cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 47

Oh, that's too bad -- that was probably my least favorite part of Lightning, and I am not super excited that there's more of it in the sequel... I kind of want to know if there's a payoff at the end of the sequel, though! (Since I hear that the first two books were originally written as a single book.)

I can access both the article with the summary as well as the book arguing for 1739, and I gave them both a quick skim earlier this evening. I'll try to summarize for salon in the next few days, but no promises.

ETA: Or there's my tried-and-true "send to Selena" approach. ;) It's only about 30 pages total. Selena, let me know if you want them.

Edited 2024-01-18 06:30 (UTC)

Next week, maybe. I have something major coming up on Sunday for which I must prepare.

What I especially love is that he comes up with these gems independent from whether the person he describes is famous, like in the case of Count Wartenberg, the sugar hoarder whom he knew in EC's household. I don't know whether he'd have written could fiction if he'd ever applied his craft to publishing, but non-fiction, he had true talent for. Travelogues, perhaps, which an 18th century nobleman could publish.

At least he tries it first before condemming it? :) Lehndorff being genuinely curious about other people and customs is another appealing trait of his.

For a quick and entertaining look at the most epic clash between Turks and Austrians, see the EH's vids on The Siege of Vienna. (I just linked you to the first one.) Era wise, this one features the Emperor who'll then hire young Eugene of Savoy, so contemporary with Louis XIV. The French, of course, famously did have the occasionally alliance with the Turks against the Habsburgs long before Fritz got the idea, most (in)famously Francis I. versus Charles V. Which reminds me, the Stuart stuff I've been reading includes this gem, on a young James VI, not yet I, he's in Scotland, hoping and expecting Elizabeth will make him her heir....buuuuuut there's Philip of Spain getting the Armada ready. So, should Philip actually win and conquer England, he and the mighty Spanish Empire will be very uncomfortable next door neighbours, way more than even the English were and are. Now, James is a bookworm not just in the sense of reading but also in the sense of writing them. So what does he do?

James: *publishes an epic poem praising the victory of Philipp's illegitimate half brother Juan d'Austria (son of Charles and the enterprising Barbara, remember?) at Lepanto*

James: *in the preface, expecting indignant accusations of praising a Spaniard*: Look, I'm not praising the Catholic Spaniard in Juan, and I'm certainly not praising the half brother of Philip of Spain, I'm praising Juan the Christian! A big Christian victory against the evil Muslims is a good thing, surely we can all agree to that?*

English publisher of James' poem, for verily, James has this printed in England, not Scotland: What he said. He's a King, surely he knows better than I, a humble subject. Don't come after me, Walsingham.

Publisher: *also hedging his bets in case the Spaniards win?*

Knight Hotham and Captain Guidickens

I see Knight Hotham belongs to the same google translate family as the Knight of Lorraine. *g* Lehndorff will refer to Sir Charles Hotham's nephew as "the Chevalier Hotham" as well. Lövenörn spelling it Guidickens, as one word, is a good reminder of what we didn't realize for the longest time, that it's not Guy Dickens, but Melchior Guy-Dickens.

Campe de Saxe - the Saxon Camp = Zeithain.

cahn, where FW dragged Fritz in front of the Saxon and Prussian armies at his hair, and where Fritz and Katte approached Hoym (and it appears Lövenörn) with escape help pleas. Well, Fritz tried to; Katte in his interrogation claims he tried to foil this by not relaying messages. Otoh Hoym certainly received them, because it will be brought up by Brühl and others later at Hoym's own downfall.

We extremely admire the presence of mind that the Royal Prince showed before the commission, which had gone to find him in Mittenwalde, having had a most serious interview with Mr. de Gromkow at the same time as he was dictating, with the eloquence of a Cicero, to the Privy Councilor Mylius, who held the pen, what he had to write, without confusing himself in the slightest in the connection of things.

In other words, he didn't incriminate Danemark more than the absolute minimum wise and also, unlike Katte, didn't try to sell FW on Seckendorff & Grumbkow trying to make him into a Catholic to marry MT :)

Mildred: I have two things I don't recognize here: Fritz never spoke to Doris; Doris's parents were kicked out. I would have to check, but I feel like Hinrichs has Fritz or one of the other people who were interrogated admitting Fritz did interact with her directly? Maybe?

She definitely interacted directly with him, because Spaen was accused of, and admitting to, chaperoning her and Fritz on some strolls. She also played the piano (I think?) while Fritz played the flute. So Lövenörn is definitely exaggarating in one direction, downplaying in the other in the partisan spirit. Re: her parents, I'm not sure but maybe her Dad lost his job as cantor over this? But her parents definitely weren't banished from either Potsdam or Berlin.

