Europe. His whole country, with the exception of some
old Saxon territory, had been won from the Sclavonians by force and
colonisation; never since the great migration of the Middle Ages had
the struggle for the wide plains on the east of the Oder ceased; never
had his house forgotten that it was the guardian of the German
frontier. Whenever the struggle of arms ceased, politicians contended.
The Elector Frederic William had freed the Prussian territories of the
Teutonic order from the Polish suzerainty. Frederic I. had brought this
isolated colony under the crown. But the possession of East Prussia was
insecure; the danger was not, however, from the degenerate Republic of
Poland, but from the rising greatness of Russia. Frederic had learnt to
consider the Russians as enemies; he knew the high-flown plans of the
Empress Catherine; the clever Prince knew how to grasp at the fitting
moment. The new domain--Pommerellen, the Woiwodschaft of Kulm and
Marienburg, the Bishopric of Ermland, the city of Elbing, a portion of
Kujavien, and a part of Posen--united East Prussia with Pomerania and
the Marches of Brandenburg. It had always been a frontier land; since
ancient times people of different races had thronged to the coast of
the Northern Sea: Germans, Sclavonians, Lithuanians, and Finns. Since
the thirteenth century, the Germans had forced themselves into this
debatable ground as founders of cities and agriculturists; orders of
knights, merchants, pious monks, German noblemen, and peasants
congregated there. On both sides of the Vistula arose towers and
boundary stones of the German colonists. Above all rose the splendid
Dantzic,--the Venice of the Baltic, the great sea-mart of the
Sclavonian countries, with its rich Marien-church and the palaces of
its merchants; behind it, on the other arm of the Vistula, its modest
rival Elbing; further upwards, the stately towers and broad arcades of
Marienburg, where is the great princely castle of the Teutonic Knights,
the most beautiful edifice in the north of Germany; and in the
luxurious low-countries, in the valley of the Vistula, were the old
prosperous colonial properties, one of the most favoured districts of
the world, and defended by powerful dikes against the devastations of
the Vistula. Still further upwards, Marienwerder, Graudenz, Kulm, and
in the low countries, Netzebromberg, the centre of a strip of Polish
frontier. Smaller German cities and village communities were scatte