Catherine the Great

On December 16, in an icy, drenching rain, Frederick led thirty-two thousand soldiers across the Silesian frontier. He met practically no resistance; the campaign was more an occupation than an invasion. By the end of January, Frederick was back in Berlin. But in making his prewar calculations, the young king lacked one important piece of information: he had not known the character of the woman he had made his enemy. Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria and queen of Hungary, possessed a deceptive, doll-like beauty, with blue eyes and golden hair. Under stress, she managed to appear unusually calm, which led some observers to conclude that she was stupid. They were mistaken. She possessed intelligence, courage, and tenacity. When Frederick attacked and seized Silesia, everyone in Vienna was paralyzed—except Maria Theresa. Although in an advanced state of pregnancy, she reacted with the energy of the enraged. She raised money, mobilized troops, and inspired her subjects, meanwhile giving birth to the future emperor Joseph II. Frederick was surprised by this inexperienced young woman’s stubborn refusal to surrender the province he had stolen from her. He was even more surprised when in April an Austrian army crossed the Bohemian mountains and reentered Silesia. The Prussians defeated the Austrians again, and, in the temporary peace that followed, Frederick kept Silesia, with its fourteen thousand miles of productive farmland, its rich vein of coal mines, its prosperous towns, and a population of 1,500,000, most of them German Protestants. Added to the number of subjects Frederick had inherited from his father, Prussia now grew to a population of four million. But these spoils came at a cost. Maria Theresa regarded her Hapsburg inheritance as a sacred trust. What Frederick’s aggressive war created was her lifelong hatred of him and a Prussian-Austrian antagonism that lasted a century.

Despite his victory in Silesia, Frederick was in a dangerous position. Prussia remained a small country, her territories continued to be fragmented, and her growing strength was making her powerful neighbors uneasy. Two great empires, each larger and potentially stronger than Prussia, were potential enemies. One was Austria under an embittered Maria Theresa. The other was Russia, the immense, sprawling empire that lay on his northern and eastern flank, ruled by the newly crowned Empress Elizabeth. In this situation, nothing was of greater importance to Frederick than the friendship, or at least the neutrality, of Russia. He remembered that on his deathbed his father had passed along a cautionary maxim: that there would always be more to lose than to gain by going to war with Russia. And at this point, Frederick could not be sure what Empress Elizabeth would do.

Immediately after taking the throne, the empress had placed at the head of her political affairs a man who hated Prussia, her new vice-chancellor, Count Alexis Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Bestuzhev’s lifelong ambition was to create an alliance linking Russia to the sea powers, England and Holland, and to the central European land powers, Austria and Saxony-Poland. Aware of Bestuzhev’s views, Frederick believed that only the vice-chancellor stood in the way of a diplomatic arrangement between himself and the empress. It seemed imperative, therefore, that this obstacle be removed.

Some of these diplomatic tangles, Frederick calculated, might be smoothed if he involved himself in the Russian empress’s search for a bride for her fifteen-year-old nephew and heir. Over a year before, the Prussian ambassador in St. Petersburg had reported that Bestuzhev was pressing Elizabeth to choose a daughter of Augustus III, elector of Saxony and king of Poland. Such a marriage, if it took place, could become a critical element in the vice-chancellor’s policy of building his alliance against Prussia. Frederick was determined to prevent this Saxon marriage. To do this, he needed a German princess of some reasonably distinguished ducal house. Empress Elizabeth’s choice of Sophia, the convenient little pawn from Anhalt-Zerbst, suited Frederick admirably.

By New Year’s Day, 1744, the timing of these negotiations had become critical. The emphasis on speed and secrecy in Brümmer’s first letter to Johanna, reiterated by Frederick’s letter, arose from the fact that Bestuzhev was continuing to press the empress on behalf of the Polish-Saxon Marianne. Now that Elizabeth’s choice of Sophia had been made, both she and Frederick wanted the two Holstein princesses to reach St. Petersburg as soon as possible. For Frederick, it was essential that the empress not have time to change her mind.