Although most of the potential readers of Tim Blanning’s newest e book won’t beforehand have heard of its hero – Augustus the Sturdy, elector of Saxony and king of Poland – they’ll little doubt anticipate a lot from its writer. Blanning’s earlier works – together with, most just lately, biographies of Frederick the Nice and George I – have earned him an enviable status for conveying profound understanding with a memorable flip of phrase. Those that belief the writer to entertain and educate shall be rewarded from the very begin as Blanning maps out the sorry trajectory of Augustus’ life (1670-1733): ‘Augustus of Saxony may have been a contented man. The accident of conception made him a member of the oldest and richest of all of the princely households of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, putting in his mouth a spoon of unalloyed silver.’ However, 63 tumultuous years later, ‘as his gangrenous physique sank in the direction of oblivion’ and he confessed his life certainly one of steady sin, Augustus realised that gaining and regaining the spinous crown of Poland had not been well worth the effort. Regardless of this, guests to Dresden can not fail to understand the creative legacy of the ‘golden horseman’ defiantly rearing up on the finish of the bridge that bears his identify.
Blanning begins by guiding the reader alongside Augustus’ path to inheriting the rich Citizens of Saxony (‘the gilded cage’) in 1694. He then explains how and why Augustus turned king of Poland in 1697. What follows is a portrait of Augustus’ typically bewildering new realm (‘the iron cage’). Blanning lays larger emphasis on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s intractability and vulnerability as a state assailed by a number of crises than on its underlying rules and potential as a civic republican group. The Nice Northern Battle (1700-21) occupies the majority of the e book. Augustus foolishly picked a battle in opposition to his teenage first cousin, Charles XII of Sweden, after an epic consuming bout with the Russian tsar Peter (not but ‘the Nice’). Maybe believing in his personal self-fashioned picture because the horseshoe-breaking ‘Saxon Hercules’, Augustus anticipated to cowl himself in martial glory and make worthwhile conquests. As a substitute, his austere Swedish nemesis drove him from the Polish throne in 1706. Augustus recovered it after Peter defeated Charles at Poltava in 1709. Nevertheless, he wasted a fleeting alternative to flee his dependency on the tsar by constructing an enduring relationship along with his citizen-subjects. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ended the Nice Northern Battle trapped within the internet of Peter I’s newly proclaimed Russian empire.
In distinction, although, Saxony prospered and its ruler partied. Even earlier than the long-drawn-out finish of the warfare, ‘Augustus the Artist’ was organising ‘the marriage of the century’ for his son and inheritor (who later turned king of Poland regardless of his father’s efforts, and never due to them). The e book’s epilogue briskly covers the ultimate dozen years of Augustus’ reign, earlier than the conclusion critiques his posthumous status and sums up the varied obstacles he failed to beat. With attribute brio, Blanning pronounces Augustus ‘a rascal, self-indulgent, recklessly extravagant, unprincipled, ruthless within the pursuit of sensual pleasure – to not point out all the opposite pejorative epithets directed by the wagging fingers of indignant moralizers’. But it surely was these very flaws that raised ‘him to iconic standing, the cynosure of baroque tradition’.
Blanning’s newest selection of topic performs to 2 of his longstanding strengths. The primary is his immersion within the baroque courtroom tradition of the outdated Reich. The assumptions of this tradition are established within the introduction whereas its manifestations are most totally developed (maybe with a sigh of reduction) within the two ultimate chapters on ‘Augustus the Artist’. These cowl festivities, music, structure, panorama, jewelry, accumulating, and wondrous Meissen porcelain. Whereas undeniably ‘priapic’ (as behoved a baroque ruler), Augustus seems to have fathered significantly fewer kids by reasonably fewer mistresses than has typically been alleged. However the verified anecdotes don’t disappoint. Some are disturbing, particularly these relating to the mass slaughter of animals that concerned little precise searching. Blanning asks readers to droop their distaste whereas he explains the logic of this tradition’s obvious absurdities.
The writer’s second power is his aptitude for reducing via thickets of army and diplomatic historical past to elucidate why wars began, why they (finally) ended, and why the winners received and the losers misplaced. When the course of the Nice Northern Battle turns into greater than normally tortuous, Blanning spares the reader the worst of it. Slicing via Gordian knots of marches and counter-marches, sieges and skirmishes, he summarises the components that proved decisive. However maps would have helped.
To date, so secure for Blanning. But Augustus the Sturdy has taken him nicely past his core repertoire of German, French, and British historical past within the lengthy 18th century. Having added a superb studying data of Swedish, Russian, and Polish to his portfolio of languages, he has tackled lengthy, dense, and humourless monographs on the Swedish empire, the Russian empire, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The outcomes are spectacular by any normal. This e book is a significant contribution to the historiography of the Nice Northern Battle. Certainly, the epic battle between Peter the Nice and Charles XII (whose pathological persona is memorably captured) generally threatens to sideline Augustus. However after spending a couple of pages within the ‘sin bin’ of historical past, the incorrigible Saxon leaps again onto the sphere and makes mischief anew. Historians of Poland-Lithuania could cavil at a few of the writer’s judgements (particularly the extra essential ones) and will question a few of the selections of literature cited within the endnotes. However not lots of them. Nobody has but written a biography of Augustus remotely nearly as good as this one, in any language. Tim Blanning’s artistry has achieved justice to an incredible artist.
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Augustus the Sturdy: A Examine in Creative Greatness and Political Fiasco
Tim Blanning
Allen Lane, 432pp, £30
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski is Professor of Polish-Lithuanian Historical past at College School London.
