Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 46

[cahn]

Background: The kids' school has a topic for "Unit" every trimester that a lot of their work (reading, writing, some math) revolves around. These topics range from time/geographic periods ('Colonial America') to geography ('Asia') to science ('Space') to social science ('Business and Economics'). (I have some issues with this way of doing things, but that's a whole separate post.) Anyway, for Reasons, they have had to come up with a new topic this year, and E's 7/8 class is doing "World Fairs" as their new topic.

Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*

Comments

Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772

[mildred_of_midgard]

How about Russia taking Crimea, was that just pure conquest or did they motivate it with prior claims?

Not prior claims, but there was definitely some handwaving of excuses! Prior claims was only one way of justifying conquest. Another was "the other side started it, and this is just war damages!" Another was "But the locals *want* us instead of their current rulers!"

The Ottoman Empire being an empire, the original detachment of the Crimea from the Ottoman Empire was justified as a war of "liberation" (sound familiar?). The Russians were just rescuing the Crimean khanate from Ottoman oppression and restoring it to a state of independence! Then for almost ten years, there was local infighting and revolts, and their puppet khan kept getting overthrown, and finally, in 1783, again quoting from Madariaga:

In March Potemkin returned to St Petersburg and threw his influence into the scales in favour of outright annexation. A trumped-up excuse was found--an alleged incursion by the Porte in Taman'--and on 8 April 1783, Catherine signed the manifesto proclaiming her intention of annexing the Crimea. She justified the decision on the grounds that Russia had already spent twelve million rubles in defending the khanate's independence, and that the Porte had destroyed the mutual treaty obligations between Russia and Turkey by its attack on Taman'. The manifesto undertook to respect the persons and property of the Tartars, to grant them the free exercise of their religion, and to extend to them the rights enjoyed by Russians.

So as you can see, even with a non-Christian monarch, you still need an excuse if you don't want such bad PR that all your neighbors gang up on you. You want at least enough plausible deniability that at least some of your neighbors can decide it's fine to care more about their own self-interest and about the balance of power.