re, prince Ferdinand was
obliged to retire to Winsleben, near the city of Magdeburgh. The dangers
which had been hitherto kept at a distance from the Prussian dominions,
by the surprising activity of their king, now drew nearer, and menaced
them on all sides. Mareschal Richelieu, with eighty battalions and
an hundred squadrons, entered the country of Halberstadt, and levied
immense contributions; whilst the allied army of the French and
Imperialists, being joined by six thousand men under general Laudohn,
who had just defeated a regiment of Prussian cavalry near Erfurt,
marched to Weissenfells, a city in the very centre of Thuringia. The
Swedes had actually taken some towns in Pomerania, and were advancing to
besiege Stetin, and the Austrians, who had made themselves masters
of Lignitz, and a considerable part of Silesia, had now laid siege to
Schweidnitz, and were preparing to pass the Oder, in order to attack
the prince of Bevern in his camp near Breslau. In the meantime they made
frequent and always destructive incursions into Brandenburgh; to oppose
which his Prussian majesty ordered detachments from all his regiments in
those parts to join the militia of the country, and sent the prince of
Anhault-Dessau from Leipsic, with a body of ten thousand men, to guard
Berlin, whilst he himself marched with the troops under his command to
Interbeck, on the frontier of the Lower Lusatia, to be the more at hand
to cover Brandenburgh, and to preserve the communication with Silesia.

While these precautions were taking, general Had-dick, with fifteen or
sixteen thousand Austrians, entered Brandenburgh on the sixteenth
of October, and the next day arrived before Berlin, of which city he
demanded a contribution of six hundred thousand crowns; but contented
himself with two hundred and ten thousand. The Austrians pillaged two
of the suburbs; but before they could do any further mischief, they
were obliged to retire in great haste, at the approach of the prince of
Anhault-Dessau, whose vanguard entered the city in the evening of their
departure. This alarm, however, obliged the queen and the royal family
of Prussia to remove to Magdeburgh on the twenty-third; and the most
valuable records were sent to the fort of Spandau, at the conflux of the
Havel and the Sphre. On the other hand, the unfortunate inhabitants of
Leipsic now felt most severely the cruel effects of the power of their
new master. The Prussian commandant in that city ha