1719-21] The Peace of Nystad 615 1719, and February 1, 1720, Hanover obtained the "bishoprics of Bremen and Verden for herself, and Stettin and district for her confederate Prussia. The prospect of coercing Russia by means of the English fleet had alone induced Sweden to consent to such sacrifices; but when the last demands of Hanover and its allies had been complied with, she was left to come to terms as best she could with the Tsar. The efforts which Great Britain made at Vienna, Berlin, and Warsaw in the course of 1720-1, to obtain, by diplomatic means, some mitigation in favour of Sweden of Russia's demands proved fruitless, chiefly owing to the stubborn neutrality of Prussia; and though an English fleet was dispatched to the Baltic to protect Sweden's coasts, it abstained from intervention, when, in the course of 1720, the Russian forces again descended upon the hapless land and destroyed four towns, 41 villages, and 1026 farms. In her isolation and abandonment Sweden had no choice but to reopen negotiations with Russia, at Nystad, in May, 1720. She still pleaded hard for at least Viborg; but a third Russian raid accelerated the pace of the negotiations, and, on August 30, 1721, by the Peace of Nystad, Sweden ceded to Russia, Livonia, Esthonia, Ingria, the province of Keksholm, and the fortress of Viborg. Finland west of Viborg and north of Keksholm was retroceded to her, and she was also granted an indemnity of two millions of thalers and free trade in the Baltic. On September 14, a courier, with a sealed packet, containing the Treaty of Nystad, overtook Peter on his way to Viborg. On opening the packet the Tsar declared, with perfect justice, that this was the most profitable peace Russia had ever concluded. "Most apprentices," he jocularly observed, "generally serve for seven years; but in our school the term of apprenticeship has been thrice as long. Yet, God be praised, things could not have turned out better for us than they have done." And, indeed, the gain to Russia by the Peace of Nystad, which terminated a war of twenty-one years, was much more than territorial. In surrendering her choicest Baltic provinces, Sweden had also lost the hegemony of the North, and all her pretensions to be considered a Great Power. CHAPTER XX THE ORIGINS OF THE KINGDOM OF PRUSSIA ALTHOUGH the complexity of the phenomena of modern history is such as to baffle any attempt to render them subservient to preconceived conclusions, yet it must be allowed that the theory of so-called historic missions has been very plausibly exemplified from the growth of the Brandenburg-Prussian polity. Not many European dynasties have furthered the interests of their dominions so steadily as the Hohenzollerns, both before and since they declared themselves the servants of the State; and few populations with whose history we can claim to be fairly well acquainted have been found more consistently ready to carry out the designs of their rulers than the inhabitants of the lands out of which has grown the most powerful monarchy of the present age. The subjects of the Electors of Brandenburg were, in the words of Lord Acton, "conscious that Nature had not favoured them excessively, and that they could prosper only by the action of their Government"; and, he might have added, the discipline to which they submitted with so exceptional a readiness was rendered easier to them after they had become possessed of a trained intelligence which at times enabled them to anticipate the action of their rulers. Yet it would be futile to ascribe to the insight or to the energy of either the Hohenzollerns or their subjects a controlling share in the shaping of their historic achievements. Rare as are the instances of States or dynasties that have accomplished more for themselves than Prussia and the Hohenzollerns, they have been conspicuously, and to all intents and purposes avowedly, the heirs of time and the beneficiaries of circumstance. But time and circumstance only rarely found the Brandenburg-Prussian State; as they had not often found either of its chief component parts, unprepared for the action demanded by them. In earlier days the necessity of expansion had been almost identical with that of self-preservation; in later times the traditions had definitely formed themselves, in accordance with which the ship of State, as if obeying laws that had become part of her being, continued her onward course. The history of the Prussian monarchy cannot be surveyed as that of any particular tribe which in the end consolidated itself, together with 500-973] The Northern Mark 617 its accretions and acquisitions, into a State. Indeed, as a whole it lacks most of the elements which go to the making of a nation-unity of race, unity of creed, and the consciousness of a common history extending over the course of centuries. On the contrary, fresh affluents differing in origin or in some important feature from the main stream were constantly finding admittance into it by a continuous process, which was only interrupted in exceptional periods of depression. Nor again, can this history be written as the annals of a dynasty which systematically and without any serious break identified itself with aspirations that with its subjects had almost grown into a second nature. Apart from the fact that other dynasties preceded the Hohenzollerns in almost every part of their ultimate monarchy, we remember how, once more to quote Lord Acton, it was not till the accession of the Great Elector that the Brandenburg-Prussian dynasty "entered into the spirit of the problem", confronting the State; and the proportion of the Electors and Kings who since that date have "struggled intensely for the increase of their power has been, to put it bluntly, little more than one-half of the whole number. I A very few pages must suffice, at a point so advanced as that which the course of this History has reached, to recall the most noteworthy stages in the growth and development of the two chief factors of the Brandenburg-Prussian State, before the time of their union in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The Mark Brandenburg was the foundation of the great Saxon Duke who, as King Henry I, was the first to give to Germany so much of cohesion as could result from the general recognition of a vigorously asserted royal supremacy. But his more notable service to the German "name" was his actual assertion of his power from the Elbe towards the Oder. This implied, in the first instance, the subjugation of the Wends, who, seated in these regions from perhaps so early a date as the beginning of the sixth century, absorbed the remnants of the Germanic populations which held the country at the beginning of the Christian era. By the end of the ninth century-the birth-time of the national kingdoms of Western Europe all the land to the east of the Elbe, besides not a little of it to the west, had come to be