Fritz getting half his hair torn out reminds me of Guy Dickens claiming he lives unshaven with a wild beard and long hair in Küstrin, i.e. it's not true at all but says something about the imagination of the respective envoy and belongs to the trope of the abused prisoner.

Sceleton!SD is similarly a rethorical exaggaration. Stratemann saw her repeatedly that autumn and mentions nothing about any significant weight loss. Granted, Stratemann also insists that Wilhelmine is "unwell" and that's why she's in her rooms all the time right until she accepts the marriage and is allowed out again which is when he mentions it wasn't all for health reasons, so he'd downplay any physical SD distress as much as the other two would play it up. But what's most likely is that SD was upset and distressed and what not, but any weight loss wasn't so much that many people noticed. Let's not forget: she gave birth to Ferdinand in the same year in late spring (May, I think?), and it's now early September. My mother took more than half a year to recover her waistline after the birth of my brother, and SD is living in far unhealthier times, and also doesn't appear to have been one for physical exercise like riding or walking, unlike, say, her grandmother Sophie of Hannover.

At any rate, it is SO COOL to be reading Løvenørn's unpublished letters and finding things like a second source for Doris Ritter being a virgin, a second source for Frau von Kamecke being the hero of the day, etc.!

That it definitely is! And all praise to you for ordering copies of those letters and translating them!

Addendum: this entire volatile situation (and how worried Fritz is about it) is also why Fritz permits Heinrich to go to Sweden to talk to sister Ulrike in the first place. Reminder that outside of the war, this was only Heinrich's second time (after the earlier trip to the Netherlands in the late 1760s) abroad, and that he knew he had to make it count because Fritz wouldn't give him permission to go again otherwise any time soon, hence the secret scheming with Catherine so that she writes to Fritz once Heinrich is in Sweden (but not before).

Yeah, definitely more of that in the sequel. And I was sometimes genuinely unsure whether a scene was rape or not.

Good to know, if I ever venture into reading about polar exploration again!

(By the way, it's obvious that there is somewhere a polar exploration fandom which has pet names for pairings, and who fill each other's requests for Yuletide etc. It's kind of weird to see those fics from outside, because they've obviously developed a lot of fanon around it.)

Apparently I forgot to hit enter on this?

What Mildred said, and also, yes, the Turk/Russian war of 1736 - 1739 features a Russia ruled by a very unenlightened autocrat and Voltaire sees it being solely about a land grab, i.e. whoever wins, the people exchange just one tyrant for another

My current plan is to cover the 1730s next time I feel the urge to study foreign policy, so hopefully we can learn about this war sometime in 2024!

Thank you for the additional Byron context! I knew just enough to prompt you. :)

there is a lot of anti-Greek bias, and Greek interpreters or tradespeople show up as cowardly and treacherous, especially in accounts written by English folk, with the not so subtext that the TRUE heirs of ancient Greece are, of course, you guessed it.

Haha, exactly like Orlov.

(I had a response here on the 1739 vs. 1752 question, but Cahn has already responded.)

he comes across as solidly confident, with a great instinct for building up a network

Heh. Okay, I guess... I'm glad there's one guy who wasn't just completely traumatized :)

=> James was smarter than all of you.

HEE. Yeah! Go James!

This is AWESOME.

Buckingham: It's a severe insult to my financial acumen to compare me to Kaphengst.

Kaphengst: Yeah, well, I never was impeached or accused of having poisoned Heinrich, was I?

Hee!

And I love Lehndorff getting the last word!

That's neat! I need to read Dunnett...

Yeah, I've started the sequel and it's already...

I think that's part of the point, to be unsure? But I'm also not sure about that.

Travelogues would be great! in my AU where Lehndorff is the feted author of the 18th century :D

It's unsureness all the way down, I see!

On weight loss: did SD get enough to eat when FW was alive? Like, the kids didn't get enough to eat, right? And if FW was going to go all in regarding food restriction, presumably it would be around this time?

Heh, I was going to say that I lost a bunch of weight while breastfeeding, but of course SD wouldn't have been breastfeeding, right? So never mind that argument! :)

cahn, please yell at me if I don't practice at least *some* Kurrent every single day. I'm on a streak of 11 days and counting, and it's helping!

Yelling at me if I don't do French every day is also still a thing!

SD definitely got enough to eat. If not always what she wanted, i.e. the kind of food considered luxurious by FW - think of of those multi course meals with eleborately decorated pheasants you've surely seen in historical movies, or for that matter many sweets - but there was never a suggestion she was starved.

