Yuletide tags are out: Frederician version

[cahn]

Come join us in this crazy Frederick the Great fandom and learn more about all these crazy associated people, like the star-crossed and heartbreaking romance between Maria Theresia's daughter Maria Christina and her daughter-in-law Isabella, wow.

OK, so, there are FOURTEEN characters nominated:
Anna Karolina Orzelska (Frederician RPF)
Elisabeth Christine von Preußen | Elisabeth Christine Queen of Prussia (Frederician RPF)
Francesco Algarotti (Frederician RPF)
François-Marie Arouet | Voltaire (Frederician RPF)
Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great (Frederician RPF)
Hans Hermann Von Katte (Frederician RPF)
Joseph II Holy Roman Emperor (Frederician RPF)
Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria (Frederician RPF)
Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf (Frederician RPF)
Peter Karl Christoph von Keith (Frederician RPF)
Sophia Dorothea of Hanover (Frederician RPF)
Stanisław August Poniatowski (Frederician RPF)
Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758) (Frederician RPF)
Yekatarina II Alekseyevna | Catherine the Great of Russia (Frederician RPF)

This means some fourth person kindly nominated Algarotti and -- I think? -- Stanislaw August Poniatowski! YAY! Thank you fourth person! Come be our friend! :D Yuletide is so great!

I am definitely requesting Maria Theresia, Wilhelmine, and Fritz (Put them in a room together. Shake. How big is the explosion?), and thinking about Elisabeth Christine, but maybe not this year.

I am also declaring this post another Frederician post, as the last one was getting out of hand. I think I'll still use that one as the overall index to these, though, to keep all the links in one place.

(seriously, every time I think the wild stories are done there is ANOTHER one)

Comments

Re: Random facts

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, I had almost mentioned Richard III and Dettingen, but was not clear on the exact details of Dettingen and to what extent George II vs. Cumberland was directly involved, so I deleted what I had written and replaced it with "not normal." Thank you for clearing that up. Did not know about the horse running away, haha. Even the horse knows this isn't normal! You don't see Louis XV expecting his horse to charge into the front lines! (I imagine the horse thinking.)

Meanwhile, Fritz: Flute at 3 am, paperwork at 4 am, charge into battle at noon, compose poetry at 6 pm, call it a day.

well, given Fritz had the army chaplain pick as his sermon good old St. Paul and his "No woman shall raise her voice in the community" as a subject...

I mean, if you're at war with someone and you're not doing propaganda, you're doing it wrong. ;) Fritz is just extra special with his "religion I don't believe in is cool as long as I can cherry-pick it for misogyny I do." Haha, I ran across this in my military history reading yesterday:

"In leading circles of society in the eighteenth century faith was at one of its lower ebbs, and religious observance in the armies was supported primarily as a means of promoting discipline and cohesion. On the day before the battle of Zorndorf (1758) Lieutentant-General Forcade received the evening orders from Frederick, and then repeated them in his characteristically loud voice:

During this litany the king chatted with Seydlitz, who was looking on with an amused and detached air. In due course Forcade came to the sentence 'Tomorrow, by the grace of God, we shall have a battle!' Frederick was apparently concerned that Seydlitz might think he had turned to God in his time of trial, and he muttered to him 'That's only for the baggage drivers!'"

I look forward to the meeting of the Catholic and the atheist/deist at the summit. ;) Btw, Wilhelmine? Low-key (compared to FW) Protestant or freethinker? (Got distracted from reading her memoirs more closely by Algarotti and military history, sorry not sorry.)

Re: Random facts

[selenak]

Btw, Wilhelmine? Low-key (compared to FW) Protestant or freethinker?

Freethinker, imo. Her being extremely sarcastic about the older Wittelsbach Empress' "Catholic superstitions" could be written off as anti-Catholic (though she is polite enough about some of the cardinals she meets in Italy), but she's also sarcastic about Dad's Protestant pietist crowd in her memoirs, and she didn't befriend a priest or lay theologian I can think of. When she's worried for someone, she doesn't mention their immortal soul.

Oh, and when she and the Margrave took off to Italy from France, apparantly someone - looking at Ulrike - spread rumors they were going to do a Queen Christina and convert to Catholicism, that this was their reason for going to Italy. Whereupon Wilhelmine, once this rumor reaches her, is all "WTF? As if I would!" (The Margrave, otoh, took the accusation seriously enough to make a quick journey back to Bayreuth (v. v. Protestant), reassure everyone he wasn't going to convert, and go back to Italy where Wilhelmine still was. (Which in the 17th century really meant enduring a lot of trouble for the sake of one denial in person.)

(Now what I really want to know was how Ulrike found out in Sweden about the Erlangen journalist who wrote those anti-Fritz articles. It's not like she could put Fritz on google alert, after all, and for an obscure German written newspaper to reach the Swedish court in time enough for this to be news to Fritz - Ulrike must have been employing a good intelligence service. Oh, and it's also worth pointing it it was her husband who joined the anti-Fritz alliance in the 7 years war.)