inhabited by Slavs; and it was as a bulwark against the great Slav inundation, which he had striven to drive back from the borders of his realm, that King Henry established (or re-established on the lines of Charles the Great) the Northern Mark of the Saxons. Henry's son, Otto the Great, developed the margravate system in his habitual grand style; and, while the Saxon Dukes themselves guarded the lower Elbe, the Counts of the Northern Mark steadily extended their authority eastwards from Brandenburg (Brennibor), a fastness which already Henry I had wrested from the Wends, over the marsh 618 The Mark Brandenburg [946-1140 and sand of the Havel and Spree country as far as the Oder. Thus the future Brandenburg-Prussian State was in its beginnings indisputably an offshoot of the Saxon duchy; but the seventeenth century was hardly historical enough in its susceptibilities to make much account of this fact in the perennial jealousies between the Houses of Saxony and Brandenburg. Notwithstanding the episcopal sees set up by Otto I in the halfsubdued Wendic lands (Havelberg in 946; Brandenburg in 949; Lebus cannot be traced with certainty further back than the early part of the twelfth century), and in spite of the advance of the Christianised kingdom of Poland, the struggle was maintained by the Wends and Paganism for the better part of two centuries. In accordance with the physical features of the country, the contest had little of grandeur about it, and no great missionary efforts imparted to it a heroic character. After the great insurrection of 983, the conquered lands between Elbe and Oder long remained lost to Germany and Christendom, while the fortress of Brandenburg repeatedly changed its masters. Thus things went on, till, in 1133, the Emperor Lothar conferred the vacant countship of the Saxon North Mark upon the man who was to become the real founder of the power of Brandenburg. Albert the Bear, of the House of Ballenstädt, which called itself the Ascanian, from the old castle (Aschersleben) where he set up his judicial tribunal, and which was afterwards known as the House of Anhalt, failed in his attempt to oust the Guelf Henry the Proud (the father of Henry the Lion) from the Saxon duchy. But in the end he succeeded in recovering his Northern Mark, now first called the margravate of Brandenburg from the definitive seizure of that fortress, and extending eastward several miles beyond the site of Berlin. Thus Albert the Bear illustrated the value of the ancient adage that the half is often greater than the whole; for the founda tions of dominion laid by him proved more solid and enduring than the vast structure raised by Henry the Lion. Now that the Mark Brandenburg protected the Empire against both Scandinavian pressure in the north and Polish in the north-east, its guardianship of the frontier and furtherance of the Christian mission on each side of it had been changed into a settled territorial dominion. The changes of nomenclature which accompanied its growth need not detain us here. Unlike 1 The original distinction between "Old" and "New Mark" as the territories on the left and on the right bank of the Elbe respectively was in course of time abandoned, as the acquisition of fresh lands continued; the New Mark then became the Middle Mark and the name "New Mark" was given to the lands north and south of the Warthe (first called "land beyond the Oder") and earlier districts south of the Oder. The Kurmark (which name of course came into use with the acquisition of the electoral dignity) comprised the whole complex of dominions with the exception of the New Mark — viz. the Old Mark, the Middle Mark, the Vormark (Priegnitz) and the Ukermark (the northern land of the Slavonic Ukri, of which the possession was long disputed between the Brandenburg Margraves and the Mecklenburg and Germanisation and Christianisation 619 so many German dynastic creations, especially in the northern and central parts of the Empire, Albert the Bear's, although it received many augmentations and passed through various minor changes-the first of the innumerable partitions of Albert's inheritance took place on his death was in substance permanent. In the work of Germanisation the Margraves were greatly aided by the efforts of the Christian Church, and in particular of the Praemonstratensian and still more of the Cistercian Orders. The Wends were not annihilated; they were pushed aside into their villages, or absorbed by their conquerors, without being able to impregnate the language, manners, religion, or legends and traditions of the latter with any distinctive elements of their own. While the mass of the Wendic population, without being admitted by intermarriage into the communities of the towns, had thus to choose between serfdom and expatriation, all rebellion being rigorously repressed, the Slav nobles in the Mark were accorded an equality of rights with their German neighbours, on whom a large proportion of the land had as a matter of course been bestowed. Free intermarriage ensued; an accord of sentiment and opinion (there being no longer any religious barrier in the way) was gradually produced; and thus the upper or ruling classes peacefully amalgamated, some Slavonic family names being preserved among the landed gentry, while no analogous process was so much as attempted in the case of the lower orders. In this social sphere immigration, to which probably no ancient or modern State has been more largely indebted than the BrandenburgPrussian in the successive stages of its progress, was welcomed by a country broken up by invasion and depopulated by revolt; but in these early times, as afterwards, it took place in small numbers or bodies, so that the authority of the Government was not impaired but strengthened by it. The Flemish, Dutch, Westphalian, and Franconian settlers, dependent as they were upon the hand of authority for the protection of their holdings, and for the security of the franchises granted to them in an environment of serfs, were steadily loyal to the Margraves. These considerations account on the one hand for the early growth of an arrogant and self-reliant Junkertum, a squirearchy rather than an aristocracy for the subdivision of the Mark prevented the growing up of States General, or any other kind of comprehensive representative body capable of much beyond petty interference with expenditure - which only a strong hand could force into submission to the authority of the State. And, on the other hand, they explain how there grew up, as the best support of that authority, an industrious burgher class, whose intelligence was quickened by the perpetual struggle with the difficulties Pomeranian Dukes). Curiously enough, the original Old Mark, having in 1807 been incorporated in the Napoleonic kingdom of Westphalia, was in 1815, instead of forming part of the Prussian province of Brandenburg, included in that of Saxony. |