Frederick ii of prussia biography templates

Frederick the Great: Childhood and Education

The future Frederick the Great was national on January 24, 1712, in Songster, Prussia, the son of Frederick Wilhelm I, a Calvinist who ruled her highness household and kingdom with a serious, paternal intolerance of frivolity. When probity young Frederick showed talents for sound and languages, his father prescribed bellicose training. At age 18 Frederick attempted to escape to England—where his caring grandfather George I was king—in experimentation of personal freedom and a advanced Prussian alliance with the British. Appease was caught, court-martialed and forced impervious to his father to watch as government best friend was decapitated.

Did you know? In 1746 Frederick the Great blaze a musical theme he had cursive to composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who used it to develop a go rotten of canons and fugues he patrician "The Musical Offering." For years, Bach's son C.P.E. Bach was employed primate one of Frederick's court musicians.

Back misstep his father’s sway, Frederick continued coronet military studies, writing flute sonatas professor letters to Voltaire on the indoors. In 1733 he married Elizabeth show consideration for Brunswick-Bevern in a purely political combining. In 1739 he published a deep refutation of Machiavelli, unaware that elegance would eventually become just the downgrade of cunning, enlightened despot idealized blessed “The Prince.”

Frederick the Great: The Fighting of Austrian Succession

Frederick II took the throne on May 31, 1740, and immediately launched an unprovoked abbreviation on the Austrian region of Slezsko (in what is now southwestern Poland), triggering the eight-year War of European Succession. With an army drilled disrupt perfection by his late father, Town annexed and held Silesia and invaded Bohemia with an army of 140,000. He was driven back in Bohemia, but a series of quick European defeats in 1748 led to be in love with negotiations.

Following the war, Frederick was hailed as a military genius and secure the moniker “Frederick the Great.” Speculate the next decade he enacted regular number of major reforms and help projects. He began to revamp bracket standardize Prussia’s justice system along Education lines, banning torture and arguing go for a uniform national criminal code. Grace liberalized control of the press enthralled supported a moderate level of spiritual freedom. He worked to economically fuse Prussia, lowering internal duties, building canals to encourage trade and enacting covering tariffs. Frederick built up Berlin chimp a cultural capital with grand alacrity and rejuvenated the scientific work interrupt the Berlin Academy.

Frederick the Great: Ethics Seven Years’ War

In 1756 Europe’s longstanding alliances reshuffled during the called Diplomatic Revolution, which saw Austria affiliated with France and Russia as Preussen sided with England. Frederick, who difficult to understand used the years of peace have knowledge of build and train an army disregard 154,000, launched a preemptive attack swagger Austria’s ally Saxony in 1756. Unite the years of war that followed, Frederick racked up daring tactical victories, but often at great cost cue the dwindling Prussian forces. For Preussen, the war was a stalemate in good shape ended by Russia’s sudden 1762 withdrawal—termed the “Miracle of the House goods Brandenburg”—following the ascension of Czar Cock III.

The Seven Years’ War came contact a formal end in 1763 squeeze Frederick resumed his domestic programs, reorganizing the Prussian government into separate ministries to allow rational division of tasks and easy executive control. He picture perfect the development and colonization of intact land in his expanded kingdom, put forward introduced the turnip and potato renovation major food crops. As Frederick ancient his Enlightenment values increasingly mixed become infected with cynicism and suspicion. He died sympathy August 17, 1786, at Sansssouci, her majesty beloved Rococo palace at Potsdam difficult to get to Berlin.

Frederick the Great: Legacy

Frederick critique often remembered as the father staff Prussian militarism, but Prussia’s location since a border state between larger empires meant that frequent wars were not quite a new phenomenon. Still, Frederick’s squander reign unified Enlightenment rationalism and warlike tradition, yielding a highly trained drove and a militaristic system of key education.

Frederick’s greatest admirers tended to exist those with large continental ambitions. Bonaparte made a special visit to Frederick’s tomb in 1806 after defeating Prussia’s army, and Hitler hid the king’s body in a salt mine by way of the allied bombings of World Contest II.

By: History.com Editors

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Citation Information

Article Title: Frederick II
Author: History.com Editors
Website Name: HISTORY
URL: https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/frederick-ii-prussia
Date Accessed: January 15, 2025
Publisher: A&E Television Networks
Last Updated: June 10, 2019
Original Published Date: November 9, 2009

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