(The kids weren't starved in the sense of not getting enough food full stop, either. In the famous scene where Wilhelmine recounts her sister Friederike (the first one to get married) mouth off FW re: food, she has Friederike complain that the food was awful and unenjoyable, not that it wasn't there. (This is the scene when FW starts to throw plates soon, but not at Friederike, at Fritz and Wilhelmine.) (Friederike will leave Berlin soon for Ansbach, which helps with the courage, undoubtedly.) How much Wilhelmine exaggarates about the food being awful was of course heavily debated among Hohenzollern historians ever since. On the one hand, we do have Fritz' weight from when he and FW were visiting Saxony and got on that famous scales where August the Strong had all his guests weight, at Königstein, and it's not below avarage, even taking account that he was fully clothed (like everyone else). And if you recall, Stratemann reports such scenes like FW being a Disney Dad, feeding pregnant (with Ferdinand) SD with chicken soup, telling Wilhelmine to take care of Heinrich (the then youngest before Ferdinand's birth) and ensure he gets the fish he wants to eat, and in the previous year he reports on FW touring the Christmas market and buying sweets for his kids. While Stratemann is as pro FW as Lövenörn is against him, I don't think he made that up - FW is just the type to play the good housefather when he's feeling sentimental, which his highly pregnant wife or Christmas approaching would bring out of him. But that wouldn't stop him from insisting everyone eat healthy like the Spartans during the rest of the year, especially the boys.

No, SD would not have been breastfeeding. Another thing Stratemann reports on is how Ferdinand's wetnurse was chosen from a variety of candidates in the spring of 1730, renember? It's a French Colonel's wife who makes it in the end. I refer you to my Stratemann write up at Rheinsberg for more details, it's an interesting glimpse of how wetnurses were chosen.

(FW: I can't understand why all my kids speak French rather than German...)

Another thing re: SD's weight - according to Wilhelmine, she was in denial about being pregnant with Amalie and thought it was already menopause, and thus there weren't the usual midwives and wetnurses etc. ready and FW had to assist with the birth. Leaving some room for exaggaration, that story still would not work if SD hadn't already been a somewhat heavy woman by the time Amalie was born. Which was years before 1730. So she did have some weight to lose and a far way to to to a skeleton.

Given the Poniatowsky love-fest going on, I thought I ought to put in a word for Izabela Czartoryska. Following the partition of Poland, Izabela founded the Czartoryski Collection, a set of objects around which a national identity for Poland could be established. It endures today as part of the National Museums of Poland, where the audioguide will tell you that Izabela was a stone cold fox (true) and that Poniatowski betrayed the nation of Poland, and probably kicked every puppy in the country personallu. It also contains various objects brought back from when the Polish broke the siege of Vienna. (One key part of Polish national identity in the nineteenth century was reminding Austria that they did that)

She was the mother of Adam Czartoryski, whose first contribution to Polish independence was attempting to seduce Alexander into liberal ideas, and just plain seducing Alexander's wife, before it turned out that genetics were not on his side, and Alexander's theoretical liberal beliefs did not stand up to actually being Tsar. He later got involved in the 1830 revolution.

SD definitely got enough to eat. If not always what she wanted, i.e. the kind of food considered luxurious by FW - think of of those multi course meals with eleborately decorated pheasants you've surely seen in historical movies, or for that matter many sweets - but there was never a suggestion she was starved.

Yeah, I can't remember anyone saying she was starved by FW, either.

(The kids weren't starved in the sense of not getting enough food full stop, either.

This is something we've debated in salon before. On the one hand, both Wilhelmine and Fritz said they were starved. Ziebura also says AW says he and the other kids were often half-starved (but Ziebura doesn't believe in citing her sources). On the other hand, yeah, we have Fritz's weight and he was not underweight or skeletal or anything.

In the famous scene where Wilhelmine recounts her sister Friederike (the first one to get married) mouth off FW re: food, she has Friederike complain that the food was awful and unenjoyable, not that it wasn't there.

But in other places in the memoir, she does talk about not being given enough to eat, quantity-wise.

My own theory is that on a regular basis, the kids got enough to eat, to the point where they weren't underweight, but the times when they were deprived of food were really traumatic and loomed large in their memory. This is how trauma works. Plus Mom talking about how this food wasn't edible (by upper class people) and sending them secret food deliveries, etc.

she was in denial about being pregnant with Amalie

I remembered the scales at Königstein but had forgotten about this, but yes, now that you remind me, I remember. There's no way she was a skeleton in 1730.

Sadly for our desire to back Wilhelmine up, Løvenørn, like Guy-Dickens, is a massively partisan exaggerator. But I still think he counts as an independent source for Frau von Kamecke! (He's an independent second-hand source for Doris, but may go back to the same first-hand source. Guy-Dickens and Løvenørn are obviously not both independent first-hand sources who witnessed the evidence of her virginity.)

