His ministers were superior clerks. Prussia was his
private possession, to be treated according to his own wishes.
And nothing was allowed to interfere with the interest of the
state.
In the year 1740 the Emperor Charles VI, of Austria,
died. He had tried to make the position of his only daughter,
Maria Theresa, secure through a solemn treaty, written black
on white, upon a large piece of parchment. But no sooner had
the old emperor been deposited in the ancestral crypt of the
Habsburg family, than the armies of Frederick were marching
towards the Austrian frontier to occupy that part of Silesia for
which (together with almost everything else in central Europe)
Prussia clamored, on account of some ancient and very
doubtful rights of claim. In a number of wars, Frederick
conquered all of Silesia, and although he was often very near
defeat, he maintained himself in his newly acquired territories
against all Austrian counter-attacks.
Europe took due notice of this sudden appearance of a
very powerful new state. In the eighteenth century, the Germans
were a people who had been ruined by the great religious
wars and who were not held in high esteem by any one. Frederick,
by an effort as sudden and quite as terrific as that of
Peter of Russia, changed this attitude of contempt into one
of fear. The internal affairs of Prussia were arranged so
skillfully that the subjects had less reason for complaint than
elsewhere.
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