Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

Comments

Re: Saxon archivess: Suhm

[mildred_of_midgard]

I definitely need to rephrase that, because we already knew (or at least I did) that his finances were in a terrible state and he was actively campaigning to get back into Saxon service. What he complained about to Fritz was having to go so far away to such a terrible climate as St. Petersburg.

Now, maybe he actually wanted that particular assignment. But it wasn't uncommon for envoys to complain about the assignments they were given (or that they were sent as envoys at all instead of being given ministerial positions at home). But given that St. Petersburg *was* so remote you wouldn't see anyone back home for a long time (I was pleasantly surprised to see that he did get to see his brother Nicolas at all), given that complaining about the climate was common, and given that Russia was kind of not a prestigious assignment (this is the time of Anna Ivanovna), I'm willing to believe it came as an unpleasant surprise.

Do we know if Suhm
- Wanted an envoy position specifically?
- Wanted St. Petersburg specifically?

Because his brother had a position as minister in Dresden, and I had the impression that Suhm either wanted that (envoys usually do, with some exceptions), or some better envoy assignment, but I'm not the one who read AvB, and I could be wrong.

(One day I will be the one who's read Suhm's letters in the archives. If I download the images, that will help a lot; yesterday I was just browsing on the site to get a sense of what was out there.)

Re: Saxon archivess: Suhm

[mildred_of_midgard]

(One day I will be the one who's read Suhm's letters in the archives. If I download the images, that will help a lot; yesterday I was just browsing on the site to get a sense of what was out there.)

Update: the website is scrapable! I can download whole volumes in one go with my algorithms!

This is beautiful.