In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a small number of large rulers had a strong impact on Austria and Prussia. Both countries became strong absolutist areas. However, because they were different countries, it’d make sense that each country developed into its state of absolutism through different means and different people. Well, it’s true. Austria and Prussia were influenced by seperate factors: one was a general-absolutist country and the other had a strong military influence in its culture and government and had a partially Machiavellian ruler. With these and other differences in mind, one country must come out more absolutist than the other.

A similarity between the development of both places is the use of decreasing the power of the nobility to increase one’s own power. In Austria, Ferdinand II lessened the power of the Bohemian Estates not long after the Battle of the White Mountain. He also gave land holdings of many Protestant nobles to a few Catholic nobles and aristocratic soldiers who had nothing in common with the peasants. The rise in property and power in a few Catholic nobles also reflects an absolutist ruler’s need for control of the church, however this is an element of absolutism that was neglected in Prussia. Maria Theresa, an Austrian ruler from 1740 to 1780, limited the papacy’s influence in politics, increasing her own influence in return. Because the papacy is involved, this, too, reflects control of the church. One of Maria’s three significant administrative reforms was an equal or near-equal taxation of all citizens including nobles with no exemptions to the taxes whatsoever. An even more direct act of reduction of noble power by Maria Theresa is her reduction of the power of lords over their serfs and partly-free peasant tenants. Ferdinand III of Austria began a permanent standing army to rid of civil disputes in his terrirtory. In Prussia, Elector Frederick I, known as the Great Elector, declined the power of the Estates when he forced the approval of taxation without consent by them in order to pay for his establishment of a permanent army in 1660. Both ruler’s permanent armies fall right into the absolutist element of having a standing army, so much, in fact, that discussing the element may sound repetitive since it is a very straight-forward idea, but the Elector’s permanent army also contributed to the decreasing of the power of the nobility in Prussia and to the most basic origin of Prussia’s development into an absolutist country.

The grounds for absolutism in Prussia was the army and military values, unlike Austria. In the second half of the seventeenth century when Elector Frederick I was looking to establish Prussia’s one and only permanent standing army, many recent wars like those of Louis XIV built up the idea that war was almost a certainty and an army could do nothing but good for the country. After the army was established in 1660, Frederick not only had financial independence but also superior force, things that in most non-absolutist governments were controlled by groups of people for the most responsible and least biased use believed possible. The Elector began building up the army immediatly. Within time, a population of one million maintained an army of thirty thousand soldiers. Less than a century later King Frederick William I stepped into the painting of Prussia’s most important people in history. Frederick William added intense military values to the economy of Prussia. He lived his days as a brutal military leader afraid to put his army into action and see his men disappear to their deaths. He was Machiavellian in the senses that he had a standing army ready for anything and he showed more values of being feared than loved in that his punishment just for one of his men missing a button on their uniform was a nice beating. At the end of his rule, the Estates and local self-government was close to its demise in Prussia or had already diminished, and the army was the fourth largest in all of Europe, and quite possibly the strongest and most reliable.

Prussia came out the more absolutist of the two countries. The reasoning for this can be seen as a “quality over quanitity” example. While Austria’s development to a state of absolutism included elements of absolutism that Prussia’s didn’t, such as control of the church, Prussia had so much backing up their military side of absolutism that they didn’t need as many elements to build up a nearly invincible country. In Prussia, lfe revolved around the army, and the army was one-hundred percent in the hands of Frederick William I, giving the Prussian ruler full control over his land. The Ferdinands and Maria Theresa never reached a place of full control in Austria.

There were only two countries. There were only five rulers of importance. Different factors put into place influenced both countries’ development into absolutism, but the matter of highest importance is that both developments were carried out, even if Prussia’s was more significant than Austria’s.