In early 18th-century Christian Europe, only Peter the Great ruled a larger territory than Augustus the Strong. As Elector Frederick Augustus I of Saxony in 1694 and King Augustus II of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1697, he reigned from the German heartland on the Elbe and the cities of Dresden and Leipzig deep into what is now Belarus and Ukraine. Augustus’s subjects...
Augustus the Strong, Ruler of Poland and Saxony: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco by Tim Blanning. It would be tempting to repeat the salacious stories told about Augustus the Strong, but Tim Blanning has instead produced an authoritative account of his reign and a measured reckoning of what Augustus called his ‘intrigues’ and ‘adventures’. It turns out that he did not father 354 bastards, as historians continue to report, but eight, which puts him well behind Louis XIV and Charles II. Numbers aside, there was a general atmosphere of moral abandon at the Dresden court.
