Frederick Augustus (1670–1733), elector of Saxony and king of Poland, owed his sobriquet ‘the Strong’ to such feats as crushing a tin plate in his hand (mentioned by Rilke in the ‘Fifth Duino Elegy’) and to his vigorous sex life. Contemporaries credited him with fathering 354 illegitimate children; Tim Blanning soberly reduces the number to eight. This biography is concerned not with court gossip, however, but with Augustus’s political career and cultural achievements. Blanning celebrates Augustus as the virtual creator of the once-magnificent city of Dresden, where the kings of Saxony resided, and hence, surprisingly, as ‘a great artist, arguably the greatest of his age’.

We first meet Augustus, who succeeded his elder brother as ruler of Saxony in 1694, serving Emperor Leopold I as commander-in-chief of the Austrian forces fighting the Turks in Hungary and Transylvania, and achieving very little. In June 1697 he learned that he had been elected king of Poland. He had of course lobbied very hard for this position, with Austrian support. He had made the obligatory conversion to Catholicism without a scruple and had used the resources of Saxony, one of the richest German states, to bribe the Polish electors. Since the entire noble caste of Poland, rich and poor, was entitled to vote, this was a costly exercise in which Augustus pawned the Saxon crown jewels and sold or mortgaged substantial territories.

Why all this effort? Apparently, Augustus had read a prophecy that a Saxon prince named Augustus would become king of Poland, then Holy Roman Emperor; this person would defeat the Ottoman Empire and govern a great empire from Constantinople. Things turned out differently. ‘Poland’ was shorthand for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, an entity established in 1569 that stretched from the Baltic across present-day Belarus and Ukraine almost to the Black Sea. In Poland, the king had little power. Its upper class, the szlachta, was not a feudal nobility owing fealty to the monarch, but an aristocratic caste with a spirit of independence. As decisions taken in the Sejm (the assembly of noblemen, bishops and officials) had to be unanimous, little was ever decided. The type of ministry, supported by a bureaucracy, that was a feature of western European states had no Polish counterpart, so the king could scarcely govern. Augustus found himself saddled with a huge, unmanageable realm that had not yet recovered from the chaotic uprisings of the mid-17th century.

With its Baltic coast and proximity to Russia, the combined realm of Saxony, Poland and Lithuania could hardly have stayed out of the Great Northern War (1700–21), essentially a struggle between Russia and Sweden for control of northern Europe. These countries’ leaders, Peter the Great and Charles XII, were described by Voltaire as ‘the most remarkable personages to have appeared for more than twenty centuries’ (in other words, since Alexander the Great). In 1700, the eighteen­-year-old Charles suddenly revealed himself – to every­one’s astonishment – as a military genius by thrashing Russian forces at Narva. Carried away by success, he resolved to capture Moscow and dethrone the tsar, but he suffered an even worse fate than later invaders of Russia. Thrashed at Poltava in 1709, he fled to Turkey and was held prisoner there for five years.

This part of Blanning’s story is told with even more than his usual verve, energy and command of detail. His narrative will send many readers (it certainly did this one) to Wikipedia to locate ‘the port of Połaga (today Palanga) in Samogitia’ and ‘Heilsberg (Lidzbark Warmiński) in Warmia’. Augustus played an inglorious role in the Great Northern War on the side of Russia. Charles, his cousin, who apparently had an obsessive hatred for him, captured the main Polish cities, devastated large areas of the country, deposed Augustus and in 1704 coerced the Poles into electing a young landowner, Stanisław Leszczyński, as king. He then imposed a humiliating peace treaty on Augustus, which allowed a Swedish army to spend a year in Saxony living riotously at the Saxons’ expense.

The catastrophe at Poltava ended Sweden’s stint as a major power. With Stanisław no longer enjoying Swedish support, it was easy for Augustus to drive him out and, in 1709, to resume the throne of Poland. But governing Poland was no easier than before. It was impossible to persuade the Sejm to give up the liberum veto, the right of any aristocrat to veto a proposal. So the military and fiscal reforms that Augustus envisaged remained on the drawing board. And although it was agreed that Saxon help had been crucial in ending Swedish domination of the Baltic, Saxony gained nothing from the eventual peace treaty, while a serious rebellion in Poland ended with a treaty severely limiting Augustus’s powers to control Polish affairs.

Unsuccessful in politics and war, Augustus turned to culture. He transformed Dresden into a city which, even after the notorious bombing raid of February 1945, is still handsome. The highlights include the Zwinger, a palace complex that served as a setting for festivities, the Frauenkirche and the 437-metre-long Augustus Bridge, which linked the centre with the New Town on the other side of the Elbe, helping to create an integrated urban landscape. Next door to the Zwinger, Augustus built the largest opera house in Germany. Blanning enthuses about his success in attracting architects, artists and musicians to Saxony, the most famous being Johann Sebastian Bach, who arrived in Leipzig, Saxony’s other main city, in 1723. 

Augustus was determined to outshine other Baroque rulers in the scale and splendour of the festivities he staged. In 1719, his only legitimate son, Frederick Augustus, married Archduchess Maria Josepha of Austria, daughter of the recently deceased Emperor Joseph I. There were two ceremonies, a relatively (but only relatively) modest one in Vienna, followed by a whole month of celebrations in Dresden. Its climax was the performance of a new opera, Teofane, composed by Antonio Lotti, in Augustus’s opera house.

While paying due attention to all this magnificence, Blanning also gives unsparing descriptions of the hunting of animals, which was one of Augustus’s favourite pursuits. At the ‘wedding of the century’, four hundred deer were driven into the River Elbe so that the wedding guests could shoot them; the bride apparently joined in with particular enthusiasm. Then there was pig-sticking and a Parforcejagd, in which a stag was chased across open country until it collapsed from exhaustion. Another ‘sport’ Augustus favoured was fox-tossing. To entertain the visiting king of Prussia, two hundred foxes were tossed in blankets in the palace courtyard until they died. There was also the Treibjagd, in which deer, bears and boars were driven over a cliff and fell to their deaths, watched delightedly by courtiers and peasants. Most of these activities involved no skill whatsoever.

Blanning does not palliate the cruelty of these pursuits. His descriptions of them cast a shadow over his account of Augustus’s architectural and musical enthusiasms. Over two centuries later, Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus would ponder the proximity of culture and barbarism. Augustus’s reign provides a case in point. The Baroque extravagance that typified his rule would soon be superseded by the more austere, but also more responsible, government of enlightened despots such as Frederick the Great. Not before time, readers of this absorbing biography might say.