No, SD would not have been breastfeeding. Another thing Stratemann reports on is how Ferdinand's wetnurse was chosen from a variety of candidates in the spring of 1730, renember?

I also remembered this and was going to tell Cahn about it if you hadn't reminded her first! :D

Edited 2024-01-19 14:49 (UTC)

Oh, interesting. I see these fics come up in Yuletide and occasionally browse one of them, but due to my difficulty reading fiction (see also Too Like the Lightning), I haven't really read them, so I didn't realize they had a fandom with lots of fanon. Good for them!

I see Knight Hotham belongs to the same google translate family as the Knight of Lorraine. *g*

Heee! Lol, yes, I missed that when cleaning up the google translate fic. Obviously, I go for speed on these things, not accuracy.

Lövenörn spelling it Guidickens, as one word, is a good reminder of what we didn't realize for the longest time, that it's not Guy Dickens, but Melchior Guy-Dickens.

The thing is, I *knew* it was spelled that way in contemporary German texts, since very early in salon, but I thought it was just a "Germans don't speak English" thing! Not that it was telling us something.

In other words, he didn't incriminate Danemark more than the absolute minimum wise and also, unlike Katte, didn't try to sell FW on Seckendorff & Grumbkow trying to make him into a Catholic to marry MT :)

Truly a Cicero! :'D

Spaen was accused of, and admitting to, chaperoning her and Fritz on some strolls

That's what I thought! Thank you for confirming I wasn't misremembering.

But her parents definitely weren't banished from either Potsdam or Berlin.

Okay, good. I would have liked to think I would remember such a thing.

Fritz getting half his hair torn out reminds me of Guy Dickens claiming he lives unshaven with a wild beard and long hair in Küstrin, i.e. it's not true at all but says something about the imagination of the respective envoy and belongs to the trope of the abused prisoner.

Yep, I was thinking of exactly this point of comparison.

Let's not forget: she gave birth to Ferdinand in the same year in late spring (May, I think?), and it's now early September.

Yes, I was thinking of that. And thank you for reminding me that she was in denial about the Amalie pregnancy.

also doesn't appear to have been one for physical exercise like riding or walking, unlike, say, her grandmother Sophie of Hannover.

Or even MT, who exercised and *still* got fat after all those pregnancies.

I'm reading it because the Kurrent is so clean. I will not be writing it up for salon, because it's SO boring, just finances (at least so far)--it's a prenup. But I had to report that there are references to Ariane's mother as "Gnädiger Mamma" and "Frau Mamma", which is hilarious to see in something as formal as this! I will report if I find anything else interesting or entertaining.

Also, I wish to complain that the document being so formal is a pain, in that every capital letter is a series of flourishes I cannot decipher, and because it's German and especially because it's 18th century German, SO MANY words are capitalized. Either I can guess the first letter from context or else I move on and silently wish I were just a little more fluent in German. But the practice is helping nonetheless, and one day I will read more interesting and less cleanly written things and be able to report them to salon.

I also read Crown Prince future FW3's lengthy and detailed description of what he did the day of Fritz's death, also in clean Kurrent (because it's a copy made by a secretary for the archives). It is boring. SO boring. It covers every single detail of where FW3 stood, and where FW3 sat when he dined, and NOTHING about what happened to the dogs. It was my last hope for someone to tell us that, and is why I ordered it last year. Alas!

However, there are at least a couple things of interest to salon (included by accident, I assume :P), so I will write those parts up when I've had a little more Kurrent practice (I'm still skipping words I can't immediately get rather than figuring them out).

Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 47

Re: Micromegas - Voltaire

Re: Micromegas - Voltaire

Re: Micromegas - Voltaire

Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: The Hats and Caps, an eternal merry-go-round

Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Prussia: Lehndorff

Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Austria: Relations with the Turks

Re: Løvenørn letters: Sep 10, 1730

Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: Lead-up to the coup (1768-1772)

Re: Micromegas - Voltaire

Re: Polar explorers

Re: Micromegas - Voltaire

Re: David Bergeron: King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire - I

Re: David Bergeron: King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire - I

Re: David Bergeron: King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire - I

Re: Micromegas - Voltaire

Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: The Hats and Caps, an eternal merry-go-round

Re: Micromegas - Voltaire

Re: Løvenørn letters: Sep 10, 1730

New quota and yelling

Re: Løvenørn letters: Sep 10, 1730

Izabela Czartoryska

Re: Løvenørn letters: Sep 10, 1730

Re: Polar explorers

Re: Løvenørn letters: Sep 10, 1730

Peter and Ariane's marriage contract