History of Friedrich II of Prussia — Volume 02
1858
History of Friedrich II of Prussia — Volume 02
1858
Thomas Carlyle's second volume of his monumental history traces Brandenburg from its earliest recorded moments, before the Hohenzollerns ever arrived, through the slow coagulation of a Northern German territory that would one day reshape Europe. Here is the medieval world of the Slavic Wends and Suevic Germans, of forest and marsh and fierce tribal independence. Carlyle renders Henry the Fowler's 928 conquest of the Wendish fortress Brannibor not as dry chronicle but as the foundational violence from which everything follows: the Christianization of pagan lands, the territorial consolidation, the endless border wars that would forge Prussian martial culture. This is 19th-century historiography at its most ambitious, written when history was still understood as the grand narrative of civilizational struggle. Carlyle's prose swings between thunderous battle scenes and penetrating analysis of how states are built, brick by bloody brick. For readers seeking to understand the deeper roots of European power politics, or simply to experience one of Victorian Britain's great historical minds at work, this volume provides an indispensable foundation.
