rman boundaries
toward the east. A hundred years after his great ancestor had in vain
defended the fortresses of the Rhine against Louis XIV., Frederick
gave the Germans again the explicit admonition that it was their duty
to carry law, education, liberty, culture, and industry into the east
of Europe. His whole territory, with the exception of a few Old Saxon
districts, had been originally German, then Slavic, then again won
from the Slavs by fierce wars or colonization; never since the
migrations of the Middle Ages had the struggle ceased for the broad
plains east of the Oder; never since the conquest of Brandenburg had
this house forgotten that it was the warden of the German border.
Whenever wars ceased the politicians were busy. The Elector Frederick
William had freed Prussia, the territory of the Teutonic Knights, from
feudal allegiance to Poland. Frederick I. had boldly raised this
isolated colony to a kingdom. But the possession of East Prussia was
insecure. It was not the corrupt republic of Poland which threatened
danger, but the rising power of Russia. Frederick had learned to
respect the Russians as enemies; he knew the soaring ambition of
Empress Catherine, and as a prudent prince seized the right moment.
The new territory--Pomerelia, the _voivodeship_ (administrative
province) of Kulm and Marienburg, the bishopric of Ermeland, the city
of Elbing, a portion of Cujavia, a portion of Posen--united East
Prussia with Pomerania and Brandenburg. It had always been a border
land. Since the early times people of different races had crowded into
the coasts of the Baltic: Germans, Slavs, Lithuanians, and Finns. From
the thirteenth century the Germans had made their way into this
Vistula country as founders of cities and agriculturists: Teutonic
Knights, merchants, pious monks, German noblemen and peasants. On both
sides of the Vistula arose the towers and boundary stones of German
colonies--supreme among them the magnificent city of Danzig, the
Venice of the Baltic, the great seaport of the Slavic countries, with
its rich St. Mary's Church and the palaces of its merchant princes;
and beyond it on another arm of the Vistula, its modest rival, Elbing:
farther up, the stately towers and broad avenues of Marienburg; near
it the great princely castle of the Teutonic order, the most beautiful
architectural monument of Northern Germany; and in the Vistula valley,
on a rich alluvial soil, the old prosperous colonial estates: