom he stayed close until her death in 1758. French Calvinist tutors taught him in French as well as German, covering classics, history and rhetoric. His leanings towards music and philosophy made for bitter conflict with his father.
Kingship changed the picture. Soon after taking power he annexed Silesia, and his battlefield experience fed an influential body of military theory on strategy, tactics, mobility and supply. He described the monarch as the state's first servant, modernised the civil service, reformed the courts so that men of humbler birth could become judges and senior officials, and invited immigrants of many backgrounds. Protestantism stayed favoured, but Catholics and Jews were tolerated, though not without prejudice. In 1772 he took Royal Prussia from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and restyled himself King of Prussia.
Almost certainly homosexual and childless, he died on 17 August 1786 and was succeeded by his nephew; he lies at Sanssouci in Potsdam. Nineteenth-century German historians turned Old Fritz into a romantic warrior hero, and the Nazis cast him as a forerunner of Hitler, which dented his reputation after 1945. Recent scholarship sees a gifted commander and capable ruler whose reforms let Prussia challenge the Habsburgs.
Source: Frederick the Great
