There is simply a political map that can be found online. It shows a fragment of Europe from around 1800, just before the Napoleonic Wars, at the dawn of the 19th century. The marked borders of the Kingdom of Prussia cover the largest territory that this state has always possessed in its history. It is an intriguing map – nearly all of modern Poland falls within this Prussia, even Warsaw! The 20th-century witness, German writer and historian Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999) was so right erstwhile he provocatively wrote that the German Democratic Republic and Poland, united into 1 state, would have been Prussia at the turn of the 19th century. Astonishing, but let us start from the beginning.
Discipline, centralism and military power
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