A quick look to the history of Prussia
On the 13th century, German crusaders conquered the land of one of the Baltic tribes called Old Prussians. Their name came from the language they spoke, and even though the area was Germanized by German immigrants, the name remained.
In 1466, Old Prussia was split in two: the western part became Poland’s province called Royal Prussia, while in 1525 the eastern part became Duchy of Prussia, a fief of the Crown of Poland.
(Explanation to the map: Light pink area is Royal Prussia, while striped is Duchy of Prussia. Map source.)
In 1618, German Electorate of Bradenburg inherited the Duchy of Prussia. This union led to the proclarnation of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, when the Elector of the Hohenzollerns (a noble family with many kings and emperors troughout the history, and which became the lineage of Prussian kings) crowned himself as the King in Prussia.
This interesting diagram below shows, how the history of Prussia and Bradenburg has been interwined. Picture source.
During this time, Bradenburg was a state of Holy Roman Empire, which was in it’s last centuries an extremely loose union between hundreds of different territories (such as principalities, duchies, counties etc). It was not a country, and it’s emperor had almost no power at all. It fell apart during the Napoleonic wars in 1806, and like many other states, the Kingdom of Prussia came to be as an fully independent kingdom.
To replace the fallen empire, German Confederation was formed in the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815. Confederation had almost the same territories as Holy Roman Empire, though this time there were only 39 states, which were all independent. However, this Confederation was nearly as weak as it’s predecessor.
In 1871 after the three unification wars led by Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck, Prussia had assembled other German nations behind it, and together they formed the German Empire, with Wilhelm I being the emperor. Altough Prussia became a state, like all the other German nations, it still had the most powerlful position within the empire.
For more information on unification wars, please read my other post “German unification in 1871”.
In 1888 began the downslide of Prussia. Wilhelm I died, and so did his son Frederik III, who was the emperor only for 99 days. Wilhelm II, the son of Frederik III, succeeded the throne, and to make things short, I’ll just point out that he highlighted German patriotism, ignoring his Prussian roots. The significance, independence and identity of Prussia, who had become the Free State of Prussia, slowly decreased during the 20th century, and finally it was blamed after World War 2 to be the symbolic part / core of Germany, that led to the Nazism and World War 2.
And so, the state of Prussia was abolished in 1947 by the Allies, making Prussia belong to the history.
Note: Please bear in mind that I’m not a native English speaker. I researched this subject for my Finnish essay, and in the end decided to also post this information here, for those who don’t want to research for hours.
Sources: The Finnish translations of the following books: Karsten Alnæs: Historien om Europa 1800-1900 and Robert Cole: A Traveller’s History of Germany. I want to point out that while I did use Wikipedia to discover what some names were in English and to find great maps and diagrams from, it hasn’t been my main research source.
