Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

[cahn]

So for anyone who is reading this and would like to learn more about Frederick the Great and his contemporaries, but who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments and an increasingly sprawling comment section:

We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Comments

Re: MT Marriage AU Reborn

[mildred_of_midgard]

he assures his readers that the hero of the Protestant faith surely was just looking to incriminate Grumbkow & Seckendorff in the eyes of FW and never would he ever.

Ahahahahaa, of course. I still wish I knew whether Carlyle's "Oh no, Herr Muller, nobody but very foolish persons could imagine such a thing of this young Herr" about Muller's son's insistence that Fritz NEVER proposed an Austrian marriage and Catholic conversion was sarcastic or not.

Meanwhile, in 1731, Prince Eugene seems to be far from senile

Yep, MacDonogh says much the same:

Prince Eugene was less senile about one thing, however: he warned Seckendorff against the possible effects of Frederick William's punishing his son. 'The harder the king deals with him, the more stubborn he will become, and in time he will change everything that his father has done.'

I might add that MacDonogh is the one we learned about the Austrian marriage project from--he's good for providing information, just not reliable info!

he does not appear energy or common sense

Could you clarify the verb there?

Re: MT Marriage AU Reborn

[selenak]

Lack! „He does not appear to lack energy or common sense“! Curse on swallowed verbs, I thought I had typed it.

Re: MT Marriage AU Reborn

[mildred_of_midgard]

Gotcha!

Well, well spotted, Eugene. And from secondhand info, too! Maybe MT would have been caught less unawares if you had been the one reporting on Fritz.

Seckendorff, Jr.: He'll be just like his grandfather.
FS: He's so charming in person. And he sent me a salmon. How bad can he be?
Eugene: Dangerous to his neighbors! Watch out!

Btw, Wikipedia tells me that Eugene thought an army and a treasury would serve MT better than some signatures from European powers, but Karl VI overrode him.

Eugene: No slouch in the energy or common sense